Common Task (about the name) was birthed in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic as a platform for utopian ideas — a sort of pop-up salon — with this set of animating principles (originally titled “The Road to Utopia”) serving as its foundation.
Writing fiction in 2020 felt misguided (at best), and it seemed like a year of turning points, both for individual lives and the world as a whole.
The world has since returned to its grim business, but the ideas here struck a nerve, leading to meetups, conversations, and a few heated late-night arguments across several continents. Upon revisiting in late 2024, they seem as durable and urgent as ever. ~SK
One finds everywhere today — not least among artists and writers — something like an unacknowledged “party of Utopia”: an underground party whose numbers are difficult to determine, whose program remains unannounced and perhaps even unformulated, whose existence is unknown to the citizenry at large and to the authorities, but whose members seem to recognize one another by means of secret Masonic signals.
—Frederic Jameson [RIP]
PS. Lots of related resources to scroll through over at Are.na for the preternaturally curious.
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