Posted by barry-cotter 7 hours ago
True in general. As a kid you think of things as bigger than you. Like whoever maintains a hiking trail or runs your towns diner is "big" compared to you.
As a grown up you hopefully realize that it's the other way - the work and effort to make and maintain those things is vulnerable and fragile.
I think about this whenever I see someone hop over the subway turnstile. The transit system is "for granted" - it's you and your few bucks that matters. But of enough ppl feel that way it all goes away via decay eventually.
Maybe we should teach people to maintain something early on, as children, so that they learn to appreciate the work that goes into keeping the wheels turning.
It also relies on people putting effort towards often intangible, uncapitalized, and unextractable shared value. So perhaps it makes sense that this is being diminished over time, as the grip of capitalism squeezes tighter and more efficiently. With more economic stress placed on individuals, people have less available time and resources to devote to things other than staying afloat.
Between polarization/politicization of literally everything and the relentless corporate desire to deconstruct society in the name of quarterly growth, I’m not optimistic this is making a comeback. If we want to teach the children anything, it is that The System has failed and is in dire need of replacement.
I think greed and corruption (cheating) by politicians and government employees has an outsized effect on this. Whenever you hear about it you lose trust and may even feel justified to cheat the system in turn. Basically they got there's, so I'll get mine.
IMO the penalties for corruption in public service jobs (all the way to the top!) should also be outsized to match the damage it does to society. I'm talking prison time. Also transparency at all levels and at all times. Public service should have really really good reasons to keep anything private and the default should be open to the public. There shouldn't be a need for FOI requests unless there's a good reason to keep something from being completely public.
And the topics changed faster. People into mainframe OSes had the same conversational fluidity in that for decades. Leave linux for too long and everything sounds like vocabulary from an alien world, now. And so many 'technologies' with it. True probably since cloud and containerization. So people have less in common technically in those communities and as more career branching happens, people get nichier. More interest bubbles. More and more people in core areas, making it hard to not be overwhelmed simultaneously.
We realized very quickly that if there was one thing we couldn't talk to each other about, it was computers.
This is an easy move too. I.e. it is hard to have impact in the technical sphere when everyone is doing that.
Organising something (book a room etc.) is what engineers tend not to want to so so it becomes a form of arbitrage. Less mental effort and more visibility.
That modern American Christianity obsoleted the old clubs and "secret" societies - most of which were no longer very secret, more ritual than societal, and at some point had to define what "higher power" meant to its members - a topic that easily takes over the municipal development discussions - to not only the younger men but to the women (who were largely barred from such organizations).
90s television and the "role model" movement helped Christianity unify and sweep the attention of the youth, reflected in "youth group" programs across churches in the United States and also the rise of indie televangelists (some became millionaires, along with thousands of pastors).
By the early- to mid-2000s, Christianity had figured out how to put on a much better show (for the kids) and, especially in California, again had evolved into something new, more palatable, entertaining, and far more inclusive than you could ever get from something like a Masonic order or even a Rotary Club.
90s-00s Christianity was a massive movement that I wonder whether or not would be possible without the advent of TV. To me, those old clubs where grandpas met and discussed things was a way of the past. Like comparing newspapers to social media - just an obsolete way of sharing information.
And that attitude is one part of the answer. Second is that home entertainment became easier and more fun, so people stay home watching movies, browsing internet, what have you instead of going out. And overtime, dance places became emptier and organizers demotivated.
Lots more money is still made by networking or potentially mild grifting than through sheer innovation or technical excelence for instance.
We used to use community to pass those down, but now the average American family gets divided from each other at an early age as soon as the distraction and ideology from technology like screens and things social media comes into play.
Edit: Before internet, there were other forms of "social media" at play attempting to extract the attention of the individual units of the family and community, but they weren't as effective. With the internet they are more effective.
I feel like this generally applies a lot in life, and most people generally sees themselves as passive consumers when it comes to most things. You can just do things, even if people look at you weird or say your weird, even in public, and nothing really changes when they say/think those things about you. Just enjoy life as much as you can, in the way you wish, without harming others.
It’s liberating. Be weird in public!
I started planning street festivals a few years ago. It’s now a lucrative and growing business for me. The demand for events at all scales vastly outstrips supply, and I think growing social isolation is part of the reason.
The free riders might seem like a problem to someone who just wants there to be events, but it is a huge opportunity to us who throw them.
how do you make sure they have some charecter and dont turn into mc-festival
People don't actually get where the deep value lies, the event income or social credibility for those involved in putting it on just helps ensure there is enough fuel for the fire of the real community.
It's also why i'm trying to participate more here, even with the crippling imposters syndrome that prevents me from contributing anything...It's so difficult actively participating in a group that seemingly got cultivated from a culture somewhat alien to my own upbringing.
I don’t see that changing, to be honest, but it’s interesting that this never even occurred to me. It seems so obvious in hindsight. Quite the blindspot.
I spent 15 years building a local community, I had 10,000 daily users once, people recognized me on the street, then everyone left on a whim when Facebook made it easier to hang in one's own echo chambers.
I still think it was worth it.
Once in a while, I bump into a stranger, and they tell me how the found their only true love because of me, or how they landed a job that made them loads of money because I facilitated communication in our community. Other times... I barely escaped molestation by a disgruntled member once, and someone threw a glassful of Orval at me (yes, it really happened).
It was still worth it.
There's an analogy here to suffocating in an anoxic atmosphere.
Our bodies don't sense blood oxygen well. Instead, our urge to breathe is mainly driven by dissolved CO2 [1]. So if you're breathing out CO2, and breathing in no O2, your alarm bells stay mostly silent. Your lights go out without your ever being wiser.
Analogously, I think our social senses trigger when we've been away from people we care for. We get that "I haven't seen so and so in a while" urge, which in turn drives reaching out.
The problem is that sense seems almost like a proximity timer. If we've interacted in any way with so and so, it resets. A threshold which appears to be met by e.g. liking a photo on Facebook–empty calories of social interaction. A nitrogen atmosphere giving the perception of normalcy while everything slowly decays. And then, at a moment nobody notices until it's passed, the social rot sets in and a former community is now folks who once knew each other.
It petered out.