Deca
A convergence, not a single problem: environmental breakdown, economic fragility, geopolitical bipolarisation, a mental-health epidemic, with AI as the catalyst accelerating all of them at once. Underneath it all sits a crisis of meaning (John Vervaeke, Awakening from the Meaning Crisis).
The State, the Market and the Commons are the three pillars of civilisation (Michel Bauwens, building on Karatani and Fiske). The Commons is the third thing that holds when the other two overreach: fishing and grazing commons, and monasteries that weathered the collapse of Rome and of Han China, preserving knowledge, feeding people and holding meaning.
State and Market are weakening: slow-burning proxy wars, deglobalisation, capital rising while labour falls (Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism), platforms decaying as they capture us (Cory Doctorow, enshittification). Social media was the first wave of AI, and we still cannot extricate ourselves from that Shoggoth. Meanwhile the Commons re-emerges to fill the void: Wikipedia as a knowledge commons, Bitcoin as a monetary one.
The so-called doomers are the real optimists (Tristan Harris): first be aware of the metacrisis, then believe we can solve it and refuse the slide into apathy. A grassroots network is forming, cosmo-local (Bauwens): what is heavy stays local, what is light is global and shared. Third spaces, ecovillages, popup cities and residencies, curated on three criteria at Agartha: heart-centered, maximally truth-seeking, in the arena.
Cypherpunk (privacy through cryptography, 1990s) evolved into neo-cypherpunk and split, as a yin-yang, into Solarpunk and Lunarpunk. Solarpunk is the world I want: community, governance, contact with nature, circular supply chains. Lunarpunk protects the movement: cryptography, privacy tech, local AI inference, and the self-sovereignty (including cognitive sovereignty) it defends (Nita Farahany, Daniel Schmachtenberger).
Commons Hub is a permanent community and venue in the Austrian Alps, bridging web3 and the commons movement. Valley of the Commons is its four-week pop-up village, 24 Aug to 20 Sep 2026, across four themed weeks. The Tech Track runs one arc in two steps: gain the superpowers of modern software and AI, then regain self-sovereignty over the stack underneath while keeping them.
Wherever you are on this journey, there is a next step and there are people already walking it. London keeps sprouting these spaces, and they connect to a wider movement sharing the same values, each community a node in the same emerging network.