This is a note on my failed experience at trying to build a political forum, it might be of interest to someone who tries to do the same. It’s also a goodbye note since, with a very sad and broken heart, I had to shut down my forum after 3 years of hard but vane dedication.
Back in the 2020 my country, Argentina, was completely lost and desperately looking for a viable political horizon that could allow for a union strong enough to replace the tyrannic socialist government, which had been in power for decades solely due to a lack of minimally viable alternatives that could be, at least, not worse.
Thankfully that turmoil culminated last year with the historical victory of Javier Milei, a libertarian that was able to finally build such a union, a feat that was impossible for nearly a century.
But before the appearance of the black swan event that Milei was, everything, at every level and by any means, was uncertain. Truly desperate, I tried to collaborate in the buildup of an alternative by getting involved in the libertarian movement, but it was an absolute mess of 24/7 discord that was going nowhere and that somehow was managing to be each day a little less that what it was the day before.
In my naive mind, due to being completely new in the political arena, I thought that what was causing such an inability to coordinate the mass of people was the lack of a proper communication structure. Which in part was true, since the first attempts people made to form new parties was to put, I kid you not, thousands of people in a single whatsapp group. Communication was of course impossible, ideas and initiatives were quickly and permanently lost, it was impossible to follow a single conversation and every single day everyone’s phone was saturated with ~2500 unread messages (all of which, as I explain at the end, I learned was on purpose, for coordination of work wasn’t needed, only monolithic coordination of will).
Being already an adept to the open-source philosophy, I thought: why not to try to build a party in the exact same way that any successful big scale open-source project is made? I know for a fact that it’s not only entirely possible to coordinate mass scale movements of a completely volunteer army of thousands, without funds and without tight central control, but I also know that it works exceedingly well.
So, I embarked in a quest to try to replicate the open-source method into the political arena, in an attempt to help to bring order in what was by the time an increasingly obscure situation.
The first thing I thought was: to be able to coordinate people in a rather decentralized manner, that is, to form a community, a forum is THE tool, and it will also finally solve the hell that whatsapp groups are for this kind of organizations. So, for 3 years, I spent 20 USD a month for the server (that’s a prohibitive amount of money to spend for a non essential service here), and devoted hours and hours of investigation to build the perfect forum for the task. The community here at Discourse was wonderful all along, and you were my sole companion along such a long walk through the desert.
For three years straight I was unable to draw any attention to the forum like if it was a law strict as gravity. And I was no stranger: I was heavily involved in the libertarian movement to the point that I ended up being directly responsible for 40% of the elections oversight efforts in my state (that is, I was a reference for thousands of volunteers). I made myself a name to the point that some people was to ask for my permission before doing something (an actually scary side-effect of my involvement which I always promptly dissolved), when I had no kind of authority over anything, not even unofficially.
So, I had the contacts, the numbers, the predisposition (thousands of people who were also active volunteers, so they had minimal initiative), the structure, the image, the respect, the words, the fully working solution to an actual and current problem, etc. Yet, despite my permanent insistence and demonstrations on how the forum could solve a lot of current burdens, strictly as a law I was unable to ever get a single soul, from thousands, involved in the forum. I mean, I permanently used the forum to help with interactive display of much needed information, which people thus did used, hundreds of them, and yet always fell atom-scale-short from there.
After 3 years, my experience in politics finally brought me to a conclusion after such a long time, that helped me to explain such a strict phenomenon: while I made the forum under the childish delusion that it was the lack of work cohesion the one responsible for the lame estate of a party, I found out at the end that it was never actually needed for a simple and pragmatic reason: what consumes a party time is the cohesion of will, not work. In three years I was never able to start working on initiatives and was never going to, that was my fatal projection error. I thought the internal fights would stop at some point and we could start working as an institution from there. It never did because a party uses its time dealing with will, not work. That’s why the focus is solely devoted to internal fights in disregard of how much damage it causes to the party as an institution. It just doesn’t matter at all, for power do not comes from the cohesion of work of the community (within a party), but solely from the cohesion of will. And that’s it, it’s a structural phenomenon, not a moral one: the current structure of politics forces that behavior as a completely natural and mechanical decay, and the fact that parties subsist in that current estate is proof that it’s indeed a successful strategy. So my attempt was ill fated from the start due to the current rules of the game. I have to admit, that was a hell of a learning curve, but one I’m glad I walked through.
I’m now, finally, and with a very heavy heart, shutting down my forum for good. I hope any of this might be insightful for anyone, and I’m deeply thankful and in debt with this awesome community who was always there for me whenever I needed it.
