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Well, yes, we've doubled down on mediating social interactions through economic relationships. Most of the interactions adults have in their lives are with or i

Well, yes, we've doubled down on mediating social interactions through economic relationships. Most of the interactions adults have in their lives are with or in the framing of economic relations. Homes, are being invaded with tablets and mobile devices which bring along with them framing interactions as economic relations through ad and consumer frames. Workplaces are inherently settings of economic relations, and third places outside of the consumer setting are becoming extinct because they are non-monetizable. This last category, non-consumer third places are formerly the domain of kid-friendly community-building activities. When we talk about creating more of these and the response is, "they aren't economically viable," it's exactly the kind of economic calculus framing that I'm talking about.

sologoub 2y ago
To take this a step further, I’d argue such framings encourage either creation or amplification of risk perceptions in order to sell the remedy (and for political gain), at least in the US. Kids aren’t really allowed much autonomy the way even their parents enjoyed. All interactions are in a sense supervised and structured.
RickS 2y ago
This is positively gut wrenching in its accuracy. Really well captured.
hot_gril 2y ago
Anything is economically viable if enough people want it.
- meowkit 2y ago
  Point == missed Its a tragedy of the commons style problem. The viability has to come from a group effort - as soon as there is a single entity running the show the economic incentives will warp or collapse the 3rd place into something different.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    What single entity did you have in mind? An HOA will spend dues on parks, a regular city will spend taxes on parks. A luxury apartment will have common spaces or even activities. They make these expenditures because enough residents will pay extra for it. And a church will run community events paid for by donations. No "brought to you by Carl's Jr." Tragedy of the commons is when there's no big entity with rules, and everyone does their own thing.
    - throwway120385 2y ago
      What often happens in these small community organizations is one or two volunteers join and begin to do a bunch of work to "transform" the organization and expand its reach. They inevitably become "indispensable" to the new organization, which they have wrapped around themselves like a cloak. Then they squeeze it around themselves until everyone leaves and the organization's soul has been sucked out. They move on to other organizations in the same area with a "resume" or "bio." You'll often see these people everywhere in your community, and they may approach you very quickly to get you involved in their organizations. They are in constant need of new volunteers to burn out on their pet projects. They also constantly promote themselves and are always telling you about what they are doing with other organizations both to recruit you and to make sure everyone knows how "indispensable" they are. These people are poisonous to community organizations because they will not abide any consensus-driven process that doesn't lead to agreement with them.
      - hot_gril 2y ago
        Not sure about the resumé part, but I've seen these authoritarian volunteers. They still don't ruin everything. And I think my local church has enough of them that they cancel each other out :D
        throwway120385 2y ago
        They don't ruin it every time, but I've seen it happen and have also seen the end result and I'm very leery of specific kinds of people in communities I'm new to because of it.
vishnugupta 2y ago
On point and well articulated!
ToucanLoucan 2y ago
This is both a loss in and of itself, and is also a rational response by people within this system. Everything MUST make money because everyone is FUCKING broke. People don't monetize their hobbies for fun, they do it because they're barely scraping by and the notion of spending time on things that don't make money is so beaten out of us that it feels wrong to do it. We can't go anywhere without spending money, we can't do anything without spending money. I shit you not my wife and I wanted to visit a park the other day and realized the parks dept now has paid parking stalls. The PARK. An outdoor space, supposedly paid for by my tax dollars, that because of it's distance from me is not feasible to walk to (and because the streets here are fucking terrifying) now charges me to park my vehicle there, so I can get some nature. Just un-fucking-believably apple pie in the window sill, burgers and fries, fireworks on the fourth American. I am so goddamn tired of every interaction I can have requiring money. I just want somewhere to go that's nice to be that doesn't demand my fucking credit card.
- jamil7 2y ago
  I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect people with cars to pay for parking?
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    At a lot at a shopping mall, sure. At a park in the suburbs, IMO significantly less so. Especially when ostensibly my property taxes are already paying for the fucking park.
    - iwontberude 2y ago
      We should be friends, I like the way you think.
    - collingreen 2y ago
      I understand your frustration but I expect there are a lot of things that go into that decision. I expect adding a fee to parking makes it possible to enforce time limits, to remove squatting, and to ensure there are actually spots available. I doubt it is for the money but even if it is the park systems tend to be horribly underfunded (and often have to be held up with private donation money). A lot of our broken things are because someone with too many responsibilities and too little resources has to make a choice between a bunch of bad options and I wonder if this is similar. From your rant we know you'll pick free open spots compared to paid open spots but what if the choice is between paid open spots and no spots at all? Or worse, paid open spots or shady looking cars parked all day selling drugs? It seems like the more effective change is more parks but imagine the pushback if someone tried suggesting that! You're angry that you already pay taxes and now you have to pay again to have a special spot right at the park you can park your car in. Imagine the backlash if someone had the audacity to suggest raising your taxes for new parks. "I already pay for parks! I won't even use 95% of them! Why should I have to pay just because I'm a homeowner!" I can hear my dads voice saying some of these things and it reminds me of his complaints about funding schools with property taxes and I see how people like him pivot this into "the socialists just trying to punish the straight white men". It all makes me sad.
StopTheWorld 2y ago
Professor Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford does research on how heterosexual couples in the US meet ( https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/ https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/ ). In 1940, over 50% met via friends or family. About 36% met at school. In 2021, about 20% met via friends or family. About 10% met at school. Over 50% met online. So the majority of US couples are now meeting via profit-maximizing corporations. He has a 2019 paper on this (and it has only increased since that paper).
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- lawlessone 2y ago
  I'm surprised dating sites work well enough that 50% of customers meet via it. They've no incentive to help you leave.
  - autoexecbat 2y ago
    They probably have some internal churn targets to hit, else people will start to figure out that the app isn't worth their time and try a different one
    - jprete 2y ago
      That's both a horrible thought and a near-certainty.
    - flappyeagle 2y ago
      It creates a much worse problem actually. Why have a committed relationship when you can always press a button to look at hotties and have a pull at the sex slot machine? If they design the system right, their audience just won't marry or have long term stable relationships
      - kevinob11 2y ago
        I can think of a few reasons why people want (either already or after enough pulls of the slot machine) a committed relationship. Though to be clear, just because I think the other more stable thing is valuable to folks even with the availability of the sex slot machine, I still don't love businesses trying to push slot machines or any kind really.
pickledish 2y ago
If anyone's interesting in reading more along these lines (the weird state we've gotten into where everything in our lives needs to be viewed through an economic lens for some reason, and the damage it causes) -- check out the book "Capitalist Realism" by the late Mark Fisher -- I really enjoyed it! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6763725-capitalist-realism https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6763725-capitalist-reali...
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Why should we recommend yet another example of a postmodernist critical theorist who went crazy and killed either themselves or others? You didn’t learn after althussar, or deleuze, and now you make the same mistakes. Don’t be surprised if it comes out later that he was a child diddler, much as it has for the previously well respected Foucault.
zemvpferreira 2y ago
True. I have personally integrated this idea fully by trying to hire/work with friends and family whenever possible. After years trying to see people weekly and failing miserably, this is best hack I have found. Caveat emptor, takes discipline and patience from everyone but it's great to see loved ones daily, fully engaged in a project. It helps that I can afford to have hobby businesses.
- anon291 2y ago
  Tell me more? You own businesses and hire your family / friends to work in them?
alexfromapex 2y ago
This is so accurate. There's been lots of talk of enshittification and it really is just everything now. Monetizing the well in modern capitalism means poisoning it. It all can be traced back to lobbying in politics. They need to ban money from politics immediately and everything will improve.
- whythre 2y ago
  That just means the money moves in stealthier ways. Instead of soft corruption you get hard corruption.
  - alexfromapex 2y ago
    Money moves in stealthy ways already, and there are ways to identify that. The problem is the legislature is supposed to be supervising the government entities that pursue financial corruption. Instead of reducing all problems to economic problems, where only the very rich have a voice, we should be encouraging a legislature with integrity to do what is right for everyone.
vegadw 2y ago
What frustrates me is that, it seems (Read as: the following is just my vibe) that the majority of 3rd places left are religious in nature, but I, personally, don't want to be religious or raise children that are. There are some options, of course, but they're limited and often of poor quality, at least locally. Libraries are trying to adapt to fill this gap, and maker spaces spring up but most don't have funding to be good - or if they do, that funding brings things that ruin the spirit. Once you're looking for a place as an Adult, especially without kids, the number of relevant events and things to do drops quickly too - so these same children aren't going to find better options as they grow older.
- giobox 2y ago
  I've found the only way to make friends/community as an adult outside of religion, at least for me, is to go to events relevant to my hobbies and interests. Yes it's difficult, but communities for just about everything are out there if you put yourself out there. If you choose events that occur regularly I've found you get to know people and make friends just by trying to become a regular face too. If you don't have a hobby/interest with a local group, you can try picking new ones until you find one that clicks too. It does take some effort initially though. The shared interest is critical to removing barriers to making those relationships for me.
- phil21 2y ago
  The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. I am no fan of religion having grown up in an exceedingly religious environment. But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on. We seem to be doing it with more than just religion these days, but it’s the canary in the coal mine. Lack of investment in your community will very rapidly erode any sort of high trust society you once had within a single generation. Once it’s gone, it’s pretty much gone for good. I believe no one is talking about this aspect of WFH either. It’s taking away maybe the last “socially expected” regular commitment to your local community. Your daily life is not supposed to be lived in complete social comfort with planned interactions with a tiny group of people being your sole source of socialization. At times you should be feeling uncomfortable or obligated in some community or social setting or you are not growing as a human being. I don’t think the office is the best place at all for this, but for many folks I know it was their last social interaction of any sort outside of family. I’ve been unable to articulate these thoughts very well for decades now - since my late high school days I was already the crazy guy telling friends I was really worried how our hobbies and social interactions were so much less investment on average than our grandparents generation. On average having a bunch of Quake guild buddies is simply not the same as my grandpa who had a bunch of fishing buddies. It’s been on my mind for quite some time, and I think the data is starting to show those concerns were legitimate.
jlos 2y ago
> we've doubled down on mediating social interactions through economic relationships We've doubled down on marketplaces to mediate interactions because they are rational systems. Rational systems like marketplaces, elections, and bureaucracies are the sine qua non of liberalism, which both ends of the political spectrum advocate for in their own ways. The right typically advocates more for marketplaces and corporations (i.e. market-based bureaucracies) and the left typically advocates for more government managemeant (election based bureaucracies). Rational systems are in constrast to local cultures based on tradition, biology, and shared history. Its why there is so much homogenization in farming, music, clothing, architecture, etc. The upside is that rational systems allow for scale, propserity, and individual liberty on an unprecedented level. On the downside, rational systems are fundamentally dehumanizing. We mediate everything through marketplaces because we've don't have any place for non-rational organizing principles (locality, biology, shared history, etc)
andrepd 2y ago
It's kinda impressive how often Marx's 19th century diagnoses of the ills of capitalism prove themselves true in the 21st century.
- deleted 2y ago
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goethes_kind 2y ago
I'm in my 30s but I'm feeling this so hard. Growing up we used to have these kid/youth centres that were run by local Catholic organizations. We used to hang out there after school. Ostensibly the point was that there'd be 30 minutes of catechism doctrine, but we didn't really care about that. To us it was just a the place where everyone would be. I miss that so much. A place where you can just go and meet people your age, without any reason to be that and without having to pay an entrance fee. Now as a grown up we have community centers, which are run, not by the Church, but by sort of hippie-lefty people. But it's not really the same atmosphere, because you go there, and it's just one demographic of people. It's not quite the same. There's also pubs and climbing gyms which people often use as low effort places where one can mingle, but again, it's not quite the same. I don't like drinking multiple times a week and I really don't like climbing.
- fragmede 2y ago
  You don't like being drunk that much, or like climbing, but, were your parents really that Catholic? We, as humans, need a dream to build towards, be in service of, and find our place in. What are we doing here and why are we doing it? For those of us who haven't figured it out yet, attaching to someone else's purpose gives us one and we don't have to figure it out ourselves. You need to find religion, just don't call it that. Find your dream that's impossible and work towards making it possible. figure out your role in making that possible. and then work on it. as hard as you can. find others along the way.
  - rjzzleep 2y ago
    Parent poster doesn’t want to have to drink to socialize. And bar meets are just that. It’s actually a huge problem in society. Ever stream something or go to the cinema ? What does it show you? You’re happy => you drink to celebrate. You’re sad => drink out of sorrow. You want to hang out with friends => you go for drinks. DEFCON for example perpetuates that same behavior. Sure, one part is loss of community, but the other half is toxic social behavior that is perpetuated by Hollywood. The people that don’t like this but want to belong will perpetuate this cycle for fear of getting ostracized.
benreesman 2y ago
It goes by various names (“trad life”, etc.) but whatever you call it the premise is dystopian and terrifying: people now become celebrity influencers on the back of appearing to live some semblance of a historically normal life. For many that’s now the unattainable dream: a community with values that sit still long enough to even aim at upholding them, a robust partnership early enough in life to start a family the biological way, children who can look forward to the same. On the surface there is a culture war around this, and it’s true that the old model had serious problems with admitting other lifestyles. That needed fixing, but not by obliterating the model that works for most people with overwhelming precedent. The real culprit as always is the “monetization” of everything, a baton that has now firmly been passed from finance people to Silicon Valley people. The #1 post on Y-Combinator’s news site is in some sense the central locus in the observable universe for this.
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andrepd 2y ago
And even "economically viable" here is actually shorthand for "able to provide short-term monetary gain which can be captured by a private entity". Because things like quality education, parks, non-car centric infrastructure, etc. are actually EXCELLENT investments even from an economic perspective.
gary_0 2y ago
A lot of the things people used to do on the Internet for fun, they now do for money or "points" (or the subconscious desire to do for money if they become successful enough). In the past, things you posted online tended to get a small number of manual responses from people you had a chance of forming an actual relationship with. Now, a good deal of interaction is mediated by a corporate algorithm (or an up/downvote button). People are also a lot more aware of automated actors (ie. bots). In general, people seem to do a lot less unstructured leisure activity and social interaction. Quantitative goals are imposed by social expectations, gamified ad-funded software, or economic anxiety. Be sure to like and subscribe.
- ChartMaster22 2y ago
  You could extend this even further to discussions about media that was traditionally used to escape, like sports, movies, even books. A lot of interactions regarding sports is focused on "advanced analytics" and highlighting obscure data points above all else, e.g., Team X is the fourth team on the West coast since 1970 to score Y points through N games. People rarely talk about how much they enjoy a movie, but everyone is quick to discuss box office numbers and Rotten Tomatoes scores. Books too now have an entire subculture associated with their economic framing ("buy books from local bookstores!") rather than actual discussions of the material.
- Ezhik 2y ago
  I miss the pointless internet.
  - gary_0 2y ago
    Me too. Nowadays if you die on the internet, you die in real life!
  - fragmede 2y ago
    https://onecheckbox.com/ https://onecheckbox.com/
notspace 2y ago
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MarkMarine 2y ago
The rise of (lowercase L) liberalism and replacement of feudal society’s requirement that you be part of the community with the commodification of every relationship we have is the root cause here. We’re just late enough in this transition to really feel it, and people are looking at symptoms and seeing cause.
swat535 2y ago
This is so true. I'm a practicing Catholic which gives me the advantage of having access to a big community and I even met my wife through Church events after Mass so it's wonderful. Also our Church offers many other programs like counseling, support groups, volunteering, career opportunities, etc. Of course no one should be forced to attend "Church" just to find a community, that's silly but its benefits are pretty clear. However for non-religious people there is really no third place to meet. Additionally, the truth is that outside of religious communities, people are not having children and thus it creates a further sense of isolation and loneliness. The best one can do is perhaps join meetup groups for hobbies but most of those cost money and may not be welcoming to everyone. I would also say that this can be a cultural phenomenon, for example in my home country (Iran) people are always meeting and socializing, at 10PM streets are bursting with activities and it's very easy to find people to connect with. In the west, unfortunately it's much harder and society is more focused on the individual rather than the collective so to approach a stranger in the street feels like a risk as they might consider your actions rude, disruptive or invading their personal space.
- youainti 2y ago
  I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and I have had the same observation as you that the access to community is so helpful.
- thatfrenchguy 2y ago
  > people are not having children and thus it creates a further sense of isolation and loneliness I don't know about that, I think in the US it's more that parents end up spending more time with other parents than anything, notably because kids are overscheduled, so as a childless person you don't see folks with children as much. > at 10PM streets are bursting with activities and it's very easy to find people to connect with I mean yes, if you have children and you have to be back at work at 9am, most folks aren't going to the bar every day (although those types of people do exist!)
extr 2y ago
Even economically mediated third places are being phased out in some respects. When I was a teen we often hung out at a local McDonalds. Super cheap food, free refills, as long as you didn't cause trouble you could stay for awhile. I went back there somewhat recently and I was shocked at the difference. It's been remodeled to have less seating, no refills, most of the lobby/counter area is touchscreens, and of course prices are way, way up compared to when I was a teen (which was not THAT long ago). It felt sterile inside, it was clear they didn't want you hanging out for long. Not a teen in sight.
- neuralRiot 2y ago
  I have seen some cities building skate and bike parks, I love seeing kids and teens doing physical activities with friends.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  Teens also used to work at McDonalds. Now it's middle aged people who look and act like life has been kicking them in the face since they were born. I also used to eat there quite often but I almost never go now because I don't like waiting 10 or 15 minutes for a sullen, indifferent person to hand me a bag of food that might or might not contain what I ordered and like you said the prices are crazy.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    That’s a sign of a good economy. The “hot waiter/waitress” index is real as hell in economic circles for a reason.
vel0city 2y ago
I constantly see people lament some loss of "free" third places that apparently used to exist and be so common but no longer exist. What are these free third places which used to but no longer exist?
- probably_wrong 2y ago
  When I was a child my parents used to sit in front of our house and drink tea. The neighbors would do the same and all children would play together. But thanks to longer working hours and the fear induced by the 24/7 news cycle no one dares sit outside anymore. My nieces don't know their neighbors. When I was a teenager there was a specific square where one would go after school (or during if you skipped class that day). As far as I know my nieces don't have such a tradition. Less clear example: in my country of origin those living in apartments used to have monthly meetings to discuss any issues they had about the building. People used to complain going to those, but at least you'd get an overview of who is who. I believe these meetings are gone, replaced by email. No one complains about them anymore but, at the same time, no one knows who their apartment neighbors are.
  - vel0city 2y ago
    My children are still a bit too young, but there are lots of kids that play in my neighborhood in DFW. The city park at the end of my street has families playing, people out walking their dogs, fishing in the ponds. People play sports at the fields in the park. People hang out on their front patios when it's not 100F outside, have trunk or treats at the park, etc. The apartments I've lived in the past several years had get together events from time to time. I also met a lot of neighbors going to the gym or hanging out around the pool or playing billiards in the clubhouse. None of this seems radically rare from my experiences in Houston and DFW.
  - latency-guy2 2y ago
    > But thanks to longer working hours Average amount of time spent working has trended downwards for nearly every income group for every decade except at best the last decade where it's been stabilizing around ~33 to 36 hours a week or 1700 - 1800 hours a year. I'm not specifying a country because I don't have to, the only country that has actually trended upwards in working hours is China.
panta 2y ago
Very true. Long term effects are often neglected when framing considerations from a purely economic perspective, especially when these are externalized costs, like public health.
weitendorf 2y ago
IMO the two culprits are high rents and efficient capital markets. Definitely many factors contributing to the first, but one of them is also the efficiency of capital markets. Basically it's too expensive to make spaces available for below market rate due to the direct cost of rents (a middle or upper-middle class person could drop $1000/month on a passion project, but not so easily $5k/month) and there's a very high opportunity cost to forgoing revenue/profit, because you can find buyers willing to buy you out for 3-25x incremental profit. That opportunity cost makes it tempting for any community space to instead chase profit. But it also makes non-residential property more expensive because you're bidding against companies that are able to convert incremental $1000/mo profit to $50k-100k in realized value, even if you aren't intending to do that. Rents themselves are very competitive not just from low supply but also because technology has made the rental market very "efficient"/liquid - it's easy to market a property and accurately price it, so sweetheart deals/underpriced leases are difficult to find. Plus rental properties themselves have been very well financialized as well - increases in incremental revenue/profit of commercial real estate can be recognized as many-times-more increases in equity by lenders, which can be accessed by loaning against the equity. So sweetheart deals are more costly to lessors than before.
- gen220 2y ago
  I don’t remember where I read this, but I remember reading recently how somebody justified their decision to leave “the city” to move to a rural area, with the phrase “I was tired of competing with my neighbors”. I they were trying to convey sense you describe, of intense economic pressure to make a certain income to pay for a certain living or working space, or alternatively be kicked out because there are ten people in line waiting to take your space. Perhaps a healthy culture cannot survive this degree of “efficiency”.
nonameiguess 2y ago
A lot of people seem to cite religious communities, if anything. It's consistently odd to me that no one on Hacker News ever seems to have been into sports. For me, the third places and communities of my youth were all oriented around some kind of physical athletic activity. This was mostly basketball personally, presumably because I passed 6 feet tall in 7th grade. Every park in the area and every school had outdoor courts and you'd just go down there early in the day with a ball, shoot around, wait for other people to show up, and play some pickup ball. The majority of my closest friends were just people I played basketball with. It didn't need to be this. Richer kids might have been into swimming and water polo. I got into volleyball later and ad hoc sand courts were all over the place. Most of the parks near me also had tennis courts and I played tennis quite a bit. Even the more counter culture kids who weren't into team sports often did some combo of skating, surfing, and snowboarding and bonded over that. Some of this is obviously mediated by where you happen to live. Southern California has a lot of open spaces, beaches and mountains, and the weather is pretty temperate all year. As much as Hacker News laments suburbs, the sprawl also means there are a lot of parks because there is so much space. I've gravitated more toward individual athletic pursuits in middle age, so I'm not really involved in sporting communities any more. Seemingly, though, all this cheap, free to the consumer infrastructure in the form of concrete courts with nets still must exist, no? Nobody ever expected parks to turn a profit. They were just a thing cities and counties were expected to provide out of tax revenue and they're a minuscule portion of that compared to expenditure on schooling and law enforcement at the municipal level. There can't be any economically good reason to put them on the chopping block.
rexpop 2y ago
I believe this is what Marx termed "commodity fetishism" in the first chapter of Capital. > Adorno was born a German Jew at the end of the nineteenth century; he saw Hitler come to power via popular vote; and, in 1941, he was forced to flee Germany for the United States. Once there, however, he observed conditions of isolation and aloofness that made him worry: post-war American culture looked, to his eye, too much like pre-war Germany. The post-war “baby boom” had resulted in the growth of the American suburbs, sprawling sections of land developed for first-place functionality (private residence) and located within commuting distance to second-place nuclei (cities, office buildings, places of work). Adorno watched Americans shuttle back and forth in their cars between work and home, and he critiqued what he saw as ever-deepening habits consistent with conditions of social alienation. “He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest,” Adorno argues in his 1951 work Minima Moralia. In other words, Adorno says, isolation begets feelings of superiority, but not solely because the isolated individual lacks opportunities for comparison; rather, isolation begets superiority because the isolated individual has no audience but himself, no one to receive (and, perhaps, critique) his image of himself, to test whether or not it is even accurate. --Sheila Liming, "Hanging Out" (2023)
tmnvix 2y ago
This was essentially brought to us by neoliberalism. It's covered well in the documentary series 'The Century of The Self' (freely available on YouTube). There are many different definitions of 'left' and 'right'. One perspective that can be useful is to think in terms of 'collective' and 'individualistic'. On this axis, neoliberalism is firmly to the right (not in the centre as is often portrayed). Communities are collective by definition and neoliberalism is inherently anti-community. When I was younger I was always confused by the incessant political drive to 'privatise' everything despite the obvious bad outcomes. On the whole, the cost of services didn't go down, they didn't improve, and they didn't become more efficient. The opposite would happen, despite the promises to the contrary. My eureka moment was when I realised that it really was simply about ideology. The essential aim was not to improve anything. It was to ensure all activity was turned into a 'market transaction' so as to provide those with capital more opportunities to invest. From that point of view, the push for privatisation makes perfect sense. We have been fooled into selling our communities for profit (as if that's the only way to improve our lot).
medion 2y ago
Capitalism has made its way into absolutely everything. Every piece of modern life is financialised and transactional. It is sad and sickening and weird how few even notice it.
verisimi 2y ago
Great response. Yes, corporations and governments aren't great parents. But then neither are parents, if they allow corporations and government free reign over developing minds.
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sologoub 2y ago

To take this a step further, I’d argue such framings encourage either creation or amplification of risk perceptions in order to sell the remedy (and for political gain), at least in the US. Kids aren’t really allowed much autonomy the way even their parents enjoyed. All interactions are in a sense supervised and structured.

RickS 2y ago

This is positively gut wrenching in its accuracy. Really well captured.

hot_gril 2y ago

Anything is economically viable if enough people want it.

meowkit 2y ago
Point == missed Its a tragedy of the commons style problem. The viability has to come from a group effort - as soon as there is a single entity running the show the economic incentives will warp or collapse the 3rd place into something different.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  What single entity did you have in mind? An HOA will spend dues on parks, a regular city will spend taxes on parks. A luxury apartment will have common spaces or even activities. They make these expenditures because enough residents will pay extra for it. And a church will run community events paid for by donations. No "brought to you by Carl's Jr." Tragedy of the commons is when there's no big entity with rules, and everyone does their own thing.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    What often happens in these small community organizations is one or two volunteers join and begin to do a bunch of work to "transform" the organization and expand its reach. They inevitably become "indispensable" to the new organization, which they have wrapped around themselves like a cloak. Then they squeeze it around themselves until everyone leaves and the organization's soul has been sucked out. They move on to other organizations in the same area with a "resume" or "bio." You'll often see these people everywhere in your community, and they may approach you very quickly to get you involved in their organizations. They are in constant need of new volunteers to burn out on their pet projects. They also constantly promote themselves and are always telling you about what they are doing with other organizations both to recruit you and to make sure everyone knows how "indispensable" they are. These people are poisonous to community organizations because they will not abide any consensus-driven process that doesn't lead to agreement with them.
    - hot_gril 2y ago
      Not sure about the resumé part, but I've seen these authoritarian volunteers. They still don't ruin everything. And I think my local church has enough of them that they cancel each other out :D
      - throwway120385 2y ago
        They don't ruin it every time, but I've seen it happen and have also seen the end result and I'm very leery of specific kinds of people in communities I'm new to because of it.

vishnugupta 2y ago

On point and well articulated!

ToucanLoucan 2y ago

This is both a loss in and of itself, and is also a rational response by people within this system. Everything MUST make money because everyone is FUCKING broke. People don't monetize their hobbies for fun, they do it because they're barely scraping by and the notion of spending time on things that don't make money is so beaten out of us that it feels wrong to do it. We can't go anywhere without spending money, we can't do anything without spending money. I shit you not my wife and I wanted to visit a park the other day and realized the parks dept now has paid parking stalls. The PARK. An outdoor space, supposedly paid for by my tax dollars, that because of it's distance from me is not feasible to walk to (and because the streets here are fucking terrifying) now charges me to park my vehicle there, so I can get some nature. Just un-fucking-believably apple pie in the window sill, burgers and fries, fireworks on the fourth American. I am so goddamn tired of every interaction I can have requiring money. I just want somewhere to go that's nice to be that doesn't demand my fucking credit card.

jamil7 2y ago
I think it’s pretty reasonable to expect people with cars to pay for parking?
- ToucanLoucan 2y ago
  At a lot at a shopping mall, sure. At a park in the suburbs, IMO significantly less so. Especially when ostensibly my property taxes are already paying for the fucking park.
  - iwontberude 2y ago
    We should be friends, I like the way you think.
  - collingreen 2y ago
    I understand your frustration but I expect there are a lot of things that go into that decision. I expect adding a fee to parking makes it possible to enforce time limits, to remove squatting, and to ensure there are actually spots available. I doubt it is for the money but even if it is the park systems tend to be horribly underfunded (and often have to be held up with private donation money). A lot of our broken things are because someone with too many responsibilities and too little resources has to make a choice between a bunch of bad options and I wonder if this is similar. From your rant we know you'll pick free open spots compared to paid open spots but what if the choice is between paid open spots and no spots at all? Or worse, paid open spots or shady looking cars parked all day selling drugs? It seems like the more effective change is more parks but imagine the pushback if someone tried suggesting that! You're angry that you already pay taxes and now you have to pay again to have a special spot right at the park you can park your car in. Imagine the backlash if someone had the audacity to suggest raising your taxes for new parks. "I already pay for parks! I won't even use 95% of them! Why should I have to pay just because I'm a homeowner!" I can hear my dads voice saying some of these things and it reminds me of his complaints about funding schools with property taxes and I see how people like him pivot this into "the socialists just trying to punish the straight white men". It all makes me sad.

StopTheWorld 2y ago

Professor Michael Rosenfeld at Stanford does research on how heterosexual couples in the US meet ( https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/ https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/ ). In 1940, over 50% met via friends or family. About 36% met at school. In 2021, about 20% met via friends or family. About 10% met at school. Over 50% met online. So the majority of US couples are now meeting via profit-maximizing corporations. He has a 2019 paper on this (and it has only increased since that paper).

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lawlessone 2y ago
I'm surprised dating sites work well enough that 50% of customers meet via it. They've no incentive to help you leave.
- autoexecbat 2y ago
  They probably have some internal churn targets to hit, else people will start to figure out that the app isn't worth their time and try a different one
  - jprete 2y ago
    That's both a horrible thought and a near-certainty.
  - flappyeagle 2y ago
    It creates a much worse problem actually. Why have a committed relationship when you can always press a button to look at hotties and have a pull at the sex slot machine? If they design the system right, their audience just won't marry or have long term stable relationships
    - kevinob11 2y ago
      I can think of a few reasons why people want (either already or after enough pulls of the slot machine) a committed relationship. Though to be clear, just because I think the other more stable thing is valuable to folks even with the availability of the sex slot machine, I still don't love businesses trying to push slot machines or any kind really.

pickledish 2y ago

If anyone's interesting in reading more along these lines (the weird state we've gotten into where everything in our lives needs to be viewed through an economic lens for some reason, and the damage it causes) -- check out the book "Capitalist Realism" by the late Mark Fisher -- I really enjoyed it! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6763725-capitalist-realism https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6763725-capitalist-reali...

Der_Einzige 2y ago
Why should we recommend yet another example of a postmodernist critical theorist who went crazy and killed either themselves or others? You didn’t learn after althussar, or deleuze, and now you make the same mistakes. Don’t be surprised if it comes out later that he was a child diddler, much as it has for the previously well respected Foucault.

zemvpferreira 2y ago

True. I have personally integrated this idea fully by trying to hire/work with friends and family whenever possible. After years trying to see people weekly and failing miserably, this is best hack I have found. Caveat emptor, takes discipline and patience from everyone but it's great to see loved ones daily, fully engaged in a project. It helps that I can afford to have hobby businesses.

anon291 2y ago
Tell me more? You own businesses and hire your family / friends to work in them?

alexfromapex 2y ago

This is so accurate. There's been lots of talk of enshittification and it really is just everything now. Monetizing the well in modern capitalism means poisoning it. It all can be traced back to lobbying in politics. They need to ban money from politics immediately and everything will improve.

whythre 2y ago
That just means the money moves in stealthier ways. Instead of soft corruption you get hard corruption.
- alexfromapex 2y ago
  Money moves in stealthy ways already, and there are ways to identify that. The problem is the legislature is supposed to be supervising the government entities that pursue financial corruption. Instead of reducing all problems to economic problems, where only the very rich have a voice, we should be encouraging a legislature with integrity to do what is right for everyone.

vegadw 2y ago

What frustrates me is that, it seems (Read as: the following is just my vibe) that the majority of 3rd places left are religious in nature, but I, personally, don't want to be religious or raise children that are. There are some options, of course, but they're limited and often of poor quality, at least locally. Libraries are trying to adapt to fill this gap, and maker spaces spring up but most don't have funding to be good - or if they do, that funding brings things that ruin the spirit. Once you're looking for a place as an Adult, especially without kids, the number of relevant events and things to do drops quickly too - so these same children aren't going to find better options as they grow older.

giobox 2y ago
I've found the only way to make friends/community as an adult outside of religion, at least for me, is to go to events relevant to my hobbies and interests. Yes it's difficult, but communities for just about everything are out there if you put yourself out there. If you choose events that occur regularly I've found you get to know people and make friends just by trying to become a regular face too. If you don't have a hobby/interest with a local group, you can try picking new ones until you find one that clicks too. It does take some effort initially though. The shared interest is critical to removing barriers to making those relationships for me.
phil21 2y ago
The mad rush to as quickly abolish religious practices in mainstream U.S. culture without any form of societal replacement is puzzling to me. I am no fan of religion having grown up in an exceedingly religious environment. But it was always completely obvious to me even as a child that the primary purpose of religion was to form local communities and have others with shared values to rely on. We seem to be doing it with more than just religion these days, but it’s the canary in the coal mine. Lack of investment in your community will very rapidly erode any sort of high trust society you once had within a single generation. Once it’s gone, it’s pretty much gone for good. I believe no one is talking about this aspect of WFH either. It’s taking away maybe the last “socially expected” regular commitment to your local community. Your daily life is not supposed to be lived in complete social comfort with planned interactions with a tiny group of people being your sole source of socialization. At times you should be feeling uncomfortable or obligated in some community or social setting or you are not growing as a human being. I don’t think the office is the best place at all for this, but for many folks I know it was their last social interaction of any sort outside of family. I’ve been unable to articulate these thoughts very well for decades now - since my late high school days I was already the crazy guy telling friends I was really worried how our hobbies and social interactions were so much less investment on average than our grandparents generation. On average having a bunch of Quake guild buddies is simply not the same as my grandpa who had a bunch of fishing buddies. It’s been on my mind for quite some time, and I think the data is starting to show those concerns were legitimate.

jlos 2y ago

> we've doubled down on mediating social interactions through economic relationships We've doubled down on marketplaces to mediate interactions because they are rational systems. Rational systems like marketplaces, elections, and bureaucracies are the sine qua non of liberalism, which both ends of the political spectrum advocate for in their own ways. The right typically advocates more for marketplaces and corporations (i.e. market-based bureaucracies) and the left typically advocates for more government managemeant (election based bureaucracies). Rational systems are in constrast to local cultures based on tradition, biology, and shared history. Its why there is so much homogenization in farming, music, clothing, architecture, etc. The upside is that rational systems allow for scale, propserity, and individual liberty on an unprecedented level. On the downside, rational systems are fundamentally dehumanizing. We mediate everything through marketplaces because we've don't have any place for non-rational organizing principles (locality, biology, shared history, etc)

andrepd 2y ago

It's kinda impressive how often Marx's 19th century diagnoses of the ills of capitalism prove themselves true in the 21st century.

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goethes_kind 2y ago

I'm in my 30s but I'm feeling this so hard. Growing up we used to have these kid/youth centres that were run by local Catholic organizations. We used to hang out there after school. Ostensibly the point was that there'd be 30 minutes of catechism doctrine, but we didn't really care about that. To us it was just a the place where everyone would be. I miss that so much. A place where you can just go and meet people your age, without any reason to be that and without having to pay an entrance fee. Now as a grown up we have community centers, which are run, not by the Church, but by sort of hippie-lefty people. But it's not really the same atmosphere, because you go there, and it's just one demographic of people. It's not quite the same. There's also pubs and climbing gyms which people often use as low effort places where one can mingle, but again, it's not quite the same. I don't like drinking multiple times a week and I really don't like climbing.

fragmede 2y ago
You don't like being drunk that much, or like climbing, but, were your parents really that Catholic? We, as humans, need a dream to build towards, be in service of, and find our place in. What are we doing here and why are we doing it? For those of us who haven't figured it out yet, attaching to someone else's purpose gives us one and we don't have to figure it out ourselves. You need to find religion, just don't call it that. Find your dream that's impossible and work towards making it possible. figure out your role in making that possible. and then work on it. as hard as you can. find others along the way.
- rjzzleep 2y ago
  Parent poster doesn’t want to have to drink to socialize. And bar meets are just that. It’s actually a huge problem in society. Ever stream something or go to the cinema ? What does it show you? You’re happy => you drink to celebrate. You’re sad => drink out of sorrow. You want to hang out with friends => you go for drinks. DEFCON for example perpetuates that same behavior. Sure, one part is loss of community, but the other half is toxic social behavior that is perpetuated by Hollywood. The people that don’t like this but want to belong will perpetuate this cycle for fear of getting ostracized.

benreesman 2y ago

It goes by various names (“trad life”, etc.) but whatever you call it the premise is dystopian and terrifying: people now become celebrity influencers on the back of appearing to live some semblance of a historically normal life. For many that’s now the unattainable dream: a community with values that sit still long enough to even aim at upholding them, a robust partnership early enough in life to start a family the biological way, children who can look forward to the same. On the surface there is a culture war around this, and it’s true that the old model had serious problems with admitting other lifestyles. That needed fixing, but not by obliterating the model that works for most people with overwhelming precedent. The real culprit as always is the “monetization” of everything, a baton that has now firmly been passed from finance people to Silicon Valley people. The #1 post on Y-Combinator’s news site is in some sense the central locus in the observable universe for this.

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andrepd 2y ago

And even "economically viable" here is actually shorthand for "able to provide short-term monetary gain which can be captured by a private entity". Because things like quality education, parks, non-car centric infrastructure, etc. are actually EXCELLENT investments even from an economic perspective.

gary_0 2y ago

A lot of the things people used to do on the Internet for fun, they now do for money or "points" (or the subconscious desire to do for money if they become successful enough). In the past, things you posted online tended to get a small number of manual responses from people you had a chance of forming an actual relationship with. Now, a good deal of interaction is mediated by a corporate algorithm (or an up/downvote button). People are also a lot more aware of automated actors (ie. bots). In general, people seem to do a lot less unstructured leisure activity and social interaction. Quantitative goals are imposed by social expectations, gamified ad-funded software, or economic anxiety. Be sure to like and subscribe.

ChartMaster22 2y ago
You could extend this even further to discussions about media that was traditionally used to escape, like sports, movies, even books. A lot of interactions regarding sports is focused on "advanced analytics" and highlighting obscure data points above all else, e.g., Team X is the fourth team on the West coast since 1970 to score Y points through N games. People rarely talk about how much they enjoy a movie, but everyone is quick to discuss box office numbers and Rotten Tomatoes scores. Books too now have an entire subculture associated with their economic framing ("buy books from local bookstores!") rather than actual discussions of the material.
Ezhik 2y ago
I miss the pointless internet.
- gary_0 2y ago
  Me too. Nowadays if you die on the internet, you die in real life!
- fragmede 2y ago
  https://onecheckbox.com/ https://onecheckbox.com/

notspace 2y ago

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MarkMarine 2y ago

The rise of (lowercase L) liberalism and replacement of feudal society’s requirement that you be part of the community with the commodification of every relationship we have is the root cause here. We’re just late enough in this transition to really feel it, and people are looking at symptoms and seeing cause.

swat535 2y ago

This is so true. I'm a practicing Catholic which gives me the advantage of having access to a big community and I even met my wife through Church events after Mass so it's wonderful. Also our Church offers many other programs like counseling, support groups, volunteering, career opportunities, etc. Of course no one should be forced to attend "Church" just to find a community, that's silly but its benefits are pretty clear. However for non-religious people there is really no third place to meet. Additionally, the truth is that outside of religious communities, people are not having children and thus it creates a further sense of isolation and loneliness. The best one can do is perhaps join meetup groups for hobbies but most of those cost money and may not be welcoming to everyone. I would also say that this can be a cultural phenomenon, for example in my home country (Iran) people are always meeting and socializing, at 10PM streets are bursting with activities and it's very easy to find people to connect with. In the west, unfortunately it's much harder and society is more focused on the individual rather than the collective so to approach a stranger in the street feels like a risk as they might consider your actions rude, disruptive or invading their personal space.

youainti 2y ago
I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, and I have had the same observation as you that the access to community is so helpful.
thatfrenchguy 2y ago
> people are not having children and thus it creates a further sense of isolation and loneliness I don't know about that, I think in the US it's more that parents end up spending more time with other parents than anything, notably because kids are overscheduled, so as a childless person you don't see folks with children as much. > at 10PM streets are bursting with activities and it's very easy to find people to connect with I mean yes, if you have children and you have to be back at work at 9am, most folks aren't going to the bar every day (although those types of people do exist!)

extr 2y ago

Even economically mediated third places are being phased out in some respects. When I was a teen we often hung out at a local McDonalds. Super cheap food, free refills, as long as you didn't cause trouble you could stay for awhile. I went back there somewhat recently and I was shocked at the difference. It's been remodeled to have less seating, no refills, most of the lobby/counter area is touchscreens, and of course prices are way, way up compared to when I was a teen (which was not THAT long ago). It felt sterile inside, it was clear they didn't want you hanging out for long. Not a teen in sight.

neuralRiot 2y ago
I have seen some cities building skate and bike parks, I love seeing kids and teens doing physical activities with friends.
SoftTalker 2y ago
Teens also used to work at McDonalds. Now it's middle aged people who look and act like life has been kicking them in the face since they were born. I also used to eat there quite often but I almost never go now because I don't like waiting 10 or 15 minutes for a sullen, indifferent person to hand me a bag of food that might or might not contain what I ordered and like you said the prices are crazy.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  That’s a sign of a good economy. The “hot waiter/waitress” index is real as hell in economic circles for a reason.

vel0city 2y ago

I constantly see people lament some loss of "free" third places that apparently used to exist and be so common but no longer exist. What are these free third places which used to but no longer exist?

probably_wrong 2y ago
When I was a child my parents used to sit in front of our house and drink tea. The neighbors would do the same and all children would play together. But thanks to longer working hours and the fear induced by the 24/7 news cycle no one dares sit outside anymore. My nieces don't know their neighbors. When I was a teenager there was a specific square where one would go after school (or during if you skipped class that day). As far as I know my nieces don't have such a tradition. Less clear example: in my country of origin those living in apartments used to have monthly meetings to discuss any issues they had about the building. People used to complain going to those, but at least you'd get an overview of who is who. I believe these meetings are gone, replaced by email. No one complains about them anymore but, at the same time, no one knows who their apartment neighbors are.
- vel0city 2y ago
  My children are still a bit too young, but there are lots of kids that play in my neighborhood in DFW. The city park at the end of my street has families playing, people out walking their dogs, fishing in the ponds. People play sports at the fields in the park. People hang out on their front patios when it's not 100F outside, have trunk or treats at the park, etc. The apartments I've lived in the past several years had get together events from time to time. I also met a lot of neighbors going to the gym or hanging out around the pool or playing billiards in the clubhouse. None of this seems radically rare from my experiences in Houston and DFW.
- latency-guy2 2y ago
  > But thanks to longer working hours Average amount of time spent working has trended downwards for nearly every income group for every decade except at best the last decade where it's been stabilizing around ~33 to 36 hours a week or 1700 - 1800 hours a year. I'm not specifying a country because I don't have to, the only country that has actually trended upwards in working hours is China.

panta 2y ago

Very true. Long term effects are often neglected when framing considerations from a purely economic perspective, especially when these are externalized costs, like public health.

weitendorf 2y ago

IMO the two culprits are high rents and efficient capital markets. Definitely many factors contributing to the first, but one of them is also the efficiency of capital markets. Basically it's too expensive to make spaces available for below market rate due to the direct cost of rents (a middle or upper-middle class person could drop $1000/month on a passion project, but not so easily $5k/month) and there's a very high opportunity cost to forgoing revenue/profit, because you can find buyers willing to buy you out for 3-25x incremental profit. That opportunity cost makes it tempting for any community space to instead chase profit. But it also makes non-residential property more expensive because you're bidding against companies that are able to convert incremental $1000/mo profit to $50k-100k in realized value, even if you aren't intending to do that. Rents themselves are very competitive not just from low supply but also because technology has made the rental market very "efficient"/liquid - it's easy to market a property and accurately price it, so sweetheart deals/underpriced leases are difficult to find. Plus rental properties themselves have been very well financialized as well - increases in incremental revenue/profit of commercial real estate can be recognized as many-times-more increases in equity by lenders, which can be accessed by loaning against the equity. So sweetheart deals are more costly to lessors than before.

gen220 2y ago
I don’t remember where I read this, but I remember reading recently how somebody justified their decision to leave “the city” to move to a rural area, with the phrase “I was tired of competing with my neighbors”. I they were trying to convey sense you describe, of intense economic pressure to make a certain income to pay for a certain living or working space, or alternatively be kicked out because there are ten people in line waiting to take your space. Perhaps a healthy culture cannot survive this degree of “efficiency”.

nonameiguess 2y ago

A lot of people seem to cite religious communities, if anything. It's consistently odd to me that no one on Hacker News ever seems to have been into sports. For me, the third places and communities of my youth were all oriented around some kind of physical athletic activity. This was mostly basketball personally, presumably because I passed 6 feet tall in 7th grade. Every park in the area and every school had outdoor courts and you'd just go down there early in the day with a ball, shoot around, wait for other people to show up, and play some pickup ball. The majority of my closest friends were just people I played basketball with. It didn't need to be this. Richer kids might have been into swimming and water polo. I got into volleyball later and ad hoc sand courts were all over the place. Most of the parks near me also had tennis courts and I played tennis quite a bit. Even the more counter culture kids who weren't into team sports often did some combo of skating, surfing, and snowboarding and bonded over that. Some of this is obviously mediated by where you happen to live. Southern California has a lot of open spaces, beaches and mountains, and the weather is pretty temperate all year. As much as Hacker News laments suburbs, the sprawl also means there are a lot of parks because there is so much space. I've gravitated more toward individual athletic pursuits in middle age, so I'm not really involved in sporting communities any more. Seemingly, though, all this cheap, free to the consumer infrastructure in the form of concrete courts with nets still must exist, no? Nobody ever expected parks to turn a profit. They were just a thing cities and counties were expected to provide out of tax revenue and they're a minuscule portion of that compared to expenditure on schooling and law enforcement at the municipal level. There can't be any economically good reason to put them on the chopping block.

rexpop 2y ago

I believe this is what Marx termed "commodity fetishism" in the first chapter of Capital. > Adorno was born a German Jew at the end of the nineteenth century; he saw Hitler come to power via popular vote; and, in 1941, he was forced to flee Germany for the United States. Once there, however, he observed conditions of isolation and aloofness that made him worry: post-war American culture looked, to his eye, too much like pre-war Germany. The post-war “baby boom” had resulted in the growth of the American suburbs, sprawling sections of land developed for first-place functionality (private residence) and located within commuting distance to second-place nuclei (cities, office buildings, places of work). Adorno watched Americans shuttle back and forth in their cars between work and home, and he critiqued what he saw as ever-deepening habits consistent with conditions of social alienation. “He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest,” Adorno argues in his 1951 work Minima Moralia. In other words, Adorno says, isolation begets feelings of superiority, but not solely because the isolated individual lacks opportunities for comparison; rather, isolation begets superiority because the isolated individual has no audience but himself, no one to receive (and, perhaps, critique) his image of himself, to test whether or not it is even accurate. --Sheila Liming, "Hanging Out" (2023)

tmnvix 2y ago

This was essentially brought to us by neoliberalism. It's covered well in the documentary series 'The Century of The Self' (freely available on YouTube). There are many different definitions of 'left' and 'right'. One perspective that can be useful is to think in terms of 'collective' and 'individualistic'. On this axis, neoliberalism is firmly to the right (not in the centre as is often portrayed). Communities are collective by definition and neoliberalism is inherently anti-community. When I was younger I was always confused by the incessant political drive to 'privatise' everything despite the obvious bad outcomes. On the whole, the cost of services didn't go down, they didn't improve, and they didn't become more efficient. The opposite would happen, despite the promises to the contrary. My eureka moment was when I realised that it really was simply about ideology. The essential aim was not to improve anything. It was to ensure all activity was turned into a 'market transaction' so as to provide those with capital more opportunities to invest. From that point of view, the push for privatisation makes perfect sense. We have been fooled into selling our communities for profit (as if that's the only way to improve our lot).

medion 2y ago

Capitalism has made its way into absolutely everything. Every piece of modern life is financialised and transactional. It is sad and sickening and weird how few even notice it.

verisimi 2y ago

Great response. Yes, corporations and governments aren't great parents. But then neither are parents, if they allow corporations and government free reign over developing minds.

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