Theory of Social Forms

In Prototyping Social Forms of Care, I introduced the term “social forms,” which I defined as “the structured architectures of behavior that determine the shape of social situations,” or as “the templates of social life.” In an interesting turn of events, some MIT researchers have picked up this terminology and decided to run with it for a new research program. In discussion with the MIT team, we agreed that social forms need a stronger definition, so I wanted to write a brief piece explaining the term, what I mean by it, why it is useful, and what a formal program of study might look like.

I use the term “social form” to mean 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.

There are two references I find useful to bear in mind when thinking about social forms: Christopher Alexander’s idea of pattern languages and Johan Huizinga’s play theory.

The notion of pattern languages gets at the ordered and formal nature of structured social situations. A dinner party or a book club consist of a set of behavioral patterns in time and space. In the pattern consists the form. Within each of these social spaces a great deal of variation is possible: the size of the group, the order of events in an evening, courses in a meal, or conversational guidance. Yet there is an overall pattern that provides the shape of how people interact in the formal setting. Over time, templatized variations of social forms get developed, becoming part of a culture’s repertoire of off-the-shelf social situations. You can pull them out and run them like a formula. By “template” I don’t mean a Platonic form but the patterns that instances share to varying degrees, with the template itself being an abstraction from actual practice. Instances reshape templates over time.

Play theory gets at the fact that social forms are rule-based spaces where something happens. When we enter into a dinner party or a book club for the evening, we suspend disbelief and enter into an arena in which implicit contracts and explicit rules guide interaction. A social form gives shape to interaction by providing a magic circle, inside which all participants agree to collectively facilitate whatever it is the form does. This is not to say social forms have a telos or are of an entirely instrumental nature. Often they are quite game-like: whatever happens in them happens, and barring some breach of the rules, that outcome is considered legitimate.

The notion of the “container,” widely used in therapeutic and healing spaces, is a popular word that evokes the four properties of ordered, formal, rule-based, and productive. Facilitators speak about “opening” and “closing” the container, representing the formal start and conclusion of the experience and its operating ruleset. Facilitators develop the skill of “holding the space,” which means their general ability to protect the spatiotemporal boundaries of the experience, ensure the integrity of the rules, and guide the form to its productive outcome. Not all social forms have such explicit facilitation, but the “container” concept is useful because it demonstrates common-sense awareness of the spatial, bounded, and procedural nature of interaction spaces.

When we return to that list above, we can see that social forms structure our daily activities. They are the habits of a society. We live our lives through the forms. Certainly, people stretch the bounds of social forms and traditions, individually and collectively, intentionally and inadvertently. And these patterns are subject to social evolution and individual whim. But overall, life tends to be structured by these patterns.

Before we move on, let me introduce one other important feature.

In their formal and game-like quality, people can become skillful in the medium of a specific social form through practice. Although you might just run a one-off templatized book club, it’s possible to get really good at running book clubs, to the point of total mastery. Beyond total mastery, you may begin to innovate on the form itself. This tells us that social forms imply a “type of guy” who has mastered the form, whatever it is. Earlier I used the term “repertoire;” this is an important term in my thinking. A culture’s repertoire of forms is the given set of social situations, and at the same time the given set of things it’s known as possible to become good at—holding stand-ups, hosting dinner parties, telling ghost stories, leading a spiritual retreat. If social forms are dedicated “spaces” with that game-like quality I mentioned, then they are also sites of social practice and social reproduction.

Some readers will know that I was influenced early on by Wenger and Lave’s monograph Situated Learning and their concept of “community of practice.” While their work shares many important features I’m hinting at now, such as skill acquisition, beginners and old-timers, and the whole notion of social reproduction at large, I’m getting at something a bit different. Wenger and Lave are implicitly dealing with lineages of practice passed down through formal and informal teaching relationships. This is true of all communities of practice but not all social forms. Many social forms, like workplace stand-up meetings, are so thoroughly part of the repertoire that people can facilitate them, or run off-the-shelf versions, with no meaningful training. Others, like holding church services, clearly benefit more from learning relationships. Finally, what’s at stake in Wenger and Lave’s work is successful transmission of a practice, such that a newcomer moves toward central participation and mastery. What’s at stake for my theory is fitness of a form for its culture, formal stagnancy and innovation, and whether or not a form has any juice in it.

Social Forms and Institutions

One of the motivations for introducing the terminology of social forms is to make a strong distinction from institutions. Let me say a bit about that now.

Douglass North gives a very effective definition of institution, one we use in our thinking at Other Internet: “Institutions are the humanly devised constraints that structure political, economic and social interaction.” On the face, this is rather similar to how I’ve defined social forms, but it’s too broad a frame to be useful in many cases. I want to give a more narrow definition of institutions. For my purposes, institutions are specific instances of social forms that have been formalized and enshrined in networks of power and legal privilege. The variation “institutionalized” carries this connotation, and it’s this meaning I am leaning on here. Institutions are things that have become infrastructural in some way.

Take marriage. The two-person partnership is one of the oldest and most time-tested social forms. It has been institutionalized in every society in which it has presented itself, with social and legal rituals of recognition, and certain rights, duties, and tax breaks assigned to married partners. Another example is the joint-stock company, institutionalized as the Delaware corporation. Or again, specific forms of debt and borrowing have become legally ensconced in the banking system. Other borrowing and lending schemes are possible, but law and banks combine to enforce a dominant mode. Many forms of two-person relationship are possible, but legal marriage strongly enforces rules about asset sharing and two-person parenting. Institutionalization locks in an “ideal type” of a social form. The art gallery is one of my favorite examples; galleries have become a dominant paradigm in the art world, even though there are plenty of places other than a rectangular room with white walls an artist could present their work. Galleries are institutionalized.

Because they are entrenched in networks of power and legal privilege, institutions are important for civilizational function. Many cultural and economic domains are maintained by power-holding institutions: the legal system, the music industry, political parties, public libraries, the military, universities, and so on. These institutional structures are the substrate of civilization because they undergird both the mechanical functioning of society, and fuzzier forms of social knowledge and participation.

When I say “mechanical functioning” I mean it in the same way that Venkatesh Rao uses the term “machine” in his 2024 essay Between Mandala and Machine: an institution as a system for ingesting and processing information about the world. Each infrastructural domain is a machine that knows about the world by turning its inputs into rationally knowlable data or abstract knowledge. Think of the messy, distended machine that ties together hospitals, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers. What is “known” by this institutional structure includes models of disease, maps of the human body, best known treatments, statistics about comorbidities and so on. This is a transformation of the kind of excellence and mastery I discussed in the previous section into persistent, situated, applied knowledge. This knowledge enables institutional machine to take in patients, classify their condition as a state, and transform it into a different state. Institutions embed this kind of know-how and this computational capactity, which account for their continued importance and legitimacy.

To recap: social forms are the templates for ordered, formal, rule-based, and productive spaces of social practice. Institutions are instances that are infrastructural, self-preserving, and knowledgeable, situated in power and legal privilege.

New Social Forms as a Theory of Change

Legitimacy, of course, is the elephant in the room. For the last decade, institutional decline and renewal has been a thematic narrative across many fields. The art world fascinated itself with “worldbuilding” projects and artistic explorations of institutions, while social scientists and political pundits lamented the dissolution of churches and voluntary organizations. Much of my own work during this period involved looking at social collectivities that arise as a direct response. In my work with Other Internet, I researched the social collectivities that form around token networks, and the participatory governance communities that called themselves “DAOs.” Before that, my earlier writing looked at things like microbrands and lifestyles. In my more recent thinking I’ve been exploring groups that deal with health, healing practices, and spiritual matters. Over these years I’ve also been involved in many self-organized educational projects outside the university.

Nearly every kind of organization I’ve looked at deeply has been a voluntary community. Brand communities, crypto governance groups, moral ecosystems, and new kinds of school are all opt-in organizations. That’s not to say they’re not important; people make life-changing money in crypto and make life-changing self-discoveries in spiritual groups. But these social bodies are not yet load-bearing in the social and economic structure of the world, nor have they managed to enshrine themselves in the legal system (with the exception of Ethereum and Bitcoin). Most of these projects have been highly experimental in nature, many of them falling apart as soon as they start, a select few lasting longer for reasons that call for embedded research to excavate.

Although many of these organizations used the discourse of “new institutions” to announce themselves, none of them are institutions in the sense I defined above. This is one clear reason to distinguish them as new and experimental social forms, and to study them as a separate unit of analysis. A second reason is that experimentation with social forms is critical to institutional and cultural renewal.

I think that all the clamor around the need for new institutions has been right, but the premise of actually building new institutions has proven nearly impossible to fulfill. 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.

I’ve got neither of those, and after becoming disillusioned by the lackluster outcomes of the new institutions discourse I felt a clear need to update my thinking to match how I actually tend to do my best work: on the ground, embedded and involved in communities of people doing unusual things on the fringes—“participatory action research,” in Academese. I’ve never built a new institution in my life, but I have been involved with many institutional prototypes, many experimental social forms. While many of the experiments I mentioned above have been short-lived, they’ve also had a lot of promise.

To paraphrase my friend Chris Beiser, social forms are a kind of capital that is essential to the structure of society and to economic production. The problem is that our culture’s basic repertoire of social situations are stuck, institutionalized and captured by rent-seeking bodies, or have become regressive as cultural needs have evolved. Because social forms are neither easy to invent wholesale nor can their value always be captured, we don’t incentivize the creation of new ones. (But we should!)

What’s implied here is that social forms can have a fitness for their time and culture. Everyone knows Bowling Alone, but everyone also knows that we don’t need more bowling alleys. What exactly do we need? The kinds of forms we need don’t have a name yet, because the most promising experiments are happening in random converted churches, in community gardens, on obscure islands, and in peoples’ apartments all over the world. You have to go on the ground to find out what’s being prototyped and what exhibits viability.

When I’m dipping my toes into some kind of new dialogue format, neo-church, school, therapeutic container, or other new social space, here are some of the questions I find myself asking to assess its viability:

• How do people feel after the container closes? Are they drained, normal, or palpably more alive?
• Was this space capable of real intellectual production?
• How closely were people paying attention? Or were they distracted?
• Did participants have fun? Or were they bored?
• Is there anything meaningfully new here from a formal perspective? Or is the novelty only in the framing?
• What was the effort to payoff ratio for both participants and organizers?
• Do participants want to come back? After going more than once, is there churn?
• How strong are the relationships cultivated by this space?
• What historical and contemporary ideas and references are being invoked? Which most excite people?
• Are people thinking new thoughts here, or does this form merely set up solved conversations and ritualistic discursive combat?
• What are the stated objectives of the form and were they accomplished in practice?
• What seem to be the implicit, unstated objectives of the form, and were those accomplished in practice?
• Are participants going for the something that the space produces, or are they going because of the facilitator’s charisma?

These are the kinds of questions that help me understand whether the form has, as I like to say, any juice in it or not. Without doing this kind of in situ research, it’s hard to understand what works and what doesn’t in any given form. This is the essence of the on-the-ground research I did in 2024 which led to Prototyping Social Forms of Care. That piece was framed around social forms for healing and care, but a lot of my references had an educational slant too. One thing we can definitively say is sorely needed is experimentation with new kinds of school, new forms for learning.

Formal social practice is the domain most worth innovating on and the natural successor to the arts. In the 20th century the arts had a great run of innovative experiments on form. Two fascinating books on this topic are The Assuault On Culture by Stuart Home, which covers countercultural utopian art movements from the Dadaists through Fluxus, and The Democratic Surround by Fred Turner, which explores the transformations of one social form into many variations over about 50 years. Art seems to have exhausted itself as a source for social-formal experimentation, which is why many artists are now turning to other forms like the corporation and therapeutic practices as sources of inspiration. It’s true the other way around too: I see more interesting and “artistic” formal experiments coming from people who are deeply involved in various kinds of social and relational practice.

New Social Forms

This is why I’m encouraged to see this MIT project taking on this topic. I had a brief chat with the project organizers, Cass Lee and my friend Amar Bakshi, and I’m excited to see where it goes. The Center for Constructive Communication, where these folks are based, is specifically focused on dialogue, and has been building AI tools for semantic analysis of conversation. I sense that its interests are roughly political, democratic, and deliberative in orientation. I spent some time learning about collective decisionmaking formats like Deliberative Democracy and Participatory Budgeting during my governance research days. But as I’ve been more focused on psychology, I’ve been more interested in the ways dialogue practices contribute to adult psychological development, emotional capacity, and subjective experiences of healing. This is a field with a lot of social-formal experimentation happening right now, and there’s plenty of room for more rigorous research. Experimental forms of education are also places where communication plays a “constructive” role.

I’d be especially interested in a version of this project that gets in touch with prototypers of social forms around the country and organizes opportunities for them to share with one another what they are doing. Because most of the experiments are hyperlocal and require a lot of IRL community-building, people doing innovative work on social forms don’t get much of an opportunity to meet one another. Enabling them to meet one another is how forms that have that juice in them can scale. I am less interested in verticalization (institutionalization) of specific forms than I am in lateral scaling of patterns and best practices. In that sense, I think the most important work to be done by researchers here is not semantic analysis but the kind of assessment for quality and cultural fit that I’ve been doing, as well as the stimulation of cross-pollination between formal experimenters.

• A morphological-evolutionary analysis of social forms that are seeing a rise in popularity, such as grief circles and authentic relating practices, with an eye to historical changes that account for growth in adoption.
• A social-historical study of the same forms, focused on masterful practitioners and their personal lineages. (The work of Don Hanlon Johnson, a historian of the somatics movement, is a good reference point here.)
• A formalized version of the viability studies I mentioned above.
• A study in the spirit of Wenger and Lave assessing the progression toward mastery within certain forms.
• A method of formal critique, inspired by criticism in the fine arts, and a comparative study of forms that didn’t take off and why certain experiments collapse after initial enthusiasm. I tried my hand at one such critique in my review of Peoplehood.
• A study of what forms suit specific stages of child and adult development.
• A study of facilitator phenomenology: what do skilled holders of various containers report about the felt sense of holding space in these various formal arrangements?

These areas of inquiry, which chiefly emphasize the patterned form rather than verbal content of a dialogic situation, are some of the features a formal research program around social forms might engage in.