Comment by fluxic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fluxic | Hacker News Reader

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While I think anti-capitalist communes are as hopeless as the author portrays, communes of likeminded individuals have been successful. Consider the Chelsea Hotel in NYC. In addition to being the cornerstone of NYC's art scene for 100+ years, it also contributed to billions of dollars in value creation. [0] The hotel was intended to be a community for artists from the start, and by every measure it was successful.

A few factors that made the community successful:

— Residents still had jobs

— Residents were expected to pay (very low) rent

— Residents had a lot of leeway if they missed their rent

— Residents were generally selected for their likemindedness/talent

— Residents stayed at the hotel for a good stretch of time, fostering a sense of community

— Short-term tourists and wealthy patrons helped keep the rest of the community afloat (like many of these communes)

— It was in Manhattan, not the middle of nowhere

I think it's still remarkably possible to create successful intentional communities. However, I think that being isolated with 100 people in the middle of Indiana is probably less tolerable (in the long term) than living in a communal hotel with 100 people while still living in an exciting city. It's less incestuous that way, and you're constantly being invigorated by new ideas from your next-door neighbours.

[0] https://medium.com/@bagelboy/make-america-bohemian-again-de8...

I like this story. My pet theory (after thinking about this for half an hour) is that the key is to keep the tight-knit community (selective entry probably helps), probably the internal governance structure, but drop the requirement of self-sufficiency. In fact, interaction with the "outside world" might well serve to more firmly anchor the group's identity.

I want one of these for software developers. Edit: and no, YC doesn't count. Sorry.

> I want one of these for software developers.

It's not exactly the same, but there is the Recurse Center (formerly Hacker School).

https://www.recurse.com/

That does look pretty awesome.

Thinking/Questions about this more for "software developers":

1) What would be the equivalent of a "painting"? (esp in the age of copypasta from stack overflow)

2) Who would the "owners"/"patrons"/"tourists" be?

3) How could this work internationally?

Some thoughts:

1) I don't really know. At first I was thinking "create a program that automates some task you could do with your computer" so it could allow for the mundane and complex, but the former is probably found as stack overflow questions. I know some forums use submit a pull request on git repo with a mod as a way in.

2) I was thinking that software engineers in relatively high paying gigs could be the "owners" who would in a sense subsidize maybe a nice apts somewhere in SE asia/ eastern europe where they themselves could vacation or hang out, or other engineers could live and pay "rent" (as well as all the necessary hacking of the legal/visa system) either in currency or maybe gigs with/for other engineers, companies and freelancer clients would be "patrons", or "tourists"

3) You can pretty much deploy code from anywhere in the world, but navigating the bureaucracy/exploitation (mostly looking at wage discrepancies) of traveling and working anywhere in the world isn't quite here yet. Something that feels transient like airbnb, but robust and minimizes the incentives to pollute "the commons".

But also good to keep in mind that such a system probably won't be free of what ails us all as humans.

The recurse center mentioned by the other poster seems like something in that direction, but seems very focused on a specific location for bringing people, where I think something like this could benefit from being able to be anywhere with subset of such people involved able to go from place to place or fixate as they see fit/things arise.

A 'school ship' model might work - A ship large enough to go from country to country while carrying some cargo and passengers. One could set it up so one is able to buy 'shares' in the company which translate to cabin and cargo space, or just pay by the voyage. That would create an atmosphere of a few people deeply invested in the project but also a steady stream of fresh faces and ideas.

I'm not sure what your point is re #1. I wouldn't try to translate the concept so literally.

Your ideas for ownership sound good, but another option would be a co-op. There's obviously all sorts of difficulties with this, but it seems possible. Also, there doesn't have to be just one. It can be customized per location, per group of founders, or per anything-else. We can let the variants fight it out in the best Darwinian fashion.

In your #3, are you talking about having the whole group roving around the world? At that point it seems like you're taking about something a lot more ambitious than I am.

I guess with #1 I was just thinking what would be the equivalent of a "painting", since that seemed to work for them.

With #3, I was thinking that maybe some people would want to be roving around the world, to different hubs that are all connected. So instead of fighting it out with other similar yet competing(?) ideas, each hub would reinforce another with given resources available to people who are passing through or at a hub at a given time, yet still have the freedom to do their own thing. Also, maybe something like this could avoid being too reliant on a given location (like NYC for the artists, or possibly what SF has become today) over time if a locations economics turn out to not be so in favor compared to other locations, as well as allowing for flexibility with others who cant/wont move to a single location/country.

What I take away from reading F.A.Hayek (particularly The Road to Serfdom and The Fatal Conceit) is that a community can keep itself going even when it's full of inefficiencies, so long as the members of the community all seem focused on the same goals.

This is why a sense of national community is strongest during wartime, when everyone is focused on winning the war. But once that emergency is gone, so is the common purpose. When the members no longer see the same goals, there will be no way to keep them all working in concert.

Perhaps in this Chelsea hotel, the group had sufficient focus because of their art.

Other commenters have mentioned a possibility of a religious element helping, as with the Amish. I don't think this is the case. For one thing, I don't see the Amish as a very distinct community (as opposed to culture); its margins are very fuzzy. And as a counterexample to the claim, I'd point to the Israeli kibbutzes, which I think we can interpret as religious because of their Israeli foundation (especially at the time, when Israel was very young), and were certainly failures.

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