I’ve been working on a theory and practice for the past decade, this idea of community as an operating system. More accurately, I’ve been working toward this point for my entire career, education (formal and informal) and inner work.

But first, we need to talk about capitalism.

Yeah, capitalism. However you feel about it, it’s not going anywhere in our lifetime. Like all human developments, it’s a living experiment — a huge, complicated exercise in “we think this could work better than what we had before?” And right now, we’re at a particularly weird moment in the capitalism project, particularly in the US. Widening income inequality and looksmaxxing. Brain rot and the climate crisis. Human rights rollbacks and raw milk.

Shit’s weird and kinda awful for an awful lot of people, and we don’t have a playbook for this. We can’t turn to older generations, who knew of warfare in terms of trenches and tanks not deepfakes and politics by algorithm. We’re adults accustomed to Googling our way to solutions, facing a systemic supernova that we can’t keyword or vibe code our way out of. And this version of capitalism is a huge reason why.

The American capitalism experiment has reached a point where money is and has been power, a power we seek and value over our own best interests.

Our insatiable appetite for power led us to extractive practices, pulling anything of value from the earth and from our labor, time and attention. We wanted power (money) so badly that we’ve dug ourselves into a hole that money can’t rescue us from. That’s not entirely true — there are a few wealthy enough to exist outside the hole, but they’re busy trying to leave the planet entirely.

I believe community is powerful enough to change that, and reorient our systems around relationships instead.

There is a degree of scale that I haven’t solved for yet, and I deeply believe some parts of community as an operating system do not and should not scale. The inability to scale infinitely is a feature, not a bug with community as an OS and to recalibrate how we build — whether it’s art, businesses, technologies or movements — toward creation not extraction.

I’m not alone. My thoughts, feelings and existential angst are not novel — which is exactly why I’m sharing them. When the media and cultural narrative lionizes capitalism’s “winners”, when we’re told time and time and time again that that is the definition of success, it’s easier to fall in line than sit with and act on the discomfort. The dominant narrative inundates feeds us endless inputs that make our inner voices, our inner rejection of this way to live our precious lives, seem like the exception.

There’s Emily Best, who’s raised more than $10 million from investors in service of helping storytellers raise nearly $90 million to make their art and connect with audiences.

And Kayla Evans, who’s centering human decision-making along tech and AI in truly groundbreaking academic and client work.

John Beeler, marketer-music industry exec-professional generalist, who led one of the most successful examples of a label that support artists instead of extracts or commodifies.

I could go on (and I probably will later on), but my point is that this list is long in a world that makes us worry it’s too short. People are still asking the same question, running new experiments based around “we think this could work better than what we have now?” And they are centering human connection — relationships, community —intentionally and unwaveringly in their respective work.

Maybe these got you thinking of the exceptions in your world. Good! We need each one. We need more of them. The systems don’t change with scarcity. But I believe there is an abundance of exceptions.

And I want to meet every single one of you.