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Communities are not fungible

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: Communities are not fungible

#51

Post by inglor_cz »

FranklinJabar wrote: post #9
testdelacc1 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a city that consistently builds about 3-4% of the number of homes we need to build each year. We don’t build rail, we don’t electricity transmission infrastructure, all of which increases our cost of living. NIMBYs are doing great, I’d say.

> NIMBYs are doing great, I’d say. NIMBYs, or just typical anglo incompetence? How can you tell the difference? It's easy to blame other people for systemic dysfunction.

This sort of construction failure is present everywhere where the public is allowed to make extensive inputs into what gets built. It is not just a US-specific reaction to urban engineering by Robert Moses.

We've let the pendulum swing too hard and instead of a dictatorship of technocrats, we have a dictatorship of vetocrats. A relatively small group of people, sometimes one single individual, can make new construction more complicated than lunar exploration, and there are indeed neighbourhoods whose permitting process took longer than the entire Apollo project.

I live in a house built on a former brownfield, 32 semi-detached houses in total. The whole project was delayed by four years by one dedicated octogenarian who didn't like the idea of new people in "his" neighbourhood and pulled out all stops he could (or even couldn't).

Re: Communities are not fungible

#52

Post by yugant10 »

Absolutely agree with the points put forward by the author. The online "communities" in their natural existence seem more fragmented as people in it cannot find a strong commonground for them to stick for a long time. (Generally talking about the numerous forums and communities that have gone dead in the past decade)

Re: Communities are not fungible

#53

Post by Carrok »

jpereira wrote: post #35

When thinking about online communities I think the lack of "global" identities has dramatically hampered community migration and evolution. I fully agree with the author that you can't just pick up and move a community wholesale but irl we do see patterns of migration, disaporas, etc that bring along with them relationships and trust networks. That's been basically impossible to do online. The networks where most of…

I can’t disagree with this more. Even on discord I have four accounts for different contexts. One, my real name. Another, my gaming name. Another, my music/stage name. Another still, a different gaming name. Why? Because I don’t want people in any of those contexts knowing anything about who I am in the other contexts. This is a feature, not a bug.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#54

Post by wasmainiac »

renewiltord wrote: post #5

Sure all the people who somehow find themselves unable to find community, are neurotic as fuck, and who are lonely have some sort of theory for how community is formed. This is definitely a case of "those who can, do; those who can't, teach". This entire field is full of immeasurable guru-bullshit without anything of any value in it. It's just pseudo-science dressed up in the language of science with some pithy lines…

> This entire field is full of immeasurable guru-bullshit without anything of any value in it.

I’m here for the project blogs, and news but yeah I’m tired of the best-practice evangelists.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#55

Post by mikemarsh »

Asooka wrote: post #15

[flagged]

Maybe, just maybe, there's some inkling of truth behind what your political enemies are saying, and you can carefully acknowledge said inklings and even gasp integrate them into your own worldview, if relevant?

Nah, they're probably all just evil and/or stupid for no reason at all. That makes a lot more sense.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#56

Post by talkingtab »

When we think about communities we need an effective model of what they are and how they operate.

What then is an effective model for a community? In "Twitter And Teargas", Zeynep Tufecki argued that the community afforded by Twitter was unable to effect long term, substantial change and therefore Arab Spring is now a footnote. Twitter affords flash mobs.

That concept - affordance - provides a hint for a model of communities. The obvious question to a hacker is "what kind of social system would afford long term substantial change?".

Another insight is that the afforded mechanisms determine the community. This is really a restatement of the Sapir-Whorf hyptothesis. From "your language determines what you can think" to "your social mechanisms determine your community". Roughly.

Another insight (corollary?) for Sapir-Whorf is that your language prevents you from thinking some things. So one could try to understand what "following" as a social mechanism prevents prevents?

Out of this kind of analysis emerges a different take on communities all together. For the hacker in us, John Holland's "Hidden Order" provides a generalized model that can be used to at least create a pseudo model for creating a simulation of the community mechanism.

Although John Holland talks about Complex Adaptive Systems, I personally find "Gestalt" a less cumbersome and effective term. A gestalt is something greater than the sum of it's parts and that can only be true(ish) when the parts interact. So entities + rules + message bus => Gestalt. For ants this is {ants + ant behavior + pheromone trails } => ant colonies. One could conjecture that for humans this could be {people + behavior + money } => economies. Or more cynically => corporations.

The complexity and emergent behavior of the {rules + message/bus part} part is probably best revealed by Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".

This is an incredibly important talking for our time. What is the most effective way to get rid of ants? To destroy their ability to use a pheromone trail. Perhaps we could just put advertising in it?

[edit: forgot the Wolfram reference. Apologies to SW for missing this wonderful work.]

Re: Communities are not fungible

#57

Post by ChicagoDave »

After reading this I wonder if ifMud has survived 29 years because we use a modified perlMud that has an IRC-like channel communication system.

We’re not beholden to any commercial service and the mud is self-hosted by the community (generally the IFTF - IF Technology Foundation).

No one could disrupt our community the way Discord or Reddit might.

Re: Communities are not fungible

#58

Post by kjshsh123 »

FranklinJabar wrote: post #6
testdelacc1 wrote: post #4

I agree with Joan here, communities aren’t fungible. Building something where something already exists does carry a cost. But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in the quiver of NIMBYs. In addition to environmental, economic, political reasons not to build something, also consider the cost to potentially breaking existing community bonds. We shouldn’t build new high density housing because the new…

> But I can also see how this will be used as one more arrow in the quiver of NIMBYs. How much are NIMBYs actually a problem these days? It seems to me that YIMBYs insisting on building anything, anything, anything at all, damn the cost, be it a privately developed five over one or a publicly funded ferris wheel downtown, are a much bigger issue now. We should be intentional about the communities we are developing (s…

Market housing will be expensive until you allow developers to build as much housing as the market demands.

Non-market housing will have extremely long wait times if there is not as much of it as the market demands.

And the NIMBYs and left-NIMBYs are still winning.

Relevant substack article (Towers Don't Cause the Housing Crisis):

https://open.substack.com/pub/shonczinner/p/towers-dont-caus...

Re: Communities are not fungible

#59

Post by zajio1am »

FranklinJabar wrote: post #13
JuniperMesos wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you consider to be anglo incompetence in dwelling construction that isn't NIMBYism?

Owning land. Whoever came up with this idea needs to be hung and revived a million times, and then tortured to death a million more. Our society has been mutilated as a result. I think you could ascribe this to either NIMBY or YIMBY harebrained thinking. We need a third option that's pro-human. We need public fucking housing.

Most of NIMBY legislature and processes that block private construction also block public construction. So most YIMBY arguments to improve the situation apply to both public and private constructions. (Not to mention that public construction has a plenty of problems specific to it.)

Re: Communities are not fungible

#60

Post by esafak »

jpereira wrote: post #35

When thinking about online communities I think the lack of "global" identities has dramatically hampered community migration and evolution. I fully agree with the author that you can't just pick up and move a community wholesale but irl we do see patterns of migration, disaporas, etc that bring along with them relationships and trust networks. That's been basically impossible to do online. The networks where most of…

I don't think so. If you want to bring your identity re-use your alias, or oauth ID, otherwise enjoy the benefits of privacy.
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