A growing number of subcultures, digital communities and guilds have turned their back on ad-supported social media and migrated their social and cultural activities to semi-private digital spaces, chat rooms and Discord servers. We believe these spaces have the potential to become decentralised institutions that are financed, owned and governed by their own members. To support this vision we propose Moving Castles, an organisational metaphor and real-time media type which combines collective agency and public participation in modular and portable multiplayer miniverses.
A Moving Castle crosses the ridge between private and public.
A Moving Castle—as popularised by Studio Ghibli’s cult movie “Howl’s Moving Castle”, based on Diana Wynne Jones’ 1986 book of the same title—is a nomadic patchwork of different spaces of mutating and incoherent scale. Such spaces are “bespelled to hold together’’ by the will of their inhabitants, which the Moving Castle can transport to different worlds in times of needs or wish.
“With a last squeak the castle lifted, the crew cheered as we could see across the dark forest for the first time, our eyes locked on the arid wastelands on the horizon. Now back to chat, this machine won’t move itself”
In our vision of this new media format, Moving Castles are modular and portable multiplayer miniverses; inhabited by communities that use them to manage their lore, ecosystems and economies. With this first post, we sketch their blueprints and collage the new collectively produced media-format that can emerge from within Moving Castles. After collecting the seeds from which these communities could grow and sustain themselves, we’ll finally take a look at how they can be built and how to facilitate an exchange with a public outside their familiar territories.
We are part of Trust, a knowledge-community that lives on a member-restricted Discord. The focus over the last year has been on producing online events which take shape as Collective Reading Groups, Sandbox (a combined voice and chat presentation format) and publicly available streams and talks on Twitch.
Trust and a large variety of other semi-private communities—from pay-to-enter-discords, game guilds, blockchain communities, subscription-mediated newsletters, and group chats— are what Yancey Strickler calls Dark Forests. According to him these are “spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments”. Ribbonfarm’s Venkatesh Rao has another term for it: “the Cozyweb works on the (human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams”. Where Dark Forests are characterised by their intentional withdrawal from social media, the Cozyweb is non-indexable because of a lacking interconnection between material, creating unintentionally disconnected islands populated by isolated communities.
In spite of their differences in intentionality, both terms describe communities that withdraw themselves from participation in the power laws of social platforms. According to New Models’ Carly Busta, and Joshua Citarella, it is through this withdrawal that these new subcultures find the space to develop shared interests and build their collective lore.
What we believe to be most promising about emerging spaces like Trust is their potential to grow into collectively-owned social and cultural institutions built on decentralised infrastructure: democratically governed manifestations of collective interest ranging from political aims to fandoms, contributed to and run by their members.