Communities are not fungible
joanwestenberg.com
joanwestenberg.com
Because humans are mobile, the community changes as people, institutions, infrastructure, and industries come and go over time.
Even if a substantial fraction of the population never leaves the geographic boundaries that contain the community they were born in, their web of relationships constantly changes as old neighbors leave and new neighbors arrive, the prevailing economy improves or worsens, and waves of technological revolution like the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles washes over them.
Furthermore the community in which we live is only one of many communities we inhabit, such as school chums, work colleagues, church congregations and political movements, all of which are subject to the same phenomenon of perpetual change.
If every aspect of the community is impermanent, the community itself cannot be permanent, and I see no argument, let alone any technology other than encasing the community in lucite, capable of preserving it indefinitely.
Attempts to "preserve" a community, both online and offline, tend to end up preserving unhealthy power dynamics within the community as well, which would have been slowly replaced with something else if you had just let the community evolve (or disappear) naturally.
Often, members of the community who benefit from the status quo are the ones who cry the loudest for such preservation.
The same is true of individual humans. And yet, that is not a great argument for killing them.
But I also enjoy interacting with other people. It just takes the right 'community' to draw me out of my shell. There have been periods of my life when I was outgoing, because I was in the right environment (college, certain jobs, sports, etc.). Other periods allowed me to retreat into my own isolated world.
There just isn't a magic formula that produces the right kind of community that we want on demand.
But frankly it's best for everyone, the isolated computer age has made in person get togethers have friction when they historically have had zero friction and were just things we did along the way.
This is part of why I love going to NYC, as long as you understand and respect the local rules it's an incredibly positive, effortless social area, so much pleasant casual interaction.
Everything has to evolve to progress. We can’t just say protect community at all cost because it also means you must prevent expansion and improvement of the status quo of other quality of life metrics.
I think the authors point about history is a key element of this. If I can track how the community has evolved and changed, I can still identify that community in its current form as the sum of all its changes.
I’m not sure that holds true if an outside entity tries to dismantle and rebuild the existing community without the context of the history.
I kind of wonder if ecosystems might be a better analogy. although ecosystems can change and adapt, they can also die.
Yes, a community is always evolving, but there's a lower level culture, the textile as Westenberg puts it. Even though some people leave, their mark on the textile remains, and newcomers are got affected by that.
This is the same substance which makes "company culture", but applied in a different context. The people coming in are partly shaped by that while bringing in their own. This is what triggers that evolution. Same is true for leaving people. They'll mix what they bring to the new community they join. Oftentimes is has an effect, rarely it doesn't. As you said there are also other variables that the community can't control.
The beauty arises from that mix. The connections maybe temporary, but the effects are small, yet permanent and profound. That's the sediment which collects at the bottom, builds the history and shared values step by step.
It's not the change we shall be trying to snapshot and keep alive, but the meta-organism which happens to be and evolves over time. Nobody is trying to stop that change, but prevent the killing of these meta-organisms which forms the basic building block of a society. Because these structures becomes stronger and resilient as they evolve, regardless of who comes and goes.
Seeing the same people on your neighborhood even though you don't even talk to them creates an invisible mortar and layer of trust and safety. This is one of the most important things in a community.
You need to preserve that fabric. Not the people, connections and "state" of that community. As an extreme example, you can find this fabric between people even in the most "dangerous" neighborhoods. Because they are dangerous for outsiders. Not for the people who're living in that. There's always an equilibrium and a layer of authenticity even under all that violence and nastiness.
But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in the quiver of NIMBYs. In addition to environmental, economic, political reasons not to build something, also consider the cost to potentially breaking existing community bonds. We shouldn’t build new high density housing because the new residents will never be able to replicate the community of the previous low density single family home neighbourhood.
You can tell this is a NIMBY piece because it doesn’t touch on how to build new communities, just that existing ones exist and new ones can’t be built and even if they can they’ll be poor imitations of the old ones. So instead of trying to build new things, let’s preserve what we have already. It would have been more interesting and honest if it had explored the role of say, third spaces and how consciously creating the right conditions can lead to community formation.
After all, even the communities that exist today were empty land once upon a time, until we built the infrastructure and community within. If all we ever did was preserve we wouldn’t even have the communities today that we value so much.
How much are NIMBYs actually a problem these days? It seems to me that YIMBYs insisting on building anything, anything, anything at all, damn the cost, be it a privately developed five over one or a publicly funded ferris wheel downtown, are a much bigger issue now. We should be intentional about the communities we are developing (say, FUCKING PUBLIC HOUSING), and ideally not spoonfeeding capital more of our lifeblood as most YIMYs insist on
NIMBYs are doing great, I’d say.
Its quite simple to me. We the grown ups (together) are to facilitate housing for the kids. If we can't do that anymore we should ask ourselves why we don't want to do that anymore?
Quite interesting is how the (now proverbial) 40 year old isn't really attacking the problem.
I won't be around but I'm curious how their kids in turn will share the tiny room till 40.
NIMBYs, or just typical anglo incompetence? How can you tell the difference? It's easy to blame other people for systemic dysfunction.
I think you could ascribe this to either NIMBY or YIMBY harebrained thinking. We need a third option that's pro-human.
We need public fucking housing.
If you want to build public housing, only the NIMBYs would really oppose the idea.
YIMBY is the pro-private-development lobby, as best I can tell. PHIMBY is the term I've seen.
> If you want to build public housing, only the NIMBYs would really oppose the idea.
I suspect most who go by YIMBY would also oppose this.
Well I'm not sure what you're proposing but if it can be characterised as "mass public housing" it sounds like a terrible idea on the face of it, and most people would probably oppose it on that ground. But the YIMBYs would have to agree that you're allowed to try it if you want, otherwise they'd be NIMBYs, on the basis that they are telling other people they can't build on their land.
There's also overlap between YIMBYs are Georgists, they share some skepticism around private land ownership.
Sucking off developers removes all air from the room.
We've let the pendulum swing too hard and instead of a dictatorship of technocrats, we have a dictatorship of vetocrats. A relatively small group of people, sometimes one single individual, can make new construction more complicated than lunar exploration, and there are indeed neighbourhoods whose permitting process took longer than the entire Apollo project.
I live in a house built on a former brownfield, 32 semi-detached houses in total. The whole project was delayed by four years by one dedicated octogenarian who didn't like the idea of new people in "his" neighbourhood and pulled out all stops he could (or even couldn't).
Non-market housing will have extremely long wait times if there is not as much of it as the market demands.
And the NIMBYs and left-NIMBYs are still winning.
Relevant substack article (Towers Don't Cause the Housing Crisis):
https://open.substack.com/pub/shonczinner/p/towers-dont-caus...
Also, the article touches Moses, right, but it is about communities as a concept, with a heavy emphasis on online communities, where 'new things to buy' do not come at the expense of 'tearing down the old' - and where, when you tear down the old, behaviour patterns change. Take, for instance, the reddit re-design, which changed the page's culture. Or usage patterns of RSS post Google-Reader-shutdown.
My point stands: there are a million excuses not to build more. And when we make that choice not to build, the costs are invisible but they definitely exist. But hypothetical benefits are not as easy to point to as the costs of building.
I've witnessed it myself. For example, Commander Keen fans moving from various InsideTheWeb forums to a centralized phpBB following the ITW shutdown announcement in the late 1990s. I can't think of anybody that got lost, and it was actually an improvement because the new discussion infrastructure was better than it had been before. The community didn't scatter to the winds, far from it; it consolidated and grew.
Of course, such a situation is probably rarer with the enshittification these days, but it would be worth it to figure out when it works, too.
And history is replete with stories of groups who became most successful AFTER a migration, or at least were not so negatively affected by one.
Things can get better over time. When they don’t acknowledge this I can’t help but see the authors article as a dislike for any change of any kind.
I was once part of a "traveling" community that would sign up for every new platform. A good few tech bloggers among us. We would meet again and again but the community still failed long term despite everyone artificially trying to make it work. I got one good friend out of it, whom I never talk to.
I one time tried to root in a new city, I talk with everyone, buy cups of coffee for reluctant strangers, had a ton of fun and a ton of laughs but nothing permanent grew. I made two good friends whom I never talk to.
In my home town I must have 1000 people I almost never talk to. Adds up to a lot of talk. Familiar faces everywhere.
I don't quite know how to articulate it but I really feel the social fabric of the internet has been limited hugely by this, and it's hard to seperate what is fundamental about community migration with what's an outcome of this limited circumstance.
Do you know what that sounds like? The "feature" that lets some credit card subscriptions follow you across credit cards although you'd like to get rid of them thank you very much.
I don't want a global identity for all communities I'm part of. Joe from the bait and tackle group (i don't fish, is that a plausible fishing group name?) has no business knowing what games I play unless I personally tell him.
Moreover, that nice store that gave the bait and tackle group a 10% discount has ABSOLUTELY NO BUSINESS chasing me in MMO #245768.
It's a "need to know" basis, and I don't need to know your face, I don't need to know your gender, your age, where you are from, what job you have, I don't need to know your political affiliation, your religion, your other hobbies, what movies you watched, games you played, books you read, whom you follow, what communities you have joined. I don't need to know anything more than what the words in the post say.
When you "need" to know what is real you end up with social media like "BeReal" which is just an enormous privacy nightmare (requiring you to take photos at random times) just to make sure that people aren't editing photos or showing only the good aspects of their lives to the internet. Since when has "posting on the internet" become synonymous with a panopticon?
The memory of what the community was or had eventually vanishes. Jane Jacobs (referenced in the article) was the reason that I learned that the sidewalks in NYC's West Village weren't always so narrow. They were made narrow to accommodate more cars, which in some ways don't help geographic community strength.
Maybe you have to accept that communities are here and now, but they can dissolve at any time.
We’re not beholden to any commercial service and the mud is self-hosted by the community (generally the IFTF - IF Technology Foundation).
No one could disrupt our community the way Discord or Reddit might.
Create a user, login, find the Adventurer's Lounge and hang out. We don't actually build or play in the mud anymore. We use the channel system to talk about "stuff and things" and really not a ton about IF anymore. A lot of politics these days.
The most recent discussions were on:
#sci/med/health/health #alt/conspiracy #misc/politics/gayrights #alt/animals/chickens #misc/cars #misc/AI #tech/.../programming
What then is an effective model for a community? In "Twitter And Teargas", Zeynep Tufecki argued that the community afforded by Twitter was unable to effect long term, substantial change and therefore Arab Spring is now a footnote. Twitter affords flash mobs.
That concept - affordance - provides a hint for a model of communities. The obvious question to a hacker is "what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?".
Another insight is that the afforded mechanisms determine the community. This is really a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hyptothesis. From "your language determines what you can think" to "your social mechanisms determine your community". Roughly.
Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your language prevents you from thinking some things. So one could try to understand what "following" as a social mechanism prevents prevents?
Out of this kind of analysis emerges a different take on communities all together. For the hacker in us, John Holland's "Hidden Order" provides a generalized model that can be used to at least create a pseudo model for creating a simulation of the community mechanism.
Although John Holland talks about Complex Adaptive Systems, I personally find "Gestalt" a less cumbersome and effective term. A gestalt is something greater than the sum of it's parts and that can only be true(ish) when the parts interact. So entities + rules + message bus => Gestalt. For ants this is {ants + ant behavior + pheromone trails } => ant colonies. One could conjecture that for humans this could be {people + behavior + money } => economies. Or more cynically => corporations.
The complexity and emergent behavior of the {rules + message/bus part} part is probably best revealed by Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".
This is an incredibly important talking for our time. What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?
[edit: forgot the Wolfram reference. Apologies to SW for missing this wonderful work.]
I'm taking this analogy for myself :)
> what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?
In my experience over the last year, these things are true...
First, in-person interaction is strictly better than digital. You can meet lots of people digitally and talk to them in bed, but _interacting_ with a given person face-to-face means you can do any digital interaction, plus have very high-bandwidth communication, and also share papers. (I love paper. It's not obsolete if you know what a Pareto frontier is.) This is something that many people understand intuitively but it took me a while to quantify it.
Second, digital (text) communication affords bickering. In the best case, if I'm DMing a friend and we disagree about some political point, it will make the conversation awkward. If I'm in a big group chat, it can drag people into a dogpile. It's an emotional drain and nobody really likes it. And it doesn't happen nearly as much in person. Even with the exact same people. Even I am nicer and more patient in person. And being able to physically leave and see someone later is a nice option that digital spaces (even Signal) don't afford. They only understand permanent blocks and not just "Tell me your dumb take another time."
Third, you can just say "I'm trying to build community and make friends, can I introduce you to some people you might like?" and in the right context and framing, it can sort of work. I am still learning this skill.
Fourth, and I almost forgot - A _huge_ amount of nonverbal communication comes down to trust and respect, especially respecting other people's time. Did you call a 50-person meeting where 1 person is yammering about some bikeshed bullshit? Everyone hates that. Are you talking to someone one-on-one but they still won't give you a turn or ask you anything about yourself? They might be a good person but they're gonna be hard to get along with if they keep that up. Did you send someone a blog post that takes 5 minutes to read? And they didn't ask for it? They aren't gonna read it. I wouldn't read it. You would have more luck reading it out loud to them in person because it shows that you are both respecting each other's time. Otherwise you are assigning homework and asking their attention without paying your attention to them. I can't name a person who likes that.
And the insight about meetings brought back memories of some horrendous meetings. At software companies. OMG. But very funny very long after the fact. Good points all. Trust, respect, reputation.
Last time I looked, Sapir-Whorf is almost universally discredited among linguists and cognitive scientists.
The wikipedia summary:
"The hypothesis is in dispute, with many different variations throughout its history. The strong hypothesis of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, is that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and restrict cognitive categories. This was a claim by some earlier linguists pre-World War II since then it has fallen out of acceptance by contemporary linguists. Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a weaker version of linguistic relativity that a language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions, without strictly limiting or obstructing them. "
Here are some question for you: can you think of any things you cannot think of in your language? Hints. Beethoven, Van Gogh, 7. Can a democracy evolve from FaceBook? What kind of political system can evolve from FaceBook? Is there a language for Democracies? The important thing is not the answer, but the thinking.
Lots of poetry makes no sense if you consider it to be a series of words to be literally interpreted according to a grammar rules and a dictionary. But it can often hint at meanings and ideas that can't be expressed directly.
Of course, there are some things that always remain that are harder to get rid of. That's not "lack of language preventing you from thinking things", but rather "assumptions so deeply built into language that it is hard, though perhaps not impossible, to escape them".
Human communities (even digital ones) ultimately have the character of an ecological system IMO (albeit in a more allegorical sense). What the author calls fungibility I might call conservation; weird Twitter accounts "migrating" to Bluesky is sort of like pandas surviving primarily in zoos. Some element of the original system is kept, but ultimately the "conservation" is more like "recreation" or "homage" rather than truly freezing the system in amber. Does that mean that it's futile to try? Or is there some sense in which we can have meaningful translation of the relationship web from one medium to the next? Maybe we don't even care about maintaining the system; if it's just the biodiversity we prize then maybe pandas in zoos forever is enough.
I don't think this is adding anything new to what the author is saying per se, but I find the parallels interesting to muse about.
Despite humans being a natural part of our planet, and thus an end to an ecosystem could be considered natural in some way, we are unique in our ability to challenge and question our natural ways. Maybe we should be exempting ourselves from the natural order of things and working to allow the natural course of an ecosystem to die out on its own. Then we have the ability to inhabit and change without having destroyed in the process.
Idk, additional things to muse on.
I see the same value in community, especially as an immigrant helping other immigrants. Someone arriving in a new country is much more likely to be happy and successful if they quickly find a community there. Communities hold so much knowledge that is freely shared but rarely written down. Think immigrants helping each other navigate the unwritten immigration office policies and surfacing knowledge that is invisible to locals, let alone LLMs.
I've been thinking about building an intentional community for years, mostly to surface that knowledge. Currently it's all happening in private groups on a dying Meta property. Previously it happened on a forum that unceremoniously went dark.
But I am afraid that all of this will be in vain, and that the age of small forums is long gone.
Saying economics doesn’t model community is a bit like saying physics doesn’t model color because some models ignore wavelength variation. It depends which models you’re looking at and what their purpose is. There is substantial economic research on: Social capital (e.g., Putnam, though he’s political science adjacent; economists like Glaeser formalize it) Network effects and network structure Repeated games and reputation Religious participation and club goods (Iannaccone’s work is central here) Identity economics (Akerlof & Kranton) Trust and informal institutions Household bargaining models Matching theory, where who you match with specifically matters
I think the fact that communities are not fungible is frankly obvious. Fact is communities do die, and sometimes there are long run benefits to consider.
The challenge is actually nurturing and valuing community which this post doesn't actually grapple with.
E.g. the problem with Robert Moses wasn't just development. It was the style of development which was inherently anti-community. Nurturing a community requires common space where people bump into each other harmlessly. Highways dividing neighbourhoods, for people in their private cars to get to neighbourhoods with no commercial life and large setbacks between homes.
It's not that Robert Moses didn't realize community isn't fungible. It's either that he didn't realize how bad it would be for community or that he just didn't value community in the first place.
That being said, I am guilty of helping building Zig communities on Discord, but in my defense none (literally none) of the FOSS alternatives was good enough at the time. And I'm also not really happy with plenty of the newer ones.
I'm now working on my own take of what an open source Discord alternative should look like and I plan to move away from Discord by the end of the year. You can find it on codeberg, it's called awebo, I'm intentionally not posting a link since these are super early days.
As of today, there just doesn't seem to be any good simple forum software. They all seem to need quite a bit of upkeep.
That is what "free" means.
When it comes to physical communities (e.g. neighborhoods), I think about some neighborhoods in São Paulo that are being destroyed by buildings and construction sites everywhere [1]. So many neighborhoods full of stories and friendships and people who took care of each other, now becoming part of this massive verticalization, speculation and isolation. Neighbors have to leave due to construction companies' harassment. The ones that decide to stay have to live without their friends around, in neighborhoods that grow more dangerous, with worse traffic, with less small businesses and without knowing who are their new neighbors (which aren't even long term living). Their houses look exactly like Carl Fredricksen's house from Pixar's Up.
When it comes to digital communities, I can only be reminded of how Orkut and MSN defined lots of adolescences in Latin America. Orkut literally had the concept of communities, where people gathered around similar interests (just as the early web's forums). I made a lot of friends in Orkut and MSN Messenger, some of them are still my friends after more than a decade. Facebook tried to recreate the idea of communities (with their groups), but Facebook is pretty much dead for younger people. And Instagram is just so isolating. It has a whole lot of standardized and algorithmically curated content that alienates you from other human beings.
I believe the reason why Orkut (owned by Google) was killed was that they wanted more users, maybe to compete with Facebook. But Orkut was too localized, it basically talked to Brazil and some other countries in Latin America, and India, where it was created. After killing Orkut, Google invested a lot on Google+ (do you remember that fiasco??).
Discord WILL disappear at some point and millions of people will lose their communities.
I can try to think of a simple scenario. For whatever reason, a user may not be as active in the new platform as they were on discord. This could alter the community dynamics. On a bigger scale this could have visible effects in the actual community.
To be clear, I am not advocating in favor of staying on discord. I just find the concept of community building interesting.
Online communities can rebuild quickly are more resilient in a sense e.g. Digg to Reddit migration.
If some social media website has no community, and has only negative effects for its users, but makes money, that is a positive outcome for its owners.
It's a net negative for society perhaps, but the owners don't have to care about that part.
There are so many people on the web who I probably won't meet but I feel close to because of years of interactions - the most valuable kind of community, and available once you discover a few hundred or more contacts.
Nothing particularly wrong with platforms as long as there are always 'plan B' replacements, and of course not too much value is placed anywhere out of our direct control.
Then I saw the footer, with other blinking cursor and a scrolling line thrown in for good measure. Awful design.
Out with this garbage. Defund the bullies.
I’m here for the project blogs, and news but yeah I’m tired of the best-practice evangelists.
People who are from the same community tend to settle in particular areas and I think that is what the author is getting confused by.
Also many people in the developed world don't really have any community that they're a part of at all.
If you're interested in learning more about this you can look up the phrase "covenantal vs majestic community".