Every Sunday for the past month or so, I’ve posted threads previewing my forthcoming book “#Lifehouse” for folks who follow me here. A bunch of them asked me to make yesterday’s thread public, so they could share it with friends they thought might have an interest in it, and after some consideration that’s something I’m willing to do. So please enjoy this discussion of one of the ideas in the book I’m most hoping readers find useful: a neat little bit of social technology I call “the #pragma.”
The pragma is an idea I kind of steal sideways from the discipline of computer programming, via a comment made long ago on Metafilter by someone perhaps more than usually inclined to use metaphors from that way of thinking. So far as I understand it, anyway, in programming a “pragma” is a set of additional instructions that specifies how a broader or more general body of rules is to be interpreted locally. In the social context in which he was using the term, it meant something more like
“a shared local understanding,” with overtones of being lightweight, contingent, perhaps even loosely held, and just barely formal. And given my experience of belonging to more than one group or organization that had fractured over the question of adherence to some overarching, inflexible principle or another, this really resonated with me.
It seemed to me that movements on the left were constantly undergoing schism due to their inability to manage situations in which highly principled people could not reach agreement on some given point of contention, even though they all agreed on just about everything else that mattered. This always feels like the most unhelpful sort of meiosis, which prevents these groups from ever achieving critical mass, disrupts otherwise functioning relationships, and squanders emergent power.
And perhaps idealistically to the point of naivete, I often wondered if some of that cohesion and power couldn’t be preserved, if – on issues that didn’t feel definitive or red-line existential, anyway – two diverging tendencies within a larger collectivity could simply name the point of disagreement explicitly, agreeing to vary around that point of contention but otherwise remain in association with each other. Perhaps they could devise some local shim or fudge factor that would permit them
to retain some kind of comradely accord, and the potency that comes with it, while diverging on whatever non-definitional principles they felt compelled to observe. In short: maybe they could make use of a pragma.
At this point, perhaps it would be useful to consider a concrete, real-world, practical example. Happily, the platform that you’re using at this very moment is a fantastic example of pragma-enabled federation! Consider, for example, the “instance rules” posted by merveilles.town: they require all members to use a black-and-white avatar, and they forbid members to post pictures of dead animals or animal products. These are both pragmas!https://merveilles.town/about#instance-rules
Both of those provisions meaningfully inform the culture of merveilles.town. Neither of them prevents anyone on any other instance from having a Technicolor avatar, or posting a picture of the pastrami sammich they had for lunch. And most importantly of all, neither presents any obstacle to collaboration between the instance, or anyone on it, and other instances, or any individual belonging to any of them. Pragmas give federation the power and meaning that set it apart from mere networking.
And it struck me that this notion might prove particularly fruitful in the context of the fundamental idea I’m trying to get across in the book: a distributed federation of local, autonomous relief, restoration and care hubs with which we might counter all the depredations that land on us as individuals and communities, both the ordinary insults of “organized abandonment” as it plays out in late capitalism and the redoubled traumas of general climate-system collapse.
Each local, democratically-managed hub in such an arrangement would clearly benefit enormously by being able to call upon the resources of a confederal network at larger, even global scale. This would, among other things, allow them to share burdens & practice “mutual aid” as the term is generally understood by emergency-response organizations, as an exchange of specialist resources in time of acute need. But it’s hard to summon any such network while maintaining the integrity of local practice.
Say that you manage to organize a Lifehouse locally, and you want to collaborate and share burdens with others – but your local membership is fiercely committed to being vegan, or a decent chunk of them are in recovery, and do not want alcohol or drugs used onsite, or have overriding sensory-sensitivity issues that affect the way they’ve gone about organizing the space itself. You want to affirm & uphold these values, but understand that the broader network cannot be expected to implement them.
Why not defuse this as a potential point of schism, by saying on all non-definitive points of local divergence, “We have a pragma here that people using our Lifehouse agree to do X,” or “agree not to do Y”? Again, I don’t mean this to paper over points of principled contention that folks regard as existential. But surely most such points are not? Can they be accommodated w/in a framework that flexes respectfully, so as to permit local practice, style & character to flower, just as Mastodon does?
Have people already been doing some version of this forever? Of course! But they’ve done so tacitly, and, well, we see how well it works. So I don’t think it’s silly to wonder that we might not get better results by making our points of divergence explicit, and naming the practice of doing so in order that everyone involved understand what dynamics are in play.
A pragma, as I think of it, is a way of saying, right out in the open for everyone to see: “We feel bound to do things this way. It’s important for us. We also want to work together with you, and we understand that you may very well not feel so bound. In our house, though, we expect you to observe our practice.” It’s not much, but it allows local groups to diverge in non-definitive ways, and therefore to preserve both their identity and the power that comes with working together.
Our Lifehouse is vegan, and yours is not. Your Lifehouse is committed to armed self-defense, and ours is very much not. Both of our Lifehouses are committed to the same definitional principles of care with justice and dignity. Let us articulate whatever local pragmas we expect to be observed on our own ground, and not let these disagreements sunder our collaboration, however profound they may be.
So there you have it: a “pragma” is a local agreement that neither comes into conflict with globally-held commitments, nor compels any other party to adopt it in their own local context. It allows the whole network to flex and vary, and should prevent build-ups of the ideological brittleness that leads to fragmentation and the squandering of capacity. Goofily idealistic? Sure, maybe. But, it seems to me, worth articulating as a value.
@adamgreenfield I think this is a great idea. I mean, it's not new, but having a word, a specific way to talk about it, seems helpful. So, principals, and pragmas.
@Laura It’s not new, not at all! But I have found it very helpful, myself, to have an anchor for the idea, a way of talking about what we so often find difficult to address. I hope you find it as useful as I have.
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