I sat down with Tallon, founder of the Otherwise Society, to talk about the origins of their community space and how it relates to mutual aid. It’s a community-building group with an alcohol-free gathering space in downtown Poulsbo they call the ‘Commons.’ It’s friendly, it’s inclusive, it’s punk, it’s a community that so many of us lack in this loneliness epidemic. Tallon, a kind, creative, and knowledgeable person, grew up in Kitsap and recently returned to the county. The Otherwise Society Commons opened on Winter Solstice of 2024, hosting monthly events including ecstatic dance nights, death cafe conversations, tarot and astrology nights, game nights, film and concert screenings, community dinners, cafe hours, and clothing swaps. They also host other community groups like the Kitsap Psychedelic Society and West Sound Democratic Socialists of America at the waterfront location in Poulsbo. [Edited for length & clarity.]
DANIEL: Why did you start the Otherwise Society? TALLON: The primary impetus for this space was that I wanted a community living room, a third place that wasn’t a bar. I was also interested in building relationships with other people that didn’t have money or ownership as their primary mechanism. To me, both of those ideas are totally social constructs. They are not very good as a mechanism for human interactions. Otherwise Society is an experiment that poses the question: “What if we coordinated with other priorities and without ideas of ownership and transaction?” Everything that we do here is 100% sliding scale. People donate what they can to keep the lights on and pay the rent…
It sounds like you’re trying to fill in gaps that society has neglected. The West Sound DSA has a similar goal. It feels to me that this experiment is prefiguring a world that most people involved in DSA would like to see. A world where most things are like a library instead of a business. I think mutual aid is human nature. It’s just that many of the structures in the dominant paradigm don’t allow for bandwidth or the freedom to aid each other without the need for a transaction, or ownership, or liability… all these ways that everything in human life have been commodified…
Do you feel like it’s going the way you envisioned it? It’s growing much faster than I thought it would. The inspiration for me was for growth to be organic and rhizomatic. There’s a bamboo design on our coin, the Ought, which is our local currency. Once you plant bamboo, assuming there’s enough rain, you can’t stop it. Not only can you not stop it, but you also don’t have to sit there babying it, making sure that it’s perfect; it just goes. That’s how I would like for Otherwise Society to be. I would just like this place to be its own entity. As soon as I am just another member of Otherwise Society, the better for me. I did a lot of heavy lifting and financially got it going. Every time an event happens here that I have nothing to do with, that the community chooses, I love it. It feels correct. It feels generative..
Mainstream society seems to have a puritanical bent to it. It views strangers as negative first before positive. Would you say that Otherwise Society is an experiment in proving that humans are mostly good? Definitely. I suppose the name, Otherwise, is a nod to that. To me, it gets spiritual somewhat quickly. Duality vs. nonduality is pretty central to what we are dealing with here. A dualistic world view separates you from nature and other people, there’s no connection, as opposed to a nondual perspective. The ideas of collective action, mutual aid, and non-ownership are all nondual in my opinion…
Nondualism reminds me of the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin who combines Jungian psychology and Taoism so well. Le Guin and Jung are hugely influential to me. “The Dispossessed” is one of the only truly protopian novels. It’s neither utopian nor dystopian. It shows two planets that took two different paths and forces the reader to consider different aspects of those societies. I don’t think she’s offering a choice between them. Her short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is also hugely influential for me. Protopian stories are like a process or trajectory as opposed to a destination. It’s moving in a direction, towards more human thriving, peace, and abundance. I think Le Guin is among the greatest writers that America’s ever produced.
What virtues do you find most important in your life? Empathy. The ability to recognize ourselves in others and vice versa… Curiosity as well. When someone is like ‘this is just the way it is,’ I have always thought that doesn’t seem correct, that this is the way it has to be. It seems like a convenient end to the conversation. There’s a book by James Carse called “Finite and Infinite Games” that’s influential on me. The gist of it is that a finite game is a game that you compete at and once there’s a winner the game is over. An infinite game is where the point of the game is to continue. So, I think that curiosity, desire to keep exploring, as opposed to arriving at some destination and being done, is really important and informs the desire to try to manifest something better than our current options.
This reminds me of Self Determination Theory. It describes that humans are born curious and the way to keep that curiosity going is with intrinsic motivation held together by autonomy, relatedness, and competence. Raising three children with an unschooling type of education has helped me realize how much better intrinsic motivation is than extrinsic motivation or punitive actions. Punitive actions such as if you don’t do the right thing, we punish you or charge you a fine, are really poor motivators. A whip is a much worse motivator than a home cooked meal. When I’m having conversations about this kind of thing it often reminds me of the movie Monsters Inc. where at the end, they realize that laughter has 10x more energy than screams… If a child discovers that they love reading, you allow them the autonomy to keep reading more and more. There’s no end to the amount of motivation that they have. Opposed to having them sit in a class and be like: ‘You need to read this for the next thirty minutes exactly, because if you don’t, we will punish you with a bad grade and all those grades cumulatively will make it so you can’t get a good job and get money.’ All those structures seem like terrible motivators. And this experiment (The Otherwise Society) feels like a completely different kind of motivation. And that’s what I want it to be. I want it to be almost this internal pull. Motivations like: This community is something that I love when I spend time here. I go home feeling calmer. I make deep connections with people. I’m able to be vulnerable. All of that is available without transactions being part of it. With all of us collectively saying we’re all going to be doing what we can to keep the lights on, but between us, there’s not really any transactions happening… I love seeing that organically happen. In this space, the reason people are here is because they want to be here. The reason they are connecting with people is because they want to connect with them. There’s something about that collective building of trust that is very powerful. It has a lot of capacity for action.
You were saying that punitive action isn’t effective. But the way I’ve thought about it is that punitive action is very effective immediately, but it’s traumatizing, and over time it causes resentment. Whereas, positive reinforcement usually takes a lot more effort, in my opinion. But it’s worth it in the long run. It creates an antifragile situation. The Otherwise Society feels like an antifragile community already. You’ve made a fast track for people to be authentic and explore themselves intrinsically… It’s an experiment in anarchy (or mutualism if that’s an easier word), disguised as a social club. It’s not like I’m not happy to talk about the sort of anarchistic underpinnings of this project with anyone who wants to, but there’s lots of people who just like going to events. And if that’s all that it is, that’s fine. But the likelihood increases that they go to that event and have a deep or vulnerable conversation with someone and go home feeling more human. It’s like a little bit of an antidote to sitting on your phone scrolling at home. That could lead them to come more often or come to a NonViolent Communication event, or a DSA event, or Kitsap Psychedelic Society… Something they may not consider otherwise. Disconnection, the sort of thread of this conversation, is mostly an illusion, mostly a human construct, and we can make choices every day that are either connecting or disconnecting. Ownership is inherently disconnecting. ‘I own something, you don’t.’ This space and this community, nobody owns it. We are all temporary stewards of it, and I think that is more aligned with the nature of reality. To most observers, this experiment feels very innocuous. Just some neurodiverse people hanging out chatting probably doesn’t feel like a threat to the status quo, but it is. It prefigures a world that doesn’t require all those structures of ownership and transaction and hoarding. I’m happy about where the Otherwise Society is and how it’s growing, and I would love eventually for there to be more of them. Another aspect of the project is to figure out the minimal amount of things that need to be sorted out to the point where we could hand this idea off to other people who want this in their neighborhood and experiment with what works. Some of that is an analysis of how it’s happening. It’s almost like this live experiment that we are watching in real time. Like, what happens when there’s a little bit of conflict? How do we make decisions together? We’re building the plane while we are flying it. // Interview by Daniel Baca of the West Sound Democratic Socialists.
Find more otherwise at otherwisesociety.org
