The Great Unbelonging
The Great Unbelonging
Notes from the first session of Expedition One
Somewhere behind the first session of Expedition One, between "Citadel" and "Cultivated" and "Liminal" and "Wilderness" and the axiom "membership requires belonging," sits an unexpected soundtrack: Imagine Dragons.
The joke holds an argument. Imagine Dragons spent a decade as the biggest "alternative" band in the world while musicians queued up to disown them; Corey Taylor of Slipknot claimed in 2019 that Nickelback were "passing the baton of being rock and roll's scapegoat" to them, and SPIN ran a whole inquest under the headline "Is Imagine Dragons the Worst Band Ever?" Rob Harvilla, reviewing Evolve in The Ringer, heard something "gargantuan, and barely human." This venom strikes largely against the genre tag more than the band members themselves: "Alternative" once created a boundary by indicating a specific counterculture, entered through particular doors, in particular cities. Imagine Dragons marks the dissolution: a band can now top the alternative charts while sounding exactly like the culture it was named as an alternative to; counterculture didn't lose to pop culture, rather the latter absorbed the former into its wardrobe. Marek Poliks pushes the point past genre and into affect in a recent Disintegrator superlecture: the reigning emotional register of what he calls TikTokCore, music built to hook within five seconds and facilitate a transition, amounts to "this kind of post-Imagine Dragons triumphance." The band no longer embodies just a certain sound, but indicates a specific feeling-shape which generative systems have learned (likely trained on Imagine Dragons songs) to produce on demand.
Language around belonging sat pride of place in the session, with doublespoken words such as "community" and "trust" punctuating our first attempts at forming shared vocabulary. Generational divisions in language as well as disposition emerged as a common interest. Gen Alpha's adaptation of the term "Goth" illustrates a generational disparity in notions of belonging quite well: the word, in a manner similar to Alt Genrelessness, originally named a club and a record and a dress code and a canon, membership performed, in person and in eyeliner. (I think of Dick Jewell and his work on Kinky Gerlinky.) Now, the term and the subculture it metonymizes remains a shell of itself swirling around in an algorithmic tidal pool: an aesthetic filter, applied from anywhere, to anything (goth farmhouse, goth Pilates).
Poliks in the same episode supplies the sharpest version of what happened to the word. In his 'superlecture' he relays Jon Rafman's observation that "music isn't really a major vehicle of youth identity formation anymore"; the contemporary listener inherits instead "a kind of closet of different interchangeable costumes." His example comes from Sam Cummins of Nymphet Alumni, describing Roblox styling contests judged against a theme: "an all-Barbie avatar could win a goth theme... when you're free from the kind of rigidity of an assumed real-world history, you can kind of create your own history. Anything could kind of be anything else." Goth, for Gen Alpha, no longer requires the club or the canon or even coal around the eyes. Whether that reads as liberation or as loss depends, Poliks suggests, on which side of the dataset you grew up on.
The session seemed to circle around this emptiness with regard to the buckets which once told us where we might fit in. The Great Unbelonging, it might be termed.
A community of Airbnb hosts
From Ben's introduction emerged a comparison in language around community, which I think is worth recording. He spoke about his own professional community, largely disaggregated, built through additions to a Whatsapp group, and set it against the word's second meaning in organisations, where "community" becomes attached to any group within which a company hopes to cultivate favor: a community of Airbnb hosts, a community of users, a community of talent. Julian's definition of community cut against the warmth the word seems to proffer: community forms through exclusion, defined negatively within culture (what we do not do) and socially by exclusion (who does not get in). He had published a blunter version a week before the session: "Organisations are not families. They are not homes. They are not communities. They are entities of effect: we build them to do something" (Scale and Adaptation: Fractured Frames). With this definition, the Airbnb formulation reads differently: an organisation calling its counterparties a community borrows the warmth of a thing it cannot, by its own convention, become.
Julian's question, I wrote down word for word: could your organisation contract with communities without thinking it owns them? Paddy described his organisation picking at a similar seam from the labour side, talent ownership giving way to talent access, with contracts as a central instrument. Julian pressed further: new models of connection will need "new models of contract." Contracts came up three times in one hour, which, for a conversation about belonging, seems like important data. (Julian wrote about trust, as well as the (perhaps gendered) language around it: the contract, in that account, works as the thing you draft once trust has already failed.)
(Matteo Pasquinelli argues in The Eye of the Master that the division of labour bequeathed the algorithm, AI descending from the factory's diagram of who does what; if labour now differentiates along new lines, the diagram mutates before the org chart does. A thread for another post.)
Belonging on a schedule
Hannah raised a question of scale: how organisations differ in their approach as they grow. Julian referenced Geoffrey West here, whose Scale finds parallel laws of power running through organisms and cities and companies, including the grim corollary that companies die on schedule while cities mostly (hopefully) refuse to. I wonder, though, whether Hannah's question concerned intimacy more than magnitude: at what size does trust stop being personal and start being procedural?
Hannah also located belonging in time, having recently been let go by an organisation after having spent 25 years split across two large organisations. Julian added the inverse case: "you can belong without having ever met anyone." He nodded to the Swifties; Ben's Airbnb hosts here again.
I spent yesterday looking through Wolfgang Ernst's account of what digitisation does to archives, and the session's focus on belonging in time and space served, for me, to restage his argument in human terms. Ernst writes, in "The Archive as Metaphor," that "the static residential archive as permanent storage is being replaced by dynamic temporal storage, the time-based archive as a topological place of permanent data transfer," and that "Space becomes temporalized, with the archival paradigm being replaced by permanent transfer, recycling memory." With 'data' swapped for 'people' the sentence still holds true. The village, the office, the goth club operated as a form of storage in Ernst's terms: places that held you, formal or informal, as resident, addressable by location. The fandom and the feed operate rather as transmission: they hold only while the circulation lasts; immortal while still caught in time. The perfunctory action of redundancy reads, in Ernst's terms, as an archival act: a deaccession.
Julian proposed a counter-move to this deterritorialisation of belonging: what if we proliferated places?
Found association
Margaret shared an exceedingly poignant story in the session. Her mother, adopted as a child and now in her eighties, recently connected with two sisters she had never met. Margaret's word for it was "association". I couldn't help but read this in Latin terms. Beneath the etymology here sits socius, ally, and secondarily the Socii, Rome's Italian allies, who fought the oxymoronic Social War in 91 BC not to escape the alliance but to belong to it as full and equal members. The allies, associates, demanded an upgrade to full membership.
Arendt reaches for the same Roman conceit when she describes community building through joint covenant. In On Revolution she describes the 'mutual contract' by which people bind themselves into a community as one "based on reciprocity and [which] presupposes equality; its actual content is a promise, and its result is indeed a 'society' or 'cosociation' in the old Roman sense of societas, which means alliance." For her, a positive route into community exists, and it calls for both joint action and contractual agreement. She distinguishes, in a dichotomy running parallel to Berlin's, between horizontal and vertical contracts: the mutual covenant among equals, with the Mayflower Compact as her model, against the vertical contract of allegiance binding subjects to a sovereign. Her reading of the revolutions credits the horizontal form with the foundations that lasted, while the vertical ones, and the revolutions captured by necessity, by what she calls the social question, hunger, devoured themselves. Power, she writes in The Human Condition, "springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse"; only the community, bound by both action and lasting, communally-drafted contract, carries power across the dispersal.
The place of the contract
So the session's three contract-mentions deserve more weight than they received in the room, because the contract sits exactly on the boundary between the two kinds of community the session continued to circle. An informal one, running on presence, and a formal one that runs on paper.
Ernst supplies the institutional genealogy of the paper. The archive, he reminds us, began not as memory but as an instrument of rule: the archivist "operates in the arcana imperii, the hidden realms of power," and the institution started "by administrative definition, as archeion in ancient Athens," the magistrate's house where the files lived; "real archives link authority to a data storage apparatus." A contract belongs to this lineage. It records a boundary, files the record, and holds it against future dispute; in Ernst's formulation, "The archive registers, it does not tell." Whatever warmth a working relationship carries, its contract stores only the cold clause, which explains the deflation in Julian's older observation that we reach for the contract once trust has already failed. The document enters the archive at the moment the relationship stops being self-evident.
Informal communities run on the opposite substrate. Diana Taylor distinguishes the archive from the repertoire, embodied memory transmitted in gesture and dance and speech, and the goth club and Ben's WhatsApp group-adds and the Swifties all live there: membership performed rather than filed, boundaries enacted at the door, by exclusion. I want to resist the sweeping version of the claim that informal equals exclusionary, formal equals constituted, because the counterexamples arrive immediately: founding constitutions excluded whole populations from the covenant they performed, Arendt's beloved American example above all, and the Swifties include strangers by the million without a single document. But a weaker claim seems to hold: the informal community sets its boundary in the repertoire, where enforcement comes through attendance, while the formal institution sets its boundary in the archive, where enforcement comes through some form of consent. Arendt reminds us that the question of the contract is not just in its existence but in its formation: the conditions of how a document is drafted, who has agency, who consents, marks the success of the actions taken as well as the longevity of any changes thereby wrought.
Thomas Paine stated the distinction in Rights of Man: "A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government." Arendt's whole reading of the American founding in On Revolution rests on that performance, promise congealed into paper, action given a body which can outlast the first actors. (I asked in "Time of Death" when data dies, and located the death at fixation; the constitution to me seems like the one fixation that stays warm, though perhaps only for as long as people keep acting under it.) Now more than ever, in the US more than anywhere, we are reminded that a contract, or a constitution, cannot be treated as though it is a cold document to be wielded when convenient and filed away at will. A contract that merely inventories (who owns the talent, who owns the hosts) files the community in the archive; a contract that constitutes would have to bind mutual promises among equals, which returns us, again, to Ben's Airbnb hosts, counterparties to thousands of identical vertical agreements and to no real horizontal one. (A community of Uber drivers. A community of Thumbtack workers.)
Setting the agenda
Jurgen Habermas builds directly on Arendt to form his concept of communicative power. He bases his concept upon her account of power springing up between people who act together. In Between Facts and Norms he describes law as the "transformer" that converts communicative power (informal opinion-formation of the public sphere) into administrative power, which has the capacity to run organisations and hold institutions. His principle of democracy states a clear consent requirement: "Only those statutes may claim legitimacy that can meet with the assent of all citizens in a discursive process of legislation that in turn has been legally constituted." Belonging, for Habermas, requires more than simple inclusion in the files; legitimate belonging requires actually participating in the discursive process which forms the file's procedure as well as its language.
The demand beneath Habermas's consent requirement reaches back to 494 BC, which saw the Roman plebs withdraw from the city to the Sacred Mount, the first secessio plebis. Menenius Agrippa responded, talking the strikers back into the city by comparing the republic to a body whose limbs starve if they rebel against the stomach. Marx seizes on that fable in Capital's chapter on the division of labour, where manufacture converts the worker into "a crippled monstrosity," so that "the absurd fable of Menenius Agrippa, which makes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realised": the organic metaphor did persuasion work on strikers in 494 BC, and the factory made the absurdity literal. However, the language of "fable" elides what the secessions achieved. The threatened exit was converted into a meaningful constitutional voice: the tribunate, sacrosanct officers armed with a veto, and eventually, after the final secession in 287 BC, plebiscites which held binding authority on the whole of the republic. Arendt closes On Revolution with the councils that spring up in nearly every modern revolution: the Paris Commune's sections, the soviets of 1905 and 1917, the German workers' and soldiers' councils of 1918 at Weimar's founding, Hungary in 1956; each an organ of direct participation owing nothing to party or programme, and each crushed or absorbed within months, the party system, Lenin's above all, proving the swiftest of the absorbers. She names the councils the revolutionary tradition's "lost treasure." Camila Vergara argues, in Systemic Corruption, that the treasure keeps getting lost because it stays spontaneous, and proposes constitutionalising it: a permanent network of local assemblies holding agenda and veto power, a modern tribunate built in as an anti-oligarchic branch. The councils, in the terms of this essay, are pure repertoire, belonging performed in assembly; Vergara's project amounts to getting the repertoire into the archive without killing it.
Two countries offer a large-scale example of what this form of participation might look like in practice. Switzerland's federal popular initiative allows any 100,000 citizens, gathering signatures within eighteen months, to force a national vote on a constitutional amendment. Only 26 initiatives passed between 1891 and 2024, but the instrument's real power operates upstream, in agenda-setting: it proffers the citizen's right to move a question from conversation into the constitution's antechamber, regardless of whether the government wants it there. Mongolia went further into the machinery of deliberative democracy. Since 2017, a national law requires a Deliberative Poll: a random sample of citizens gathered to deliberate under controlled conditions, before parliament may take up any constitutional amendment; the first one, held in Ulaanbaatar in April 2017 on an agenda built from thousands of public meetings, rejected proposals the major parties favoured. Membership is based on chance (lottocracy): the archive (as a sampling frame) summons the repertoire (a weekend of citizens arguing in the Government Palace), and the law obliges the institution to listen. Legitimacy-by-consent is reached through the fact that all people could participate, regardless of whether they do in fact.
Neither mechanism transfers ownership, and both grant something conspicuously absent from the secondary "communities", namely the right to set the agenda. The question of whether organisations are able to contract with communities without owning them starts to look answerable in these terms.
Private equity has been running the mirrored experiment: ownership without the agenda. Since buying CHI Overhead Doors in 2015, KKR has granted equity to every employee, not only executives, across its industrial portfolio companies, a model Pete Stavros built and has scaled through Ownership Works, the nonprofit coalition he founded, which aims at $20 billion in worker wealth by 2030. Stavros's project has already had profound impact. When KKR sold CHI in 2022, its 800 factory and delivery workers received payouts averaging $175,000; when it sold CoolIT this spring, Fortune reported front-line checks averaging roughly $240,000, with a floor of $95,000 even for recent hires; the firm now runs such plans at 84 companies covering 195,000 workers, with $1.8 billion distributed across 13 exits and as much as $14 billion queued behind future sales. And yet, as far as the public reporting shows, the equity arrives without standing attached: no initiative right, no deliberation requirement, no seat at the table where the terms get written, and the stake matures only at exit, when the company gets sold, so the worker's ownership pays out at precisely the moment the belonging ends (Hannah's deaccession again, this time with a cheque stapled to it). On the session's terms the KKR model answers the opposite half of the question about contracting with communities: it proves an organisation can share ownership generously with the people it calls community while still withholding what Switzerland and Mongolia grant citizens, the right to put a question on the table.
Expedition One will run for one year. The structure is fundamentally deliberative, we have yet to see whether any contract will form, but participation has become clear as the first form of belonging, even in the space of a zoom call.
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Sources: Marek Poliks, Superlecture: Nobody Listens to Music Anymore, Disintegrator · Wolfgang Ernst, The Archive as Metaphor · Julian Stodd, Scale and Adaptation: Fractured Frames · Julian Stodd, Contracts and Trust · Julian Stodd, Gender Effects in Trust · Rob Harvilla, It Is Time to Talk About Imagine Dragons, The Ringer · SPIN, Is Imagine Dragons the Worst Band Ever? · NME on Corey Taylor and Imagine Dragons · Dick Jewell, Kinky Gerlinky · Geoffrey West, Scale · Hannah Arendt, On Revolution · Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition · Thomas Paine, Rights of Man · Karl Marx, Capital Vol. I, ch. 14 · Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms · Jeffrey Flynn, Communicative Power in Habermas's Theory of Democracy · Camila Vergara, Systemic Corruption · Swiss federal popular initiative, ch.ch · Stanford CDD, Mongolia's First National Deliberative Poll · Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire · Matteo Pasquinelli, The Eye of the Master · Fortune on the KKR CoolIT exit · Ownership Works