I first heard about The Productivity Commune while half-asleep on my second cold brew at Blue Bottle. A designer I vaguely knew from Twitter (back when that was still a professional networking site rather than a digital trauma diary) was bragging about “living cognitively minimalist.”
Turns out, this meant he’d joined a Palo Alto “startup colony” where engineers lived together to “reduce cognitive load.” Imagine a WeWork, a dorm, and a cult all signed the same lease. The Commune’s premise was simple: if founders eliminated distractions like groceries, dating, and ethical decision-making, they could finally focus on “pure output.”
Meals were planned by consensus in Notion. Romantic pairings were handled through a dashboard called “Heartsync,” which matched members based on productivity compatibility (“your sleep cycle complements her shipping velocity”). One guy even wrote an API that automatically suggested breakups when a partner’s dopamine metrics dropped below baseline.
When I visited, the founder—an ex-Googler named Rowan—showed me around the house. Everyone wore identical neutral-toned loungewear and noise-cancelling headphones. “We’re not anti-social,” Rowan clarified. “We just prefer asynchronous intimacy.”
Dinner was a tray of Soylent-based casseroles. A projector displayed live mood data aggregated from everyone’s Apple Watches. Conversation topics were pre-approved via Slack poll. Someone mentioned they’d replaced their weekly therapy sessions with a shared Airtable called Emotional Burndown.
Halfway through, I asked what happened when people disagreed—say, on something moral, like whether to sell user data from their communal app to pay rent. Rowan looked offended. “We don’t argue,” he said. “We fork.”
By week three, a splinter commune had indeed formed three blocks away. They called themselves The Fork. Their Notion aesthetic was darker, moodier, allegedly more “emotionally agile.” The original Commune accused them of “betraying the mission,” and members began ghosting one another across shared Google Calendars.
I left around midnight as the group prepared for their nightly “moral sync,” where decisions were voted on via weighted tokens based on GitHub contribution history.
The last thing I saw was a whiteboard labeled Q3 Deliverables: Love, Morality, Purpose. Each box already had a checkmark.
The strange part isn’t that it failed—it’s that people still tour the place on weekends. Realtors now advertise it as “Palo Alto’s first cognitive commune.” The Notion templates are open source. You can download the one for “Shared Conscience (v3.4)”—if you don’t mind signing a data waiver.
Leave a Reply