Actions in three landscapes

Here we describe the material, cultural and aesthetic landscapes implicit in members' practice, and the way that meet.coop intends to provision a stack of spaces that engage this range.

Updated 2021 12 07

Spaces

meet.coop provisions a stack of commons, around digitally mediated spaces. There are three kinds of spaces

• Platform spaces - in the material-digital landscape

• Media spaces - in the cultural-documentary landscape

• Venue spaces - in the aesthetic-affiliative landscape

A stack of digitally-mediarted commons - Three landscapes

In line with what was said about dimensions of community, the basic frame of commoning in meet.coop is practices (commons of capability); not, for example, code, or platforms, or client-server networks. That is, ‘a space’ is a field of practice, rather than just a material configuration, or a domain of digital stuff.

Three landscapes

Practices per se are continuously involved in both production and reproduction, which are addressed as taking place in three ‘landscapes’. All the landscapes are material, and subject to skilful activist intervention and transformation. The intention of meet.coop, in its relations with its communities of members, is to facilitate actions in all three landscapes:

• The landscape of material configurations (eg material provisioning of means of subsistence and wellbeing, hands-on care and attention, ‘use values’, supply chains, ecologies, ‘commons of running code’, etc). Platform spaces are examples of material configurations. But community-care provisions, for example, are also material configurations; and so are the oceans and global weather systems. The economy - the 'real' economy, the living economy - comprises an enormous diversity of configurations of use-value stuff, in the material landscape. We need to become able to handle it all extremely skilfully.

• The landscape of cultural formations (ie, organised labour power, visioning and planning, coordinating and communicating, ‘the dance of knowing’, R&D, design, literacy, education, training, etc). Media spaces are examples of configurations of cultural means. Cultural formations involve many diverse combinations of skills, conceptualisations, stories and practice-genres, But within this, and latterly (the past 30 years), extreme digital-machine forms of conceptualisation and description - code, algorithm - have become enormously powerful and significant. meet.coop operates in this complicated intersection of capabilities - a 'dance of knowing and capability'. commons.hour - our primary venue space for user-members - is a pivot of this dance within meet.coop.

• The landscape of aesthetic forces (eg ‘structures of feeling’, the ‘emotional ocean’ of the individual and collective heart-mind; impulses of affiliating and resisting, recognising and bonding, obsessing and desiring, grasping or taking the long view, etc; also living in deep species time, or in the time of our grandchildren’s grandchildren). Venue spaces are stewarded by meet.coop, to facilitate skilful collaborative work in the aesthetic landscape: the production and propagation of structures of (feminist, de-colonial, ‘commonist’, mutualist, non-supremacist, etc) activist feeling, across silos of activist commitment.

Although the skills needed to operate skilfully in these radically differing landscapes are diverse and sometimes difficult, meet.coop has an ambition (a modest ambition!) to facilitate the full breadth of these kinds of literacy in its member communities, in transformative practices of dual power, in civil-society formations. Hence our provisioning and stewarding of the three kinds of spaces, not just a network of servers running or hosting libre code. [Add link: xxx libre code]

Fundamentally, rather than just operating a libre-software, video-room platform-service, we promote the capability of our members to cultivate and sustain activist formations (aka formaciòn), and their literacy in fluently mobilising the tech.