ABSTRACT
Institutional inertia suggests societal groups protesting injustices and demanding change from government and firms more fruitfully might adopt communitarian sensibilities, which embrace relative autonomy from institutions to produce change emanating from civil society. Communitarianism aims for inclusion, sharing resources, and prioritizing use value of productive activity instead of the conventional prioritization of exchange value for profit. Following a synthesis of traditional types of communitarianism, which exist in ‘corners’ of cities and regions worldwide, the chapter examines prospects for, and problems encountered in, the digitalization of communitarianism in ‘community-based peer production,’ CBPP, which aims to scale communitarian values to systematize communitarianism beyond small and bounded spaces. CBPP projects aim to encompass material production and consumption to develop sustainable, relatively autonomous communities across space. Semi/automating governance, select CBPP projects demonstrate innovativeness and thoughtfulness yet face dilemmas producing and protecting postcapitalist communities within capitalism while harnessing algorithmic affordances of a market-based system towards communitarian values. Some problems resemble those in conventional digital-era systems against which CBPP projects position themselves. The fundamental challenge is to resist the comfort of normalization by adopting a fluid approach to governance to accommodate continual revision, multiple modes of organization, and active participation among diverse community citizens.
