[glroyal]

Communities are not fungible, but they are also not permanent.

Because humans are mobile, the community changes as people, institutions, infrastructure, and industries come and go over time.

Even if a substantial fraction of the population never leaves the geographic boundaries that contain the community they were born in, their web of relationships constantly changes as old neighbors leave and new neighbors arrive, the prevailing economy improves or worsens, and waves of technological revolution like the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles washes over them.

Furthermore the community in which we live is only one of many communities we inhabit, such as school chums, work colleagues, church congregations and political movements, all of which are subject to the same phenomenon of perpetual change.

If every aspect of the community is impermanent, the community itself cannot be permanent, and I see no argument, let alone any technology other than encasing the community in lucite, capable of preserving it indefinitely.

[didgetmaster]

Like many technical people, my personality naturally gravitates towards introverted behavior. I am very comfortable being alone for long periods of time, and in spending my day writing code or fixing bugs with just me and my computer.

But I also enjoy interacting with other people. It just takes the right 'community' to draw me out of my shell. There have been periods of my life when I was outgoing, because I was in the right environment (college, certain jobs, sports, etc.). Other periods allowed me to retreat into my own isolated world.

There just isn't a magic formula that produces the right kind of community that we want on demand.

[fellowniusmonk]

A lot of introverts are best served by parallel proximal work and the only stratification should be around noise levels of the activity.

But frankly it's best for everyone, the isolated computer age has made in person get togethers have friction when they historically have had zero friction and were just things we did along the way.

This is part of why I love going to NYC, as long as you understand and respect the local rules it's an incredibly positive, effortless social area, so much pleasant casual interaction.

[supern0va]

>Communities are not fungible, but they are also not permanent.

The same is true of individual humans. And yet, that is not a great argument for killing them.

[ux266478]

He not implying impermanence is an effective primary argument for killing a community, as in "This community is impermanent, therefore we must destroy it" in a vacuum. Additionally, humans and communities occupy different ranks in a moral hierarchy. I'm not sure your point is coherent.

[jmcgough]

Nowhere in the article does it say that communities can't change. Communities are living, breathing organisms.

[kijin]

An unchanging community is a dead community, period.

Attempts to "preserve" a community, both online and offline, tend to end up preserving unhealthy power dynamics within the community as well, which would have been slowly replaced with something else if you had just let the community evolve (or disappear) naturally.

Often, members of the community who benefit from the status quo are the ones who cry the loudest for such preservation.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

NIMBYs

[snohobro]

I suppose in many ways this is a deeper philosophical discussion. Your observations are correct, and as others posted, a healthy community is an ever changing one. Effectively it becomes the Community of Theseus. All its parts, the people, the technology, the geographic aspects can and maybe have changed. Is it still the same community and can it be referred to as such?

I think the authors point about history is a key element of this. If I can track how the community has evolved and changed, I can still identify that community in its current form as the sum of all its changes.

I’m not sure that holds true if an outside entity tries to dismantle and rebuild the existing community without the context of the history.

[bayindirh]

You don't have to preserve a community definitely, because you can't snapshot a state of a community.

Yes, a community is always evolving, but there's a lower level culture, the textile as Westenberg puts it. Even though some people leave, their mark on the textile remains, and newcomers are got affected by that.

This is the same substance which makes "company culture", but applied in a different context. The people coming in are partly shaped by that while bringing in their own. This is what triggers that evolution. Same is true for leaving people. They'll mix what they bring to the new community they join. Oftentimes is has an effect, rarely it doesn't. As you said there are also other variables that the community can't control.

The beauty arises from that mix. The connections maybe temporary, but the effects are small, yet permanent and profound. That's the sediment which collects at the bottom, builds the history and shared values step by step.

It's not the change we shall be trying to snapshot and keep alive, but the meta-organism which happens to be and evolves over time. Nobody is trying to stop that change, but prevent the killing of these meta-organisms which forms the basic building block of a society. Because these structures becomes stronger and resilient as they evolve, regardless of who comes and goes.

Seeing the same people on your neighborhood even though you don't even talk to them creates an invisible mortar and layer of trust and safety. This is one of the most important things in a community.

You need to preserve that fabric. Not the people, connections and "state" of that community. As an extreme example, you can find this fabric between people even in the most "dangerous" neighborhoods. Because they are dangerous for outsiders. Not for the people who're living in that. There's always an equilibrium and a layer of authenticity even under all that violence and nastiness.

[conductr]

Community as described in article also isn’t the default. If you’re in a rural area and urban sprawl comes to you, it may bring with it establishing of this type of community but it also generates resentment from those that liked their rural setting and the lack of community.

Everything has to evolve to progress. We can’t just say protect community at all cost because it also means you must prevent expansion and improvement of the status quo of other quality of life metrics.

[m463]

You are not permanent either... your body cells regenerate and are replaced regularly. ship of theseus

I kind of wonder if ecosystems might be a better analogy. although ecosystems can change and adapt, they can also die.