Spotlight: Thursday Council

After several frustrated attempts to find an online space with interesting discussion outside of centralized social media platforms, I ran into the Thursday Council on a public Matrix homeserver list. Instead of trying to explain it myself, I’ll just let you read its own pitch, taken directly from its webpage:

Rarely do social constructs survive as long and with as few changes as the timekeeping units originally devised by the Babylonians around the 6th century BCE. Their seven-day week associated each day with one of the celestial bodies visible to the naked eye—the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. While the etymologies of the days’ modern names are slightly more complex, each can be traced back to the naming scheme of the Babylonian week. For instance, the Latin term “dies Lunae” refers to the day of the Moon. This was adopted as “Monandæg” in Old English, which became Monday in modern English. Despite thousands of years separating their inception and the present, the functionality and arrangement of the days of the week have remained largely consistent in western society.

Social constructs like the days of the week are a fundamental part of a given society. They enable concise and effective communication, producing a narrow lens through which reality is perceived and understood across generations. For thousands of years, civilizations have refuted a bartering system based on the intrinsic worth of material goods, instead opting to arbitrarily create and assign value through the closely regulated use of otherwise worthless objects like coins or bills. Modern economics are even more extreme—an individual’s worth and socioeconomic standing is assessed using purely theoretical quantities of socially-constructed units of currency. In such an information-based system, the very existence of the economy is entirely contingent on silent, mutual agreement between participating members of society. It is not physically real; it is a social construct, no more inherently important than the calendar.

Wealth, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, and all other conceivable differences between demographics, are qualities without objective meaning, devised and granted importance by a society. A human’s entire sense of identity and role within society is transient, consisting of ideas established by people and propagated with language. The term “status quo” refers to the collection of social constructs and norms that comprise society at a given point, where each construct serves as the momentarily standard way of thinking, understanding, or being. A status quo is only thought into existence and allowed to preside over society, where it dictates what people consider regular.

Certain social attitudes have endlessly presided over and actively endangered the lives of those marginalized by the contemporary status quo. The Thursday Council was established to foster a community among friends affected by and standing against these norms. We seek to bring awareness to social issues and inequalities like gender, sexuality, race, and of course, the Gregorian calendar and Babylonian week. After all, neither was made universal due to their efficiency or neutrality (of which both lack), but as yet another byproduct of mass cultural imperialism and subjugation by European, Christian state powers.

And from its community page:

We’re currently a loosely-organized group that just calls itself a community and accordingly tries to operate like one. This is mostly to combat modern society’s remarkably prevalent culture of atomization.

The concept of social atomization is a complicated one that frankly warrants a more thorough analysis than what is written here. However, to summarize the idea, atomization can broadly be defined as the tendency for individuals to grow more individual, to become disconnected, and to stray from what we call community. Here, Willow Liana more precisely calls it “the process by which larger units—compounds or cultures, molecules or families—are broken down into their subcomponents, their individuality gaining clarity as their relationships disintegrate.” This is a fantastic term. It argues that the perceived epidemic of mass loneliness is a symptom of a larger, more insidious disease, born from homogenization and inflamed by competition. It’s a complex social breakdown rooted in factors unique to the modern socioeconomic circumstance; worker subjugation endlessly saps people of time and energy, isolationist culture produces distrust in organization, and the internet now represents a critical piece of our identities and “social” lives. The potential dangers of this loss of community was famously pointed out by Robert Putnam in his 2000 book Bowling Alone. Or, if you’re in a rush, there’s a good documentary about Putnam’s research called Join or Die.

Of course, it is a relatively small community without much discussion matching its otherwise excellent homepage, but it was a great landing place for an IRC user returning back to federated platforms. As a result, instead of dealing with the hassle of running my own homeserver, I’ve decided to join theirs, and encourage curious readers to also get involved.

I promise it’s not a cult.