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Comment by bertjk | Hacker News Reader

I kind of agree with you, but what does positive "coordinated social change" look like? I can only think of negative ones, like those that occurred with radical political changes, or else explicit/thinly-veiled marketing campaigns for consumer goods..

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Redesigning neighborhoods to be walkable not driveable. Rezoning so that more businesses can open near residential areas, so people can walk or bike to work, walk to get groceries, etc. More people around leads to more serendipitous interactions, maybe improved safety.

I guess that's not really coordinated social change, but I think tweaks to the context in which we live can have huge, positive social impacts.

There's a nice virtue to this, also. Build walkable and bike-able places and you're building public spaces to be shared. If you only embrace a car-driven model of development, "public" spaces are to be competed for (e.g. you stole my parking spot, you cut me off, you're in front of me driving too slowly, etc.)

Stop focusing on the negative.

"Redesigning neighborhoods to be walkable." Full stop.

In my opinion this includes /planning/ for Parking to have it's own space, preferably /under/ everything. (You don't have to dig down, it's an option build up to begin with!)

Also, relegate /any/ smoking to only designated shelters with negative draw and scrubbed exhausts. It should be a 1 day's pay fine + 4 days of community service for a violation.

If you move to an area like this right now, you’ll find that the “serendipity” is just people asking you for money.

Radical political changes were universally negative? Many of those radical movements had extremely positive effects, such as labor laws and civil rights. These movements were radical partially because of the tremendous material support in keeping the status quo.

That's a great question and I've been trying to figure it out myself for a while. I oscillate between "technology has given us new ways to connect and we just need to leverage them" and "technology broke our existing coordination mechanisms and replaced them with something fundamentally worse for human well-being."

I do think a backlash is already underway against Facebook, at least. This is a step in the right direction, as social media seems to intensity loneliness. The internet can be a tool for community-building -- I see other comments mentioning meetup.com, and I've met many people through Twitter and other online social channels -- but none of the solutions (by my estimation) seem quite there yet in terms of helping people find groups that might suit them and providing a means for keeping people together long-term.

I actually think the most important solutions rest primarily in land use. The "new urbanism" ideas of walkability and mixed-use buildings seem to encourage more casual interactions (which ultimately becomes deeper interaction over time) as people live their lives. On the other hand, I live in Manhattan and I'm still lonely. It's hard to say what will work.

Well, we wash our hands a lot more often now than we did before the germ theory of disease caught on.

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