Community

Human lives in communities. We join them, we sometimes leave them. Social networks should only be an underlying infrastructure to support our communities. Social networks are not our communities. Social network dies. Communities migrate and flock to different destinations.

Many people have long wondered why the Grateful Dead succeeded in creating a world of Deadheads. It turns out that’s because the people who allocated tickets understood familiar strangers. If you bought a ticket for a Grateful Dead show in Miami, they kept a record of who you were seated near. Then, if you bought a ticket for the Nashville show,... See more

Community is the currency of the new internet and memberships is how you’ll get paid.

There are always going to be people who believe they don’t really need to depend on others, or want others to depend on them. And capitalism has produced more and more ways we can use money, rather than relationships, to solve our problems. It’s easier and easier to employ a courier, a therapist, a zero-hours contracted task-doer, rather than ask a... See more

Over the subsequent years, Feÿtopia evolved into a community of people who live at the castle in the ‘off season’, roughly November-April, for anywhere from a few days to the whole season. Community members are encouraged to co-create the experience of living at the castle: meals, parties, and improvements to the grounds can be planned by anyone.

Stop trying to make social networks succeed, stop dreaming of a universal network. Instead, invest in your own communities. Help them make long-term, custom and sustainable solutions. Try to achieve small and local successes instead of pursuing an imaginary universal one. It will make you happier.

It will make all of us happier.

That is to say, our social groups, tools, situations, and, more broadly, environment have always served as a cognitive extension, networking our individual minds, allowing them to spill into each other and share processing tasks as a group. It’s as though our brains are aware of their own biohardware limitations. They naturally seek to form rings... See more