What follows is an interview with Tallon (founder of Otherwise Society), conducted in August 2025 by Daniel Baca of West Sound Democratic Socialists. An edited version of this interview was featured in the September 2025 edition of Kitsap Smokestack.

I sat down with Tallon, the founder of the Otherwise Society, to talk about the origins of the community space and how it relates to mutual aid. Otherwise Society is one of the most exciting things happening in Kitsap right now. It’s a community building and mutual aid group with an alcohol free gathering space in downtown Poulsbo called the Commons. It’s friendly, it's inclusive, it’s punk, it’s the community that so many of us lack in this loneliness epidemic. (Tallon prefers ey/em pronouns. These pronouns are the singular version of they/them. They’re used by nonbinary people who want to bypass the plural vs singular confusion that they/them may cause.) Tallon grew up in Kitsap and recently returned to the county. Ey is a kind, creative, and knowledgeable person.

Otherwise Society Commons opened on Winter Solstice of 2024 and hosts monthly events including ecstatic dance, death cafe, tarot and astrology nights, game nights, film and concert screenings, community dinners, cafe hours, clothing swaps, Kitsap Psychedelic Society and West Sound Democratic Socialists of America.

D: Why did you start the Otherwise Society?

T: The primary impetus for this space (Otherwise Society Commons) 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 the primary mechanism. To me, both of those ideas are totally social constructs. They are not very good as a mechanism for human interactions.

In my life I was a chef for a long time. I was also a carpenter, so I spent a lot of time in people’s houses building or cooking things. That act of creative expression, of making something with my hands is the primary motivation for those jobs. I love making things. I love building things so I would spend time catering for a function. The rush of cooking food for 50 or 100 people and getting it out at the right time, designing the menu… I really loved it. This, for me, was all the motivation necessary, and it is an intrinsic (internal) motivation.

Then it would come time to send people the invoice. It felt like “here’s the only reason I did all of that”. The time leading up to it where I was either feeding them or working on their house felt like connecting. I feel like we were increasing our connection as human beings and the moment that I went to hand them an invoice, and they handed me money, it felt disconnecting.

So, I started to consider why that would be and did a lot of reading. I really love David Graeber, for example, and I started thinking of what the underlying symptoms of the problems that we face as humans are. Some people call it the meta-crisis: the interconnected web of crises that we are facing. One of my analyses is that the concept of ownership, that you can even own anything outright, lies at the core of the issues that we are facing. The idea that you could own a piece of land outright and completely ignore the fact that all the plants on that land are part of the broader ecosystem or biome. The air that is in the atmosphere above that land, there’s no disconnection from all other air that is on Earth. The water that falls on the ground and goes into an aquifer and flows underground. The idea that you can own that outright until it crosses some imaginary line on the ground seems faulty to me. The idea of ownership leads to the idea of property rights. There’s a house up the road that is completely covered in moss, hasn’t been maintained or anything done to it in more than a decade, maybe 20 years. It’s just rotting and about to fall off a bank. And that property has been owned by someone who has done literally nothing with it. It’s actually slowly decaying and being destroyed. And that is this right that is baked into the very origins of our economics. It’s the right of abusus. If you own something you can destroy it, even if it’s brand new. That right to destroy is completely disconnected from all the materials that were required to make that thing. All the labor, all the people that spent time creating that thing. We have encoded the right to completely destroy it, never use it for anything, put it in a storage unit. Completely legal. No Restrictions.

There's a thinker I really love, Daniel Schmachtenberger. He mentions that a whale swimming through the ocean is worth zero on humanity’s balance sheet but a dead one on a boat is worth millions. And that is a value system that is encoded into the core of how we organize ourselves currently.

This is all a very long way of saying that it seems to me that ownership and money are poor coordination mechanisms, so Otherwise Society is an attempt at coordinating as a community without those

Dr. Jason Hickel, a British anthropologist, came out with a paper last year that was a meta analysis of materials and energy use by humans. The conclusion was that for 30% of the materials and energy that we currently use as a species we could give every single person on Earth a decent standard of living. So that means we are currently wasting 70% to give maybe half the people on Earth a decent life. Many people would consider how we are currently living intractable, not optional, like “what else are we supposed to do?” So, you look at that paper and you wonder how anyone could look at that stat and be like “our current system is preferable.” Most people that are not sociopaths would say that a better future is possible, but no individual agent has the capacity.

For me it boils down to a coordination problem. And that’s why I really like the concept of Moloch. There was a blog post from 2014, written by Scott Alexander called “Meditations on Moloch”. Moloch is a personification (named after an ancient Yiddish god) of win/lose games or coordination failures. If you take the 30% example (above), most people would want that to be reality. If they could push a button and it was reality tomorrow most people would push that button. But they don’t actually have the agency to affect change in the direction of a future like that. And no individual does.

Moloch is that force, the “invisible hand” of coordination failure of win/lose games. For me this framing frees one up from needing to find someone to blame. Blaming people or entities neglects the underlying systemic problems. Even if we get rid of one company polluting our Earth, another company will show up in its place because there are incentives baked into our current human system for people or corporations to act in self-interested ways. And that is a coordination failure.

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 rent. And we are trying the best we can to have all the decisions we make be collective without having any kind of hierarchy or power structures and to actively figure out how to coordinate in a low stakes environment where we are just talking about having a gathering space, what event is going to happen on Saturday, how do we get people in and out.

D: It sounds like you’re trying to fill in the gaps that society has neglected. The West Sound DSA has a similar goal.

T: 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 there needing to be a transaction or ownership or liability. All these ways that everything in human life have been commodified. The Otherwise Society is kind of a distributed intentional community. We don’t live on the same property but currently we are sharing a living room and making decisions about it. There’s not really a limit to the ways that we can coordinate that not only prefigure a world that we would like to see but also make our lives right now better.

D: Do you feel like it’s going the way you envisioned it?

T: It’s growing much faster than I thought it would. The inspiration for me was for the growth to be organic and rhizomatic. There's a bamboo design on our coin, the Ought, which is a 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. Currently it’s a little like a benevolent dictatorship. I did a lot of heavy lifting and financially got it going. Every time that an event happens here that I have nothing to do, that the community chooses, I love it. It feels correct. It feels generative. It has grown faster than I thought it would, and it feels sticky. People come here for the first time and their reaction is most often “Awesome. I’m so glad this exists in my backyard”. A lot of times they are already thinking of ways to participate or other events they can come to. That’s very affirming to me. It’s been really exciting. It’s interesting how many groups there are out in the world meeting at the library or a pizza place because they have no other place to go. I just love that these different groups of people have a place with a low barrier of entry.

D: 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?

T: 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. You can drive by someone that is asking for money on the offramp and they’re just a separate person. There’s no connection as opposed to a nondual perspective, which tends to be a more eastern perspective. It’s not exclusively eastern, I would argue that Jesus taught nonduality and the mystic religions did as well. The ideas of collective action, mutual aid, and non-ownership are all nondual in my opinion. There are a lot of theorists that talked about why the dualistic version of Christianity paired so well with capitalism. They were and are almost like this binary star of power and control. I think the dualistic mindset is part of that separation and disconnection.

D: Nondualism reminds me of the writings of Ursula K. Le Guin who combines Jungian psychology and Taoism so well.

T: 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.

D: Why do you think this place attracts so many neurodivergent people?

T: A part of it might be that I am neurodiverse. I think it might just be that a lot of gathering spaces that are available to us in the world aren’t welcoming to us. They’re loud, people are drinking. It seems to me that neurodiversity and alcohol don’t mix very well.

There’s also something very low pressure and accepting. The first wave of people that started hanging out here were neurodiverse, so the culture is informed by that. It wasn’t explicitly on purpose. I mean I want this place to feel welcoming to everybody. Specifically, I would like this place to be welcoming to typically disenfranchised groups: neurodiverse people, queer people, and so it might’ve been mostly an unconscious shaping of this space. Neurodiverse people might also be more prepared to consider alternatives. Since they are already kinda living an alternative already. Especially in the last decade, people have become more aware of neurodiversity. I think that it’s easier for neurodiverse people to imagine a different kind of world just because of the way their minds work. Many of us have the capacity for hyperfocus and diving deep into topics.

D: What virtues do you find most important in your life?

T: Empathy. The ability to recognize ourselves in others and vice versa. When someone’s fucking up, being able to connect to the times when we fucked up in a similar way is important to me, maybe essential to an alternative way of being as human beings.

Curiosity as well. When someone is like “this is just the way it is.” I have always thought that it 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.

D: 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.

T: Raising 3 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. Whereas 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 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. The need for there to be transaction or ownership has been removed and there’s other motivating factors. 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.

D: 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 because of the culture, space, and hard work you’ve helped start.

T: 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 that 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. Like it’s a little bit of an antidote to sitting on your phone scrolling at home, that would 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.

Jamie Wheal talks about the three aspects of catharsis, ecstasis, and communitas which is a balance of things that we would like to get out of community. We’re having serious conversations here as often as we are dancing really hard. That feels really important to me. It has to be fun. Life is fun. Life in ancient villages was often fun. There was dancing and singing and art and mythmaking and creativity because for the most part you didn’t have to spend 40 or 50 hours a week toiling. Life was fairly straightforward. The Suquamish people had food everywhere and that’s why the art and canoe building traditions are so rich. That’s what humans want to do. We want to create more and more novel things. We want to create more complex myth and stories and sit around telling those stories. That’s fucking fun.

This project is partially inspired by the fact that we are on land that was held sacred by the Suquamish for thousands of years. This house, this building, was built by one of the first settlers who just sort of showed up and said, “guess what I’m gonna live here.” People have different stories about how friendly the Moe family was to the Suquamish tribe, but they were a logging family you know, they were clearcutting. This house is probably built out of those old-growth fir trees.

I would love this place to someday feel safe for tribal members to spend time in. It could be some very small way to invite the people that have stewarded this land for so long, especially after the murder of Stonechild Chiefstick on Front Street. It’s one of the reasons why there’s Salish inspired art on our coin. The art is by a nonnative carver named Duane Pasco who was married to a Suquamish tribal elder, Betty. Duane passed away last year, but Betty gave us permission to use the 8 interlinked salmon on the coin which felt appropriate to me. He was someone who spent his entire life celebrating the carving and art of the indigenous people of this place but wasn’t indigenous himself so using his art feels like a bridge. He was also a fluent speaker in Chinook Jargon, the PNW pidgin language. It was used as a bridge, as a way to communicate between tribes and between natives and nonnatives. I’m obviously not native but it seems to me that the people who were able to steward this land without destroying it, without stripping it of its gifts for so long likely didn’t really believe that you could own land. Didn’t believe that you could own anything. In my opinion we’re borrowing everything.

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.

Interviewed by Daniel Baca of the West Sound Democratic Socialists https://westsound.dsachapters.org/