#58 friends > communities

For much of history, if you asked someone to define “community,” they’d give you an answer that involved a physical location — a school, synagogue, church. Today, the word community invokes something more intimate: identity. It’s not something we’re born into, but something we choose.

The creator economy is lonely. The freedom, the flexibility, the likes give us status, but a lingering sadness lurks.

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families.

Everywhere we go these days, there is talk about community - the developer SaaS tool, the soap brand, and virtually every product I interact with now prominently bears a Community link on their homepage. Personally, I don’t need more Slack groups or things to which I belong. What I want is deeper relationships with specific people where I can be mo... See more

But I do know that as the boundaries of life and work become more porous and businesses transform into webs of interrelationships between people, we need software that takes new assumptions about group structures to heart.

This isn’t about the Slack, Discord, Geneva or Circle groups you’re part of that start with a small version of a thing, but where the intention is to scale to hundreds or thousands of people that convene in a single public forum to discuss the topic du jour and get them to pay for the thing. This is about building the picks and shovels for intimate... See more

The devil is in the defaults - what we need next is tools that create new, digitally native formats for small groups of people to create wealth and form strong social bonds.

In Issue #51, I addressed the trust shift away from institutions and towards individuals. The reasons for this are varied — but tools have a lot to do with it. We didn’t have easy to use tools to make an independent career possible before, we do now.

This new thing acknowledges our primal drive for both autonomy and belonging. It is grounded in the well-being, both financial and emotional, of people, not a shallow culture that glorifies individualism while downplaying how the resulting self-reliance has deeply tarnished the human spirit.