I asked just the title of this post to someone near me, who first laughed and said “ha ha not possible,” and when I said “no, really”, they came back with “community”. I asked for more details and it went something like this:
Community is the everyday practice of negotiating a positive outcome with people who aren’t just like you. When you do this regularly with people around you, you learn that they are people and that they have your back. Think churches, block parties, school boards. When community is our primary source of human interaction, we build this muscle of cooperation-by-default because that’s the social expectation, and because successful cooperation has positive feedback cycles that produce immediate returns.
We suck at this today: our communities are online,
national and personalized. There’s no longer a forcing function to be nice to / learn to communicate with our neighbors.
Online communities compete with offline communities for our limited capacity to have meaningful interactions with people.
And like the private sector drains away the smart people who are motivated by money, internet drains away the smart people who are motivated by prestige.
I asked just the title of this post to someone near me, who first laughed and said “ha ha not possible,” and when I said “no, really”, they came back with “community”. I asked for more details and it went something like this:
Community is the everyday practice of negotiating a positive outcome with people who aren’t just like you. When you do this regularly with people around you, you learn that they are people and that they have your back. Think churches, block parties, school boards. When community is our primary source of human interaction, we build this muscle of cooperation-by-default because that’s the social expectation, and because successful cooperation has positive feedback cycles that produce immediate returns.
We suck at this today: our communities are online, national and personalized. There’s no longer a forcing function to be nice to / learn to communicate with our neighbors.
Online communities compete with offline communities for our limited capacity to have meaningful interactions with people.
And like the private sector drains away the smart people who are motivated by money, internet drains away the smart people who are motivated by prestige.