A New Revolution in Social Theory

Is hanging out an activity or a form? The answer can change everything.

E., who is bisexual, would sometimes tell me he felt he could swing gay or straight, depending on the situation, but where we were in Berlin, the gay nightlife capital of the world, he usually found himself swinging gay. We were struggling to find examples of people who were making straight male life really look like a premium. “You could be Toby Shorin,” I said, designating him as the Ideal Straight Guy. Toby was in town for a little bit, staying with E. They knew each other from Twitter, where Toby wrote an influential blog, Other Internet. I met Toby for the first time, IRL, when E. and I went to some gallery show. I remember he had a super-thin bracelet, a single sliver of silver.

I invited him to a monthly Essay Club I hosted, where we read an essay of critical theory, and discussed it. We hosted it at Linn and Avery’s sublet, which had large bay windows that overlooked a park. That month, we read “Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics,” by the technology philosopher Yuk Hui, which is honestly due for a reread. It introduced the idea technologies, through design and repeated function, promote and reinforce worldviews called “cosmotechnics,” that can go on to shape a country’s politics (and as that country’s technology is spread throughout the world imperially, so are its cosmotechnics). This was ten years ago, when AI was just starting to creep into the world. Toward the end, I said I would continue the group when I was back in New York, and that Toby, if he was in town, should come. I never had the group again. I have no idea where Toby lives now.

I haven’t thought about that Essay Club much until last night, when I read Toby’s latest text on his newsletter Care Culture, his current project examining vernacular movements in wellness, mental health, and spirituality. It’s titled “Theory of Social Forms,” and it blew my mind—I already forwarded it to four people—because it put into philosophy and strategy a lot of the ideas I’ve been having about how community formation is the engine of political change. His definition of “social forms,” which the MIT Center for Constructive Communication is forming a research program around, is

“a structured arrangement of people and activity. Here is a short list of notable social forms that you can bear in mind while reading: church, art opening, salon chat, book club, all-hands meeting, board game night, telling stories around the campfire, the therapist’s couch, authentic relating or “circling,” design crit, multi-generational living, confession booth, meditation retreat, writing retreat, first date.”

When I read this, the idea of giving form to activity unlocked a door upon new aesthetic thinking I immediately recognized had revolutionary potential. Let me break it down. In the past, I thought of sociality as this: an actor (a painter) generates an activity (paints) that leaves behind a trace (painting). That trace is where I was taught that form was. Pretty much all art criticism you read will operate on that assumption. Yet Toby’s notion would say that form, or at least the social form, is not the canvas, but the activity of painting.

Why does this matter? Social forms—a structured arrangement of people and activity—have rules, protocols, and ways of doing things that are going to shape outcomes (like a sink: roll a marble in it, at any direction, but eventually it will roll to the bottom). This suggests that if you want to change the outcome, it’s not so much about mastering those social forms, getting smarter at it, doing more research, or increasing the budget. At a certain extent, you have to change the social form itself.

Essay Club was a social form. I brought it into my life, because after college, I didn’t know how to read academic texts in a group, and I also wanted a regular excuse to see my friends. There was no need to enforce rules or police the outcome—the social architecture was sufficient where the only two activities we need to do (reading the thing, and talking about it) happened effortlessly. The form was well designed. But I noticed that if I didn’t introduce Essay Club as a social form into my life, those activities never happened on their own. I did not read critical theory together with my friends. The subject didn’t just naturally come up when we pregamed. You need form to regulate a change in activity. If you want to introduce new activities or lifestyle changes in your social life, it’s not enough, as common sense would have it, to just start doing those things differently. You have to introduce a new social form.

Introducing it can be as simple as a speech act. (Marriage is the go-to example: it’s a social form spoken into existence by saying “I do.”) You can just say “We’re having an essay club,” and then it happens. It can literally feel like making something out of nothing. It’s that easy.

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I was first introduced to this line of thinking from my friend H., who writing his Art History dissertation on Indonesian art collectives like ruangrupa, founded in 2000, who curated Documenta 15. It was around the time that critical theorist and sociologist Bruno Latour had begun mapping the social with Actor Network Theory. In the Cologne School in Germany, artists seemed only interested in how art or artists, when circulating a group or network, accrued value and clout—a very capitalist interpretation of ANT. Yet the Asian art collectives used Latour’s sociological model to show how the individual nature of certain artists were always already plural, participating in plural processes. Here, the status of the individual was destabilized. “It’s collectives within collectives,” H. said.

When we were living together in Bushwick, we would talk about art as “social architecture,” which went on to really influence my ideas around raving. H. introduced me to the term nongkrong, which literally just means “hanging out,” an art medium that designates social activity as the center from which all creative production extends (suggesting that art is always the result of collective processes, rather than the sole product of individual genius). It’s a subtle but major shift in thinking.

Is hanging out a practice or is it a form? Nongkrong would designate it as a form.

When thinking about social change, the theory of social forms privileges shape and design over behavior and repetition. Usually, creating new social forms is a vie of desperation to resist or oppose other social forms that have locked us into certain behaviors that are no longer desirable. We often feel locked in because these social forms become institutions, which Shorin defines as, “specific instances of social forms that have formalized and enshrined in networks of power and legal privilege.” Freelancing has become an institution, with behaviors and industry protocols protected legally, incentivized economically. I told myself I was making a better world by shoehorning liberal ideas into self-mythology that hopefully accrued enough clout, prestige, and writing craft to get me published again for my next month’s rent. I hated this so much that I started blogging for free on Substack, another social form that took blogging (people and activity) and an ad-free, algorithmic platform (structural arrangement) that, to my surprise, produced wildly different writing than I had ever done before. Seriously, I did not write like this before.

Can institutions be changed? Shorin prefers starting new social forms rather than reforming institutions, which often have already locked a social form into place (sometimes by law).

Institutions are definitionally things that are legally and culturally entrenched, with processes that are economically and culturally load-bearing. You can’t “just” make new ones. As for updating existing institutions, it’s possible to alter their course through long campaigns of institutional takeover; one example is the Institute For Progress’s efforts to change how science funding works at the National Science Foundation, which seem to be slowly bearing fruit. But changing a change-resistant entity takes a huge amount of financial resources and sustained focus.

Shorin examines emergent social forms in his essay, “Prototyping Social Forms of Care,” which have happened both online and offline, and often in some hybrid (alternatives perhaps to the all-or-nothing thinking of deplatforming). He looks at DAOs, Discord servers, network states, somatic therapy. He breaks it down between Center, Campus, Parlor, and Practice.

What used to be the faith community has evolved into what he calls the Center, a hybrid between a church and a clinic and a school. In the underground nightlife community in New York, Brooklyn has Light & Sound Design, which hosts dance meditation workshops, parties with free vegan meals, panel discussions, Writing on Raving, music showcases devoted to culture from, say, the Global South. Capacity is around 70, so no one ever feels anonymous. Mutual aid for Palestine and ICE incarceration is foregrounded at every event. Tickets are tiered at multiple cost levels, never denying anyone from a lack of funds. They have a loose membership system, and organize their events with frequent meals to promote casual socializing.

On the other side of Brooklyn, the Queer Nightlife Community Center has recently opened. It's bold, aspirational, intertwined with the government through the office of nightlife, and aims to institutionalize the last fifteen years of Brooklyn raving. Materially supporting nightlife workers is the core of its existence. They host experimental performances, dance parties, lectures, artist talks, screenings, or other arts and queer history exhibitions. They plan to provide well-paid employment opportunities, apprenticeships, consultancies, and residencies to expand and sustain an ecosystem of nightlife workers.

Both of these examples are not just centers with regular, hobbyist activities and programming, but moral and political ecosystems. They have values, not only stated in communications, but expressed as practice and reinforced by the behaviors regulated through the social form itself. About centers, Shorin goes on,

Likewise, some notion of the good life is inextricable from these places. The moral sensibility might be tied to a specific spiritual tradition, or it could be a more secular sense of what it means to live well … A center’s moral or spiritual vision is not always explicit, but even as an unstated vibe it’s a major part of what draws community together.

It’s a petri dish for solidarity. A microwave for politicization. Certainly not in the art world, but in rave culture do I see rich people voluntarily paying higher cover prices, donating to mutual aid, subsidizing people's rent, and buying plane tickets for precarious ravers, purely because our social forms have successfully made redistributive wealth a norm.

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I read Ross Douthat’s The Age of Decadence, which is honestly pretty good, where he tracks that America’s decadence—our era of stagnation and forever times of late capitalism—has, like Weimar Germany, created the conditions for fascism to strike. In the long 2010s, we were so dissociating and amusing ourselves to outrage by the culture wars and social media, because there had been no political change for so long. Wage growth, unemployment rates, and the median family income barely progressed since the 1990s. In the 2010s, two-party gridlock has yielded no significant legislation outside of Obamacare. Technological progress was stilled: Cures for cancer, progressive AI, and the California high-speed rail never materialized. Instead, we got social media, which didn’t solve any problems—it invented new ones it pretended to solve, which hooked us, so that if we got off, our life would be beleagured by problems that weren’t there in the first place. This unleashed the greatest, mass social de-skilling event since the fall of the Roman Empire.

For a while now, but in the past year especially, political protest has seemed pretty much pointless. Like the liberals on the Supreme Court. Does it matter at all what they say? Are we just showing up to the pro-Palestine demonstration to document, on social media, that we were on the right side of history? Last year, I spent some time in Hong Kong, where many of the artists and DJs and intellectuals I talked to said they felt spiritually vacated after the pro-democracy protests were systemically quashed. What is even the point of the list of demands if it will never get met? It’s no surprise that out of the age of decadence came cancel culture: a Debordian spectacle, in its own right, that presented the illusion of change to mask that social relations have effectively remained unchanged.

If we want to change social relations, policy is in gridlock and democracy isn’t really a thing anymore. But is there a way outside of policy or democracy to change social relations? This is where the theory of social forms comes in.

Recently, I began thinking about worldbuilding as a political strategy after my friend Youbin Kang, a raver dyke and labor scholar, had come back from South Korea, where she reported for Lux on the protests demanding the impeachment of right-wing President Yoon Suk-yeol. You should read the piece. It’s fun. Kang talks about how Yoon’s opposition to the Anti-Discrimination Bill had united an unlikely alliance of feminists on pregnancy strike, radical queers, asexual icons, disability-rights activists, art students, labor activists, non-binary taekwando athletes, farmers with the Korean Peasants League, and migrant workers. It was a vibe. At a metalworkers’ demonstration, men were wearing rainbow patches that read, “Queers among workers, Workers among queers.”

Kang wrote about one of the union leaders, occupying the CCTV tower:

When I asked him about movement strategy, he responded that solidarity work, like that between labor and hornets, was more than that. He saw it as world-building — practicing democracy by holding conversations across differences and learning to see one another as equals. “I sensed a deep resemblance,” he told me, “between outsourced shipbuilders and queer comrades who feel society has cast them aside.”

The union did successfully reach an acceptable collective bargaining agreement. Yoon did get impeached. Political change is no longer going to happen by changing minds, one article after another, but by worldbuilding.

The first time I got engaged in a protest, it was the anti-fee-hike protests at UC Davis. I occupied lecture halls. Chanted slogans. I drove down to the city jail to pick up friends who had been forcibly arrested during a demonstration. Suddenly, everyone became friends, people who had nothing in common. I was introduced to Joshua Clover’s poetry. The DJs at the radio station and the art writers for the paper, people I always wanted to be friends with, were now spending hours with me, debating ideas, and talking about art and sex. We had teach-ins where Wendy Brown taught me about neoliberalism. The fee-hikes weren’t reversed in the end, but I don’t really think about that much these days . I still think about Wendy Brown, and the outfits people wore, and the poetry written by poets who I still know to this day, who still live in the Bay Area, I hear about them from time to time. The protest was a moral and political ecosystem. At the barricades, I was politicized. The list of demands were never met, but who could say all that was pointless?