From Communities to Circles
Week 8 of 10. Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week
A circle is a band practice for solo artists.
In 2019, I set out to build an intentional co-creation space: a place where people could show up with their creative surplus and use it. Not a networking group or a community in the LinkedIn sense. Not a mastermind or an accountability circle, but a space where communication and discourse come before roles and transactions, where people arrive as persons rather than personas.
I called it Circles, distinctly not a community.
That space has been running continuously since 2019, through a pandemic, through the rise of remote work, through the arrival of generative AI, through the slow disillusionment with online community that has defined the last half-decade of the internet. What we learned in that time changed how I think about gathering, belonging, and creative collaboration.
Why Most Communities Disappoint
The internet promised us community. What it mostly delivered was an audience. Social media platforms, Slack groups, Discord servers, membership sites, and cohort-based courses all share the language of community but operate according to the logic of content distribution. Someone speaks; others consume. Engagement is measured. Value is transactional. The platform's architecture determines the exchange's architecture, and, almost universally, that architecture is one-to-many.
The platforms get better. The features multiply. The templates proliferate. And yet the frustration persists, because the thing people are looking for cannot be delivered by a platform feature. Genuine connection, creative exchange, the feeling of being truly met: none of it survives the funnel.
The solution might come from the nature of conversation itself rather than from any technological fix or editorial angle. You cannot fix a structural problem with better content. You cannot create a sense of belonging with better onboarding. You cannot manufacture thirdness1 with a better algorithm. These things require a fundamentally different structure, one built not for distribution, for mutuality rather than transaction.
The question is not: how do we build better online communities? The question is: how might we move from performative communities to generous circles?
The Anatomy of a Circle
A community is a room, with the facilitator at the front, inviting speakers, activating, and funneling value. Think of the last breakfast lecture you attended, the last webinar you watched, the last expert panel you sat through. The space for conversation is the dialogue between the group and the facilitator or their guests. A community is a choir.
A circle is a bonfire. The exchange happens in the middle, and the facilitator positions herself around it. The value is not delivered by the facilitator but generated by the participants. A circle is a band practice for solo artists. Each person brings their own instrument, their own style, their own creative surplus, and the practice happens in the space between.
This distinction plays out across several dimensions.
Rigidity and fluidity. A community is crafted for a target audience, based on a need, seeking a deliverable, or in sync with a campaign. It is a product placed on a shelf, waiting for a customer. A circle is in conversation with the room. It can adjust to its inner workings: the energy, the cultural context, and the transformation happening in real time.
Pre-defined and proto-defined. In the same way that members of a circle show up as a process rather than a product, the group itself is not a product. Its identity is not established in advance. It emerges from the interaction, and it changes as the members change. A community knows what it is on day one. A circle discovers what it is over time.
Performative and transformative. A community asks you to show up as your professional self: your role, your expertise, your brand. A circle asks you to show up as a person. The first asks you to demonstrate competence. The second asks you to practice vulnerability. The first produces networking. The second produces creative solidarity.
How We Built It
Our circle evolved through several phases, each shaped by circumstance and each teaching us something about the nature of gathering.
- 01 What No One Is Asking For Week 1 of 10 – Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week 4 min read
- 02 Why This Matters Now 4 min read
- 03 Design Is Not Production 4 min read
- 04 Aesthetics Is What Doesn’t Fit 4 min read
- 05 The Practice of Discovery 5 min read
- 06 Putting Language on What You Carry 5 min read
- 07 Integration Is Not Monetization 4 min read
- 08 From Communities to Circles You are here
- 09 Thirdness and the Efficiency Singularity 5 min read
- 10 56 Prompts for Your Creative Surplus Week 10 of 10 — Creative Surplus: A Chapter a Week 11 min read