(Roughly) Daily

But in what does the “continent”– our community– consist? Further to yesterday’s piece on Epicureanism, Noah Smith argues that the internet has changed what “community” means…

… I think the kind of communities we inhabit has simply changed. In the past, our communities were primarily horizontal — they were simply the people we lived close to on the surface of the Earth. Increasingly, though, new technology has enabled us to construct communities that I’ve decided to call vertical — groups of people united by identities, interests, and values rather than by physical proximity… for most of history, most of the people you interacted with most of the time were the people who lived near to you — your horizontal community.

Horizontal communities can often be stifling and repressive, because they impose community norms on people with a diverse array of occupations, temperaments, and backgrounds. Sinclair Lewis’ novel Main Street is a great depiction of the ever-present, crushing conformity pressure of small American towns in the 1910s. But that social pressure was nothing compared to the pogroms, inquisitions, and genocides that enforced religious, cultural, and racial homogeneity in many of the world’s horizontal communities — and which still do, in some parts of the world.

When the people around you pressure you to be the same as them, you can use exit, voice, or loyalty — you can knuckle under and conform, you can fight back and rebel, or you can simply leave and find some place that you fit in better. A lot of immigration to the U.S. was driven by misfits looking for communities where they didn’t stick out as much. In the latter half of the 20th century, Americans themselves sorted into different parts of the country in order to create pockets of local political homogeneity.

In fact, our use of the word “community” to describe racial, religious, and sexuality groups is probably a relic of an ugly pattern of history, in which minorities were forced to live in circumscribed, segregated areas — Chinatowns, ghettos, the Castro in San Francisco — either by law, or by mass violence that made them unwelcome elsewhere…

But then the internet came along, and everything changed. Suddenly we stopped being isolated and started being social again, through the windows of our laptop screens and phone screens. There was a whole world of human interaction waiting there for us — forums, social media feeds, chat apps, online games, and so on. Suddenly we were surrounded by people all the time — or at least, their written words, and perhaps once in a while their pictures or videos or voices.

Constant internet usage allowed us to organize a far greater percentage of our human interaction around vertical communities. It let us find the people we identified with and interact with them, rather than being forced to interact with whoever was close to us on the map. We could surround ourselves with other anime fans, or other Muslims, or other economists, or other trans people — and we did. What were once notional bonds of connection that existed mostly in our minds became Facebook groups and subreddits and loose networks of Twitter contacts. And those spaces developed their own norms, rules, customs, and institutions, because now, thanks to the internet, it was easy to do that…

The identity-based “communities” that people talk about are thus no longer simply shorthand for a notion of cultural or political affinity with distant people, or for a fading memory of segregated neighborhoods. They’re thriving online verticals — archipelagos of online spaces where people can go to talk about what it means to be gay, or Jewish, or Pakistani. And like the small towns of Sinclair Lewis’ day, these vertical communities have the ability to use social ostracism to punish those who deviate from consensus norms and political objectives.

At the same time, horizontal communities didn’t completely vanish. We still educate our children in physical space (more or less), meaning we still have to deal with other children’s parents in a local community. Local government policies rule many of the aspects of our lives that are still offline — food, public safety, housing, transport — and this means we have to go to city planning meetings and school board meetings and various other community forums to hash out our differences with people who don’t share our interests or our identities. We now live in a world where our communities exist in three dimensions — the familiar hodgepodge of local humanity in two dimensions, and our self-sorted online spaces in a third.

And this dichotomy presents an enormous challenge to our institutions… for now and for the foreseeable future, our public goods are provided locally, but our social interaction happens in the cloud. In theory, this could be a dangerous recipe…

Eminently worth reading in full: “Vertical Communities” from @Noahpinion.

* John Donne

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As we find our folks, we might recall that it was on this date in 1933 that The Lone Ranger debuted on Detroit’s WXYZ radio station. Created and written by station-owner George Trendle and Fran Striker (who went on to create the Green Hornet and Sgt. Preston of the Yukon), they aimed create an American version of Zorro. Though (or perhaps because) they worked with no real knowledge of Texas in the period, their creation became an American icon, succeeding on radio, television, in comic books, film shorts, feature films, books, and newspaper strips.

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