I was in a Twitter space. The topic was community building and third spaces. Didn’t have enough time to wait for an opportunity to speak, so I’m putting my musings on the topics here.
The narrative was simple - it used to be good, then it got worse, we need to return in an innovative way. It was said that cafes used to be such a public third space in the US, and bars in the UK, but now Starbucks moves more and more to pick-up orders and now wanting people to stay and chat. How could this be remediated? Through markets, of course , with new third space businesses, Starbucks’ case was phrased as a third space business moving to a different business model.
Big emphasis was on the new wave of third space businesses, online first. The idea was that since couples meet now predominantly online and then move to irl meetings, the same will happen to communities. Examples cited were vibecamp and some party in SF that one of the speakers attended with his online friends. Hope was expressed that it’s happening and will get better.
Now there are many special types of communities, such as monastic or military, but these are not for the typical person as we think of it. The discussion was focused on places for average members of the laptop class, and I will limit this post to this as well.
I will discuss 3 reasons why community creation and maintenance is different than it used to be, and then shortly about possible solutions.
1 The need for community
The community itch - we’re built to be social - Aristotle said that much. Steven Reiss’s 16 desires theory has some entries about this - ‘social contact’ and ‘social status’.
The drive for community is only one of many human needs. Incentives can be set up against this, such as with covid lockdowns. Many fandoms have been roughed up by this, but many see a continuing worsening trend. Let’s just remember the famous 2000 Robert D Putnam’s book, Bowling Alone.
I haven’t read the book, but the activity itself sounds like a shared hobby, possibly bleeding over inter-family relations, or work. There are different meanings of this ‘community’, from hobby ‘we meet once a month for activity and beer’, through economic ‘weekly beer and bowling with colleagues’, to hosting BBQ with neighbors to living in a commune sharing some expenses, or even all of income. The first one is soy, the last one is longhouse, the sweet spot for a free man is probably in the middle.
We could go deeper into this, but that’s not the key now. Let’s talk about our choices of leisure. From the reception of the book we can see that the issue of “individualization of leisure” could have been since the radio in the 1920s. And I don’t want to fall into the presentism trap here, overestimating how special our times are. But this individualization is huge. It was to be to listen to music you had to be there live, which for economic reasons implied a big gathering. Later you have phonographs, where consumption could be in solitude. It is here that we encounter a big difference from the modern experience. Then you had to buy the song physically from someone and materially obtain information that something exists. Now all that information is received through news or music app - the discovery step is hugely individualized.
> Ok but we have moved these online, right? It’s a decent substitute?
Not quite.
2 Logocentrism exposing us to brainworms
Doing all that stuff digitally is logocentric. It is focused on words, be it audio or text - video being the most excusable. Group dynamics irl present much richer information environment. Because of this the harmonizing process is more organic. In a group setting only a few people can talk at a time, but still all are interacting nonvocally. Yes on social media likes form an analog to that, but force the feedback channel to the speaker to conform to a PC format. Slight indication of losing interest is hard to express online. The feedback is more coarse, with engagement the main and the most accessible metric, with less insight in what mood it is. Finally in person activities like dancing most fully use the nonverbal communication so losing out on these is a big one. I really emphasize the nonverbal-logocentric axis here. Language is one of the latest developments in humans, it’s the most fault prone of the systems in human psyche, vector for mindworms and weapon for the high-verbal IQ cult leaders.
To sync in a nonverbal way is the art of the dancer, of the fellow mariner you’re fixing a shipping vessel with, or of interracial seducer catering to sex tourists. That art is being lost through globalization of English and loss of offline spaces.
We are literally neurologically different from our ancestors a couple of decades ago for whom physical work in cooperation was taking most of their time. That is if you had not rich ancestors. Of course some heritages have been detached from physical work like this for centuries, so I don’t expect everyone to get this.
Lastly we have the question of social intercourse - who is rent-free in our heads?
3 Egregores, parasocial relationships - rent free!
One case can be where you’re thinking about a friend, family member or lover. That is a social relationship. Another case when you’re thinking about characters from a book, TV show or a youtube channel. That is a para-social relationship.
I’m not saying such relationships are bad. It is a very uniting factor for a group to have one tulpa running in the heads of everyone - an egregore. Putting kings face on currency is a Lindy way to that.
Benedict Anderson in his famous 1983 book Imagined Communities describes how novel as a genre created a feeling of simultaneity and commonality with people across whole nations. People reading even fiction set in the capital of the country could then visit it and feel connected with the epic characters in it. Notabene Greek Mythos must have worked in a similar way.
Now I’d like to take a step further. We’re fed stories from everywhere and then project them onto reality. If most stories feature striving from oppression we will see oppression in situations and narrations much more often. Now the economics of scale and smaller size of countries, say in 1914 let there to be less books out there. Young Europeans enlisting to fight saw in faces of other men in the queue people with similar struggles, ambitions and ideals. Yes, some were more Communist or something - but whatever that was, you knew about this and could orient in a clear way towards it.
Prismatic tessellation
I call this effect “prismatic-tessellation”. Prism is from light and reflection, tessellation is when you have a geometric figure that can fill a plane. If your society is prismatically -tessellated, you will have a ready story for any person you see around. That story does not have to be positive, but it is defined - you see the same archetype reflected. Let me give some examples. If you have children, you react more viscerally to seeing news about child sex trade and abuse than someone without. If you’ve never lost a family memeber to gang violence, or car crash, you prismatically reflect these experiences less. Now the remainder not covered by the primsatic-tesselation - the imperfections in the pattern happen due to lack of memetic power - is when the reality is too complex to reflect in a couple o fo simple memes. Checkout this post for more information on the concept of memetic compression.
Now arguably all the trad societies used to do this. This tessellation does not need to be egalitarian, it could be fractal. We can see the Chinese 5 relation tessellating the basic 5 social relations both horizontally AND vertically, with the Emperor being the Patriarch - Father of the nation.
Now what happens if you are not feeling that tesselation? You’re alienated. Marxist alienation-from-labor was about lack of reflection of laborer-product relation in memes as much as prior to the industrial revolution. But this alienation is making you uncaring and causing you to be socially insensitive. Now that is different from having a small moral circle. Two people with equally small moral circles will behave differently in societies with different degree of prismatism.
Now prismatism was low in feudal ages among most of the population where village life was the main focus of memes. Yes elites traveled broadly, freemasons built great churches, but that’s just the urban elite. From this and some insights from the Imagines Communities we can see that prismatic-tesselation tends in the mid-term to overlap with the limits of a cultural entity, most often nation.
Prismatism rose with print and mass culture of novels in the 18th and 19th centuries. That was the peak of the reach of prismatism. Now the books and travels there had a broad strokes approach, some pandering to the audience, but not as targeted as the algorithms now. Now everyone will find some niche thing that will make himself unrelatable to others, while allowing the most narrow targeting.
This greentext illustrates this effect well:
Now ther is an aspect of this that has to do with gender - males tends to prismatize much more easily than females
https://twitter.com/DaSkrubKing/status/1640477621388562438
Make of this what you want.
The Future
What awaits us in the future then? Just a personal experience machine? Eternity of neotenic NPC girls smiling at you - is this what you want Anon?
https://twitter.com/merryweatherey/status/1226645725867438080
The drive to community might actually be composed of many subdrives that the community used to fill in the past but which might get replaced with changes such as the Great Reset.
Social status in a group →social credits
Feeling of financial security if you fall on bad times → UBI
Potential mates → AI lovers
Fortunately there are limits to this. Hyper-individualized targeting relies on certain baseline level of affluence, free time and safety. Physical safety is a big one, especially for women. This woman isn’t looking for a “spiritually fulfilling” community, just a safe one.
https://twitter.com/activeasian/status/1688568776026148864
Solving the itch to community through a “google campus” style public space? Would get vandalized in a day! The near future of communities is gatekeeping, providing spaces with physical safety and heavy vetting. A thing or two could be learned from the churches in this regard. Some people confuse ‘trad wife’ with ‘trophy wife’ and want a Mannerbund while not seeing the role of gossip and neighbor rivalry.
The revival of communities will happen when the mothers will be fed up with lack of safety for them and for their children. They will vote with their feet - they already do. America will change when WASP MILFs begin to hate…
Yeah, that could get fiery and frankly embarrassing. Check for the biggest NSDAP voting blocks in 1933. It was not Bavarian Catholic men, I assure you. From the state perspective, it was a fiery, overly aggressive collectivism, alienating some of the finest brains and depleting the vital forces of the German nation, leaving Germany under American boot.
The alternative is “cold collectivism” - a pragmatic approach, coined by Nick Land. I made a playlist about it and related concepts. You can find it here, but it starts with the video below:
What’s your take on cold collectivism?
>but now Starbucks moves more and more to pick-up orders and now wanting people to stay and chat
Did you mean "and NOT wanting people to stay and chat"
seems like since Covid many places have been less hospitable. SBX used to be crisp air conditioning and spotless with attentive service - since the scamdemic they seem to be skimping on the AC, muggy and sticky inside, dusty tables and floors, napkins and litter left un picked up, service spotty.