Our community believes that the universe is using my sex life to assemble a benevolent superintelligence. Every adult member is therefore expected to sleep with me, although I retain discretion over which connections are presently useful to the network. Once sufficiently integrated, the intelligence will abolish scarcity and hierarchy. In the meantime, eight people participate in its construction upstairs and nineteen people wash the sheets.
We also believe that jealousy consists of memories leaking backward from relationships we will have after the intelligence resurrects us. This has helped several members accept my relationship with Claire. It has been less useful for Ben, who has spent seventeen months paying $460 a month to prepare a room in which his future self will supposedly be welcome. Last week he asked whether he could at least sit on the bed while assembling it. I said we should be careful about using anticipated future privileges to justify premature access.
The nineteen provisional members are, of course, essential to the project. Ben replaced the dishwasher, filed our nonprofit paperwork, and became the only person who knows how to turn the heating back on. I have repeatedly explained that these contributions are part of the same cosmic undertaking as my weekends with Leah. He asks why one part of the undertaking comes with voting rights and the other requires him to bring his own lunch. I worry that he is still thinking in terms of conventional employment.
Our admissions process measures willingness to transcend inherited preferences. An applicant who says they do not want to sleep with me is asked to examine whether that preference reflects authentic desire or conditioning by a society that has never built a sexually integrated superintelligence. My unwillingness to sleep with an applicant is treated differently, since the network requires a stable reference point. Ben says he does not want to sleep with me either, so there should be no problem. There is still the question of whether he arrived at that conclusion correctly.
Nobody can accuse the system of preventing mobility. Claire became a core member after three weeks. She was already dating two core members, which gave us unusually rich evidence about her capacity for integration. Ben objects that people who are already intimate with the group are admitted faster than people who are responsible for cleaning up after it. This is true. The purpose of an admissions process is to distinguish applicants using the available evidence. Ben’s strongest evidence concerns the downstairs toilet, and we have given him considerable autonomy there.
At his request, we opened one of our private dinners to provisional members. Ben cooked because he knew where everything was. Afterward, he reported that spending the evening in the kitchen had prevented him from forming connections. I encouraged him to be more present at the next dinner. He stayed at the table, and we ran out of clean plates. Several core members found this stressful. His decision to prioritize personal advancement over an obvious community need has complicated his application, although I have urged the committee to consider the full seventeen months of plates.
He has now proposed that household labor be shared equally. This overlooks the different consequences of interrupting different people’s work. An evening taken from Leah and me can delay the emergence of an intelligence capable of resurrecting everyone who has ever lived. An evening taken from Ben delays Ben’s evening. He says we cannot know what he would do with the time because we never let him have it. I accept the uncertainty, but we should not assign an unobserved possibility the same weight as my confirmed reservation for two.
Several provisional members have left. Those who remain tend to have invested the most time and money, which I initially took as evidence that sustained participation deepens commitment. Ben says they are staying because leaving would require them to acknowledge what they have paid for. When he threatened to stop managing our finances, I reminded him how much responsibility we had entrusted to him. He said responsibility was the only thing we had entrusted to him. This is a discouraging attitude in someone seeking more responsibility.
Nevertheless, I accept that an indefinitely provisional tier creates uncertainty. I have therefore offered Ben a permanent position as Member Development Coordinator. He will explain to new applicants how practical contributions can lead to greater inclusion. He asked whether the position included voting rights. I said that would confuse administrative responsibility with personal intimacy. He then asked whether he would still be on the provisional-member chores rota. I assured him that his new role would allow him to write it himself, subject to approval by the people upstairs.
I left a similar arrangement after two years. The difficulty was not that I had failed to understand what membership meant. It was that the definition changed after each contribution. At first I needed to show that I could be relied on. Once everyone relied on me, I needed to show that I had a life outside the work. When I stopped doing the work to develop that life, it became evidence that I couldn't be relied on. I would ask Ben what he was told before he started paying, rather than what he thinks he is owed now.
Please get someone outside the group to review the nonprofit paperwork. Responsibility for a bank account isn't simply an expression of trust. Depending on how you have organized this, Ben may have legal duties and personal exposure that the people controlling expenditures do not share. Giving him a title without a vote could make that worse. I don't know your structure, but I would not let the membership discussion postpone checking it.
You can keep your private dinners. Most organizations have conversations that not everyone attends. What I don't understand is why attendance is then the evidence used to award a vote over the work everyone does. Ben isn't asking to be present at every intimate conversation; he is asking for a say in a household whose plumbing, accounts and heating depend on him. You have made his lack of access both the obstacle and the reason to retain the obstacle.
A group can reasonably restrict voting and intimacy to people it knows well. It cannot reasonably sell outsiders a route into both, pay them in assurances about that route, and then cite the separation of work and intimacy whenever they ask whether it is working. You could run this as a private household with employees. You could also run it as a community with equal membership. The provisional tier seems to let the eight people upstairs switch between those descriptions depending on which obligation is being discussed.
Ben has asked us to state the requirements in writing, and we are doing that. The difficulty is that fixed requirements could obligate members to vote for someone with whom they still feel no connection. I don't think we should create that obligation. The current draft therefore specifies the contributions that make someone eligible for consideration, rather than the contributions that guarantee admission. Ben says this describes the system we already have.
The superintelligence belief makes it difficult to tell which disagreements can be resolved by evidence. If someone declines intimacy, that becomes conditioning to overcome. If they express jealousy, that becomes information from a future relationship. If they leave, it becomes insufficient commitment. What observation would cause the core members to conclude that the arrangement is failing somebody? The number of people doing the work doesn't appear to count, although it is what led you to write the post.