4 ms·

Vertical communities

50 points by zdw 4y ago

zokier 4y ago
I mean sure, the central idea of the article is not that far fetched. But it seems a decade late? It speaks in future tense of things that have already happened or are happening.
akira2501 4y ago
> Maybe big companies have just muscled out small businesses, so that now it doesn’t mean much to be a local businessperson > In fact, I think the kind of communities we inhabit has simply changed. There's no reason both of these can't be true. You might even ask to what extent did changes in one environment caused reactions in the other? Ignoring this seems to imply that the "network effect" is always to degrade local communities by default, which I don't think is true, and certainly wasn't the expectation as the network was initially being built.
- Animats 4y ago
  > > Maybe big companies have just muscled out small businesses, so that now it doesn’t mean much to be a local businessperson True, but that process was well underway by 1960 and mostly over by 1980. What town has a local department store any more? Or even a local non-chain grocery store?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - akira2501 4y ago
    That sounds like a very coastal perspective. Plenty of middle American towns held them for quite a long time and many still do have these things. The 1990s was the decade of insane M&A, but it was far from total.
none_to_remain 4y ago
I think most people are not Online in the way this article wants them to be. Certainly I read or watch things on the Internet most every day, make a few comments here and there, but somehow banning me entirely from the Internet would not affect my social life beyond the annoyance of my friends, family, and associates losing certain contact methods. The problem, though, is that it seems our politicians and journalists are increasingly Online and losing the ability to distinguish it from real life
- brightlancer 4y ago
  Politicians aren't very "Online"; they're in e-mail and IMs with staffers, but they aren't engaging on social media, which is what Noah is really referring to. The issue I see is that journalists are increasingly _only_ "Online" and, until last year, ran Twitter as their petty fiefdom. Because they're having their conversations amongst themselves and rarely with anyone outside, they think their conversations (especially Twitter) are 90% of reality. And that then feeds back to politicians, who are very responsive to what journalists say -- even if it isn't true, journalists can repeat something often enough with clickbait and weasel headlines until folks believe it to be true.
rufus_foreman 4y ago
So it sounds like by "vertical communities" it is just meant identity politics? Identity politics does not replace family, church, and neighborhood.
causality0 4y ago
The issue with vertical communities is self-stratification. A horizontal community has a diversity of interests and opinions. A vertical community has only what you choose. A horizontal community influences your decision-making to be less specialized, i.e., less descriminatory in who it benefits. Vertical communities don't. Not only are you not going to hear from perspectives different from your own, you don't even have to witness the consequences of your decisions on people different from you. For example, as a childless adult, I might vote against the deployment of speed cameras in school zones and never even notice if the number of kids being hit by cars is going up every year.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
Although I am loathed to be seen as recommending it, Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota trilogy does have a bit of interesting material as it imagines an earth 5 centuries from now in which vertical communities are vastly more important than nation states. Of course, this is aided by an insanely fast transit system that means you can work in Paris and have lunch in Rio without thinking about it. Palmer's vertical communities (called "hives") are fairly high level compared to the considerations in TFA, but IIRC they consist of something like: 1. Cousins - strive to take care of all humans 2. Utopians - dedicated to utopian projects, specifically planetary colonization 3. Mitsubishi - very control-via-land-ownership focused, merged with Greenpeace which had owned most of the wild areas 4. Humanists - as the name suggests, combined with a strong belief in the power of individuals 5. Masonic Empire - essentially a continuation of a sort-of Roman empire 6. Gordian - dedicated to understanding and controlling and predicting the human mind 7. Europe - still valuing national identities 8. "Blacklaw" - everyone outside the Hive system I found the final book almost impossible to finish, and ultimately not very rewarding. Still, as an imagined future essentially without computers of any kind we would recognize, humans organized primarily into vertical (distributed) communities and more, it at least started out quite intriguingly.
erichocean 4y ago
The next big thing will be to reify "vertical communities" as private societies.
jacknews 4y ago
"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." I'm fairly sure this 'take' is at least 30 years old, I seem to remember reading something in the early 90s describing almost exactly the same thing, along with various 'death of distance' type think-pieces.

50 points by zdw 4y ago

I mean sure, the central idea of the article is not that far fetched. But it seems a decade late? It speaks in future tense of things that have already happened or are happening.

akira2501 4y ago

> Maybe big companies have just muscled out small businesses, so that now it doesn’t mean much to be a local businessperson > In fact, I think the kind of communities we inhabit has simply changed. There's no reason both of these can't be true. You might even ask to what extent did changes in one environment caused reactions in the other? Ignoring this seems to imply that the "network effect" is always to degrade local communities by default, which I don't think is true, and certainly wasn't the expectation as the network was initially being built.

Animats 4y ago
> > Maybe big companies have just muscled out small businesses, so that now it doesn’t mean much to be a local businessperson True, but that process was well underway by 1960 and mostly over by 1980. What town has a local department store any more? Or even a local non-chain grocery store?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- akira2501 4y ago
  That sounds like a very coastal perspective. Plenty of middle American towns held them for quite a long time and many still do have these things. The 1990s was the decade of insane M&A, but it was far from total.

none_to_remain 4y ago

I think most people are not Online in the way this article wants them to be. Certainly I read or watch things on the Internet most every day, make a few comments here and there, but somehow banning me entirely from the Internet would not affect my social life beyond the annoyance of my friends, family, and associates losing certain contact methods. The problem, though, is that it seems our politicians and journalists are increasingly Online and losing the ability to distinguish it from real life

brightlancer 4y ago
Politicians aren't very "Online"; they're in e-mail and IMs with staffers, but they aren't engaging on social media, which is what Noah is really referring to. The issue I see is that journalists are increasingly _only_ "Online" and, until last year, ran Twitter as their petty fiefdom. Because they're having their conversations amongst themselves and rarely with anyone outside, they think their conversations (especially Twitter) are 90% of reality. And that then feeds back to politicians, who are very responsive to what journalists say -- even if it isn't true, journalists can repeat something often enough with clickbait and weasel headlines until folks believe it to be true.

rufus_foreman 4y ago

So it sounds like by "vertical communities" it is just meant identity politics? Identity politics does not replace family, church, and neighborhood.

causality0 4y ago

The issue with vertical communities is self-stratification. A horizontal community has a diversity of interests and opinions. A vertical community has only what you choose. A horizontal community influences your decision-making to be less specialized, i.e., less descriminatory in who it benefits. Vertical communities don't. Not only are you not going to hear from perspectives different from your own, you don't even have to witness the consequences of your decisions on people different from you. For example, as a childless adult, I might vote against the deployment of speed cameras in school zones and never even notice if the number of kids being hit by cars is going up every year.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

Although I am loathed to be seen as recommending it, Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota trilogy does have a bit of interesting material as it imagines an earth 5 centuries from now in which vertical communities are vastly more important than nation states. Of course, this is aided by an insanely fast transit system that means you can work in Paris and have lunch in Rio without thinking about it. Palmer's vertical communities (called "hives") are fairly high level compared to the considerations in TFA, but IIRC they consist of something like: 1. Cousins - strive to take care of all humans 2. Utopians - dedicated to utopian projects, specifically planetary colonization 3. Mitsubishi - very control-via-land-ownership focused, merged with Greenpeace which had owned most of the wild areas 4. Humanists - as the name suggests, combined with a strong belief in the power of individuals 5. Masonic Empire - essentially a continuation of a sort-of Roman empire 6. Gordian - dedicated to understanding and controlling and predicting the human mind 7. Europe - still valuing national identities 8. "Blacklaw" - everyone outside the Hive system I found the final book almost impossible to finish, and ultimately not very rewarding. Still, as an imagined future essentially without computers of any kind we would recognize, humans organized primarily into vertical (distributed) communities and more, it at least started out quite intriguingly.

erichocean 4y ago

The next big thing will be to reify "vertical communities" as private societies.

jacknews 4y ago

"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." I'm fairly sure this 'take' is at least 30 years old, I seem to remember reading something in the early 90s describing almost exactly the same thing, along with various 'death of distance' type think-pieces.