Democracy needs better infrastructure.
Public Mesh is an independent platform, based in Valencia, for thinking about that infrastructure and learning how to sustain it.
What we share depends on things we rarely see.
A square where you can no longer stay without buying something. A group of neighbours relying on a social network whose rules change without warning. A city council that contracts an AI system without being able to see how it decides.
None of these looks like a democratic decision, and all of them are. Life in common depends on places of encounter, habits of trust, civic organisations and the technology all of this runs on. Whoever owns that infrastructure decides what we can do together.
Public Mesh exists to make it visible, to argue over who governs it and to share tools with the people who sustain it every day.
First in the open. Then, slowly.
- Many ideas start as series in the Journal and only later become notebooks and books.
- We work in Spanish, English, Italian and French, because these questions are not asked in a single language.
- We sell directly: the shop, the classroom and the mailing lists are our own, and what you buy here sustains the catalogue.
- We do not track people who visit the website: its pages use no cookies, and all we count is visits. Only the course classroom uses a cookie, to keep your session open and make it easier to use.
We are not starting from zero.
Before Public Mesh there was Think Commons (2011–2019), with its open live sessions on the commons and collective creation, and Urbano Humano (2006–2023). Both remain in our catalogue, in the archive.
We keep them because the question is still open: who will sustain what allows us to live in common?