In the global nomad sphere, “community” is everywhere—on the coliving landing page, in the conference pitch deck, as the promise of the Facebook group. Yet most of these so-called communities operate less like commons and more like marketplaces: funnels for attention, capital, and legibility, optimized for churn rather than care.
The word remains because it sells. Belonging becomes a benefit tier. Intimacy becomes a service feature. Presence is welcome so long as it performs value for the brand.
An etymological aside
The word community carries a history that makes its current usage feel almost unrecognizable. It comes from the Latin communitas: com- (“together”) + munis (“under obligation, ready to be of service”). In its earliest sense, to be in community was to share life, to hold resources in common, to be bound by mutual obligation. It named the public, the shared, the common—the opposite of the private.
In medieval Europe, communitas described self-governing towns (communes), monastic orders, and the commons: land, water, and other resources held collectively and accessible to all. Even in its political descendants—commonwealth, commune, communism—the thread remains: community implied a structure of mutual care and responsibility, not just a shared identity.
Today, the word is as likely to appear in a marketing deck as in a political manifesto. It has shifted from naming a shared life to describing a target audience. The obligations have disappeared, but the warmth of the word remains—which is exactly what makes it so easy to put a price tag on.
What Tiqqun calls the terrible community
In Theses on the Terrible Community, the French radical anarchist collective Tiqqun* describes a form of community “fully compatible with this world”—one that doesn’t threaten existing systems, but reinforces them.
“The terrible community is the only form of community compatible with this world, with Bloom. All the other communities are imaginary—not truly impossible, but possible only in moments, and in any case never in the fullness of their actualization. They emerge in struggles, and so they are heterotopias, opacity zones free of any cartography, perpetually in a state of construction and perpetually moving towards disappearance.”
Gloss: Under current conditions, any lasting, structured community will inevitably take the “terrible” form—self-limiting, self-policing, and aligned with the world it inhabits. Other kinds of community can and do exist, but only briefly, arising in moments of struggle as spaces of opacity and resistance that cannot be mapped or fixed in place, and whose vitality depends on their disappearance (incompatibility with this world).
Terrible communities are not communities of solidarity, but apparatuses in which appearance and policing are intertwined.
In nomad life, this looks like:
- Flagship conferences where “community” is the selling point, but the event schedule is mostly sponsor pitches, panel selfies, and networking breaks.
- Paid mastermind groups that conflate membership fees with loyalty (or worse: your "seriousness" as an entrepreneur)—and dissolve quietly the moment the billing cycle ends.
- Skill-share courses advertised as collaborative learning spaces, but run as perpetual funnels for the founder’s next launch (with a bonus module on “building your own community”).
- Private WhatsApp channels where most interaction is pitching services to one another, with the occasional GIF to keep up the illusion of camaraderie.
The terrible part isn’t that people meet each other. It’s that the architecture turns every bond into a transaction—and every transaction into proof of the community’s value.
Even the real is enclosed
It’s true: some people meet lifelong friends in these spaces. Paid events can yield genuine bonds. Chat groups can become mutual-aid lifelines. The defense goes: If value is found, does the structure matter?
It matters because design shapes possibility. Even when real friendships emerge, they do so within a framework that:
- Privileges those who can pay for access.
- Defines belonging in terms of ongoing participation in a branded environment.
- Rewards visibility over contribution that can’t be easily measured.
The issue is not that your friendship isn’t real—it’s that it’s confined to a structure built to extract from it.
The network state temptation
The rhetoric of the “network state”—a cloud-first polity bound by shared ideals—offers something intriguing: portable affiliation, governance that can be opted into rather than inherited, and a chance to re-imagine collective structures outside fixed geography.
And yet, the form carries its own shadows. Borders aren’t erased, they’re redrawn as membership criteria. Sovereignty is often gated by capital and digital compliance. The architecture of the nation-state—central control, singular sovereignty, definitive boundaries—can easily reassert itself under a more frictionless, branded surface.
The alternative is less tidy: loose, overlapping networks with no single center, no final gatekeeper, no uniform map of belonging. Affiliation by choice, not contract. Relations that overlap, dissolve, and recombine without hardening into a permanent sovereign form. Messier, slower, less legible—but harder to capture or commodify.
Without care, network states risk becoming the most advanced terrible communities yet—privatized nations where belonging is still bought.
Toward a non-terrible community
If Tiqqun is right that terrible community is the only form fully compatible with the current world, then to imagine another kind of community is to imagine another kind of world.
Still, some conditions feel non-negotiable:
Conflict as capacity, not scandal
Cohesion that expels dissent reenacts the terrible. Protect parrhesia (risky truth‑telling) and build processes to metabolize disagreement without exile.
No ownership over relation
No collective, founder, or platform “owns” the ties formed among participants. Social bonds remain portable beyond the container. Infrastructure is stewarded, not monetized.
A friend once quit a coworking space in Thailand because she no longer needed a desk. She still joined volleyball games at the public beach, arranged informally among people she knew there—many of them current coworking members. The owner then told her she could not play with them because she was no longer a paying member. The games were not organized by the coworking, nor on its property. Yet he presumed authority over those social bonds, as if human connection itself were an asset belonging to the brand.
This is the logic of enclosure applied to friendship: to privatize a commons that was never theirs to own.
Ease of exit
Belonging that punishes departure is ownership in disguise. Make exit frictionless.
“The terrible community cannot permit the existence of a bios, an unconforming life lived freely, within it; it can only permit survival within its ranks.”
Gloss: Here, “bios” is life lived on one’s own terms, an unconforming existence. In the terrible community, cohesion is preserved by narrowing what forms of life can survive inside it; the free life is exiled, and only survival remains.
The ones that can’t be bought
The communities that have most touched me were never branded, never ticketed, never for sale. They were moments when people simply chose to be together—serendipitously, without a contract.
I think of one trip with three flights: the second leg delayed twice, the third delayed again, two nights sleeping in San Francisco hotels, paid by the airline. Strangers from different countries pooling the meal vouchers the airline gave us, wandering out into the city for dinner, passing hours together that we would never have planned. There was no program to join. Just the quiet astonishment of finding yourself with people you’d never have met otherwise.
I think of Remote Year—once the most visible expression of a “curated nomad community,” now gone. Many people surely formed meaningful friendships through it. And yet there’s something different—something irreplaceable—about building connection outside the frame of a brand or a package. It’s simply to do the work ourselves: to be friendly, to be open, to be the kind of people who invite relation without needing it to be sold back to us.
*Editorial note on referencing Tiqqun:
Tiqqun’s "Theses on the Terrible Community" forms a philosophical anchor for our critique—yet it is important to recognize that Tiqqun has also been the subject of serious criticism, including from feminist and critical theory circles. Some readers have taken issue with the “Theory of the Young-Girl” text, which, while offering a sweeping critique of commodified subjectivity, risks repeating the very gendered abstractions it aims to critique. We reference Tiqqun here with both admiration for their conceptual provocation and humility in acknowledging these debates. Our use of their framework is intended to support dialogue, not uncritical adoption.
