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we underappreciated people’s attachment to place. We underappreciated the necessity of community. I think now we’re suffering the consequence of that with a lot of communities destroyed—many of them now feeling they don’t have a place in a modern economy, and don’t have a sense of identity.

ro khanna • Ro Khanna makes the case for digital public space

“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature that interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”

Jessica C. Flack • Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass)

Social ties require a lot of effort to establish and maintain, especially across long distances, and people are unlikely to expend all that energy unless they think they need to. People who are self-sufficient and fairly sure of their economic future tend to maintain strong social ties with a small number of people, usually people very much like

David W. Anthony • The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

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What if the loneliness crisis is simply a feature of liberal democracy in a market economy? One corner of an impossible trilemma. words h/t @Scholars_Stage https://t.co/JlXwTIBLGg

Tina He

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Just a moment...

bookshop.org

American communities founded on intense associational activity now have a civic participation vacuum. Associations once mobilized their constituents for specific improvements. Now only local governments -- often elected by tiny numbers of voters, or self-appointed small business groups -- serve as public custodians. While there have always been... See more

Tal Shachar • Main Street Bets

not because he is inferior to the authorities which conduct it, or that he is less capable than his neighbor of governing himself, but because he acknowledges the utility of an association with his fellow-men, and because he knows that no such association can exist without a regulating force.

Alexis de Tocqueville • Democracy in America, Volume I and II (Optimized for Kindle)

Rediscovering the Pleasures of Pluralism: The Potential of Digitally Mediated Civic Participation — Digitalist Papers

Alex Pentland digitalistpapers.com

Americans used to live within “place-based networks” of clubs, churches, schools, commerce, and recreation that overlapped, wrapping individuals in social support. Local networks protected individuals from isolation and loneliness.

Those networks have largely disappeared, replaced by networks based outside the local community. We shop and interact... See more