reVillager is a social platform for real-life communities who want to be happy
For the past year I’ve been advising a super interesting team with their startup. I first got introduced to them during a stay in the mountains of Bolivia, and soon came to love what this little international gang of renegade idealists is constructing.
The concept of reVillager sprung very much from the daily needs of the three founders and their challenges building and managing in-person communities. Jasper and his family live in a small intentional community on Vancouver Island, Sante is part of a high-tech nomadic vanlife group called Kift that roams the west coast of North America, and Warren is an addiction therapist who runs an eco-retreat in the Bolivian mountains.
They all consider themselves part of the revillaging movement, a revival of communal interdependence with one’s neighbors, and a modern take on the ancient social format that characterized the great majority of human history.
If this brings up images of hippy farms, you’re not wrong. But I’ve come to appreciate that revillaging takes many forms, both traditional and modern. The revival of eco-villages is revillaging, as is the rise of co-housing. When I was organizing my Brooklyn apartment building, with our monthly neighborhood happy hours and local activism, that was definitely revillaging. And when I visit Buddhist monasteries and retreat centers where people are living in daily interdependence and reciprocity, this is an ancient village format here in the modern world. I think the rise of psychedelic therapy centers will lead to new forms of villages with people “healing in community” both on and off-site. If you’ve braved Burning Man or a really great yoga retreat (adult summer camp?), you’ve probably felt a burst of village life. But village dynamics show up all around us: college campuses, co-ops, men’s and women’s groups, sports clubs, recovery groups, self-development circles, and parent’s groups. My involvement in real estate projects have also built my appreciation for the value of social fabric in urban living.
So yes, the desire to be more “in-community” is definitely vintage — just ask a baby boomer. But I’m convinced its relevance has become even greater in our era. The epidemic of isolation, loneliness, and individualism is real, with teenagers who relate more to their screens than to other kids, adults who approach retirement with few or no true friends, and nuclear families who feel alone in their child-rearing.
There are so many references one could draw on here: the UK has officially declared a “loneliness epidemic” and a recent Harvard study showed that 61% of young people feel lonely “frequently, almost all the time, or all the time.” One that comes to mind for me is in Arthur Brooks’ new book From Strength to Strength, which clearly cautions that avoiding the malaise and dark spirals that often arrive in the second half of life is largely a question of whether a person has meaningful social ties. Real friends, not just “deal friends.”
So what’s this technology and how is it new? reVillager will be familiar looking in many ways. It’s an app for the phone or browser that lets people create private groups for their in-person communities and organize members into different circles and pods. It promotes productivity through messaging and event scheduling.
Getting more specialized, reVillager lets people exchange goods and skills. And it even has features for conflict resolution to help address the inevitable frictions that come with group dynamics. And the team has plans for more tools to run voting and collective decision-making, which I’m very excited about. Rather than trying to build features that maximize scroll time, the goal here (gasp) is to actually nudge people off the screen and back into relation with one another. The team jokes about installing a timer that, if you’ve been asynchronously messaging with someone for too long, insists you go talk to them or just video calls them automatically.
As reVillager grows, the plan is to build up a knowledge base of literature and video courses on “how to village,” a full toolkit so aspiring organizers can get up and running, and existing groups can refine their practices. (They’ve brought in community education guru and documentarian Ian MacKenzie to help build this). The growing number of villages on the platform will lead naturally to a directory where groups can find, connect, and build solidarity with one another either regionally or around the world.
The reVillager team speaks often of designing humane technology, and they are deeply suspicious of how Facebook and other corporate communication products work as Trojan Horses to capture your attention and sell it to advertisers. This might still seem innocuous on the day-to-day, but these business models have shown they can influence elections, destabilize the mental health of an entire generation, and who-knows-what-else in this civilization-scale unregulated experiment we call social media.
To build humane technologies, entrepreneurs are setting out to make humane companies, rethinking the profit motives and success metrics that they say drive the aggressive tactics of modern social media apps. Rather than striving to be mythical (mutant?) unicorns, enticing fly-or-die investors with visions of billion-dollar valuations and rapid 10x returns, they talk about creating zebras: financially responsible, investable/lendable, appropriately-sized ventures that are good for the world.
The reVillager zebra is being built as a B-Corp with non-profit subsidiaries. They envision an eventual “exit to community” where the people who use it most are able to have ongoing ownership stake. The team is also closely watching the world of Web3 and blockchain, where promising mechanisms are emerging to allow more distributed ownership and decision-making than our read/write Web2 ever did.
So there we are. I think it’s very important to keep an eye on ventures like this, and I love advising this particular team. The older I get, the more I appreciate what it means to have our social-emotional needs met, not in theory, but in real life. If a digital tool can help people organize into harmonious communities, this is the kind of technology that is on the side of human flourishing.
reVillager is now live on Kickstarter! Check it out here.
