Latent Communities in an Artificial Internet
Those who can harness the latent power of communities which already have strong roots have a better chance of changing our world.
Today, there is enormous interest in building new movements. But you don’t have to start anew if you want to change the world. Communities lie on a spectrum in terms of their origins: either they have been created to achieve a goal, or they appear to have been created almost by default; no purpose, they just exist.
Who can harness the latent power of those default communities? What power do they have?
This essay was commissioned by Folklore. I’ve shared the beginning below and will share another excerpt next month.
When we looked at historical sources at school, my history teacher encouraged us to respect even the tiniest details. “Everything in this source was put there for a reason.”
The internet, of course, is just the same. Have you ever acknowledged how, on the internet, nothing exists by default? Everything online was created by some person, for a reason.
Our real world is quite the opposite. Yes, groups which make headlines are designed to effect change on the world — Google beats its earnings targets; a local charity raises money — but these Designed Communities are built on unintentional foundations.
In particular, these foundations are the product of social value systems and the natural world. They arise without any purpose or design, with origins embedded so deep in the past that in the present day they appear almost as the default state of affairs.
Nobody chose them: geography that defined borders and ‘home’; birthright that influences class and ethnicity; genetics and the food chain; personality and natural ability.
It is these foundational characteristics which truly shape our lives, values, and allegiances. They do so not just because they are part of our identity, but because they are the parts which feel most difficult to give up.
This is well documented, most famously by Stuart Brand.
A community is a clearly-defined group of people whose interests are co-invested with each other. One can be built on any of the layers that Brand uses in his diagram, whether it’s a community built around some fashion trend or a set of cultural values.
Fashion and commerce move “fast”, he writes in The Clock of the Long Now (01999). These are the layers of those headline-grabbing Designed Communities, purposefully designed to pursue a specific goal.
“The fast parts get all the attention,” Brand writes. These are the parts that are easy to give up. Millennials change job every 3 years. Trends every three weeks.
The fast parts are home to a long line of changemakers who seek to influence society on a timeframe that spans only the few decades of their working lives. The art of designing a community to make a dent in the world, from startups to protests, is now highly refined.1
Designed Communities have shaped our world because they are specifically designed to do so. They have institutionalised methods to accumulate assets, coordinate people, and allocate capital.
Default Communities, by contrast, have no such institutions. People forget that communities can even be formed around these ‘default’ characteristics which date to before living memory. Culture and nature are “slow”, Brand writes. They are “the work of whole peoples” in the former case and “inexorable” in the latter.
This is best seen as a feature, rather than a bug. Because communities built upon these characteristics have something that Designed Communities lack: ties between their members that date to before living memory. “The slow parts have all the power.” Nation states usually beat companies.
I warmly invite you to read the rest on Folklore.
The world’s cohort of ‘famous people’ is dominated by those who influence our planet within a ten year time frame. Most today’s famous people, from singers to CEOs, will be forgotten after the ten years which follow (related).