
What we’re about
Are our politics trapped in false binaries? Does our culture feel “stuck”? Do you feel “politically homeless”?
Triangle Common Good is a civic club dedicated to exploring ways to secure the material and social conditions for living flourishing lives in ways that address the failures of our current political order.
We have a set of values that guide us, which you can find below. You do not need to agree with all of them! All you need to join is curiosity and a belief in the ideals of frank discussion, empathy, honesty, and nuance.
Our New Discord
Group Substack
## Vision
We envision a society where our public political philosophy believes common goods, development of community, virtue, and human flourishing are things a liberal politics should pursue, and which takes both positive policy actions towards providing the material conditions needed for these goods, as well as restrictive actions that maintain the psychological and social context needed for these goods to exist, for an active democracy to thrive, and for technology to serve a human experience.
## Mission
We encourage associations that are ordered not just around shared personal identities, but shared material needs and goals, universal aspects of humanity, and building healthy local dependencies, including civic clubs, unions, and mutual aid organizations.
We do this through three avenues:
- Discussions and lectures that promote a “public philosophy” and cultural and policy alternatives to our current political order.
- Discussing policy reforms that address the conditions for human flourishing, income inequality, democratic decision-making, labor rights, and universal programs.
- Designing and implementing pilots of mutual aid, including intentionally designing local, prosocial, not-for-profit digital platforms and decentralized systems.
Put Simply: Society should have goals beyond efficient markets and just the protection of individual negative rights.
## Values
- The functioning of democracy requires some minimal realist theory of truth for productive conversation to occur.
- Technological progress is not an independent, natural force of history we have no control over.
- Measures of efficiency, output, and scale are means and not ends.
- “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” – David Graeber
A Quick Notes on Rules:
Polite, respectful, and empathetic discussion will be required at all times. Vigorous and passionate debate is desired! Challenge each other! However, the fact that we will be reading controversial works will not be an excuse to engage in insulting or offensive interactions.
Upcoming events (4)
See all- Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World - Jason HickelWeaver Street Market, Raleigh, NC
Come join Triangle Common Good in discussing Jason Hickel's Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.
Less is More is an argument for "degrowth", which Hickel personally defines as "a planned reduction in energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being". This will be a chance to talk about the relationship of our economy to questions not just of the environment, but of critiques of looking at the size of an economy or GDP alone as a measure of the well-being of a society and how this relates to a society ordered around some conception of limits or intentional design.
Hickel is an anthropologist whose focus is economic anthropology and has served as a senior fellow at the London School of Economics, editor of World Development, and member of the US National Academy of Sciences Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable.
Those of you who were present for our Abundance discussion will know that Hickel and this book is referenced and Abundance is explicitly framed as an option in opposition to "degrowth". This will also then be a chance to compare and contrast these two approaches.
What Does Degrowth Mean: A Few Points of Clarification? - Hickel Article
https://blogs.law.columbia.edu/utopia1313/files/2022/11/What-does-degrowth-mean-A-few-points-of-clarification.pdfTurns Out GDP Doesn't Buy Happiness - NYT
https://archive.ph/NrFi7Oren Cass Interview - Example of Conservative Critique of How We Talk About Economic Growth
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-right-wing-economist-makes-his-case/id1081584611?i=1000712061927The Case for Degrowth
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2020/08/the-case-for-degrowthCentre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity - Degrowth Think Tank
https://cusp.ac.uk/ - Lecture Lounge Event - Shakespeare and Communitarian EthicsWolfe & Porter, Raleigh, NC
Our sister organization Lecture Lounge will be hosting a fascinating talk from Dr. Christoper Crosbie on Shakespeare and communitarian ethics.
*****This requires tickets, which can be purchased here.******
In this talk, Dr. Crosbie will discuss how Shakespearean drama works as a kind of laboratory for doing collective ethical thinking and how it helps shape communal identities and moral commitments. Shakespeare’s age has often been characterized as an era rife with suspicion and anxiety toward the unknown minds of others, a world where ill-intent, even treason, lurks just beyond view and warrants continual vigilance. By turning to communitarian philosophy, this talk will recover the Shakespearean stage’s crucial role in offering an alternative vision for civil society: one where graciousness and the making of allowances are held up as essential virtues for nurturing communal connections.
Dr. Christopher Crosbie is a Professor of English at NCSU whose research uniquely focuses on the intersection of philosophy and early modern drama, particularly Shakespeare. He is the winner of a Martin Stevens Award from the Medieval and Renaissance Drama Society and the J. Leeds Barroll Dissertation Prize from the Shakespeare Association of America.
Crosbie's Profile
https://chass.ncsu.edu/people/cjcrosbi/ - Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI - Karen HaoWeaver Street Market, Raleigh, NC
Come join Triangle Common Good in reading Karen Hao's Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI.
Karen Hao was one of the first journalists to cover OpenAI, writing a profile in 2020 for MIT Tech Review that would result in the company refusing to officially talk to her for three years. She is presently the leader of The AI Spotlight Series, a program with the Pulitzer Center that trains journalists on how to cover AI. Previously she was a senior AI editor at MIT Technology Review, Wall Street Journal correspondent, and fellow at Harvard and MIT.
Empire of AI is the culmination of her behind-the-scenes reporting on OpenAI since their inception and covers the leadership decisions and ideology involved in the operation of OpenAI and the AI industry more broadly. The book has gained a lot of positive attention since its release in May, including praise from a variety of outlets and individuals involved in covering the AI space.
Although we have talked about the philosophical limits of AI, and situated it in the history of labor automation, we have not begun to dig fully into the political, social, and material impacts of AI on our society right now. This will be a chance to start to talk about that.
Hao's 2020 Article on OpenAI
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/02/17/844721/ai-openai-moonshot-elon-musk-sam-altman-greg-brockman-messy-secretive-reality/Interview between Hao and Brian Merchant (author of our prior read, Blood in the Machine)
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/dismantling-the-empire-of-ai-withNew York Times Review
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/19/books/review/empire-of-ai-karen-hao-the-optimist-keach-hagey.html - How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy - Jenny OdellWeaver Street Market, Raleigh, NC
Come join Triangle Common Good for a discussion on How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell.
"This is not a book about putting your phone down. There are enough of those. This is more about questioning our current notions of productivity altogether. And...how to feel okay enough, for long enough, to figure out what it is that needs to be done". - Odell on the book in her Talks at Google presentation
Jenny Odell is an artist and collector whose work focuses on the relationship of observation and attention to our understanding of reality. She found herself questioning the value though of making art after the 2016 election and the Ghost Ship warehouse fire in Oakland (the latter of which claimed the lives of several of her friends). In an attempt to work through these questions, she began a habit of contemplation at at nearby rose garden. That experience, and working through what it ultimately meant to her, formed the catalyst for this book.
This book will be a chance to explore the values of contemplation and disconnecting our identities from our day jobs - a topic that we will return to more in upcoming readings.
Original Talk that Inspired Book
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNRqswoCVcMJenny Odell's Background
https://www.prhspeakers.com/speaker/jenny-odell