14/ As I’ve been saying since one of my early Breaking Smart essays, geography is the strongest filter bubble (credit for this insight to ). But we now know a shit ton more about why this is and what the consequences are.
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15/ In-person interactions are powerfully human, and add massive weight to belief structures. Picking up a fake news opinion from some rando is one thing. Having it then reinforced by your 10 lifelong neighbors who also picked it up and internally flesh it out... explosive.
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16/ We’ve all seen this. It’s especially obvious in (for example) the things our old relatives forward. Everybody above 70 is apparently on the same email lists and they all live next to each other.
But it’s not a problem of age. It’s a problem of cognitive mobility.
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17/ Cognitive mobility is probably a lousy term but I can’t think of a better one. Something about how much variety there is in the minds that most powerfully reshape/reweight your beliefs.
One in-person interaction counts for like 10-100 online, for the same belief.
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18/ What can we do about this? You can’t just yell at people “choose Atomization over Circled Wagons” and you can’t guarantee that a more open response to digital forces will lead to Resurrection rather than death.
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19/ You also can’t deny the strong need for physical community with “just get some VR goggles and get in the Nozick experience machine already.”
Human desire for physical community is a predictor for adaptation success. Less desire = more success at the moment.
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20/ In terms of adaptive fitness in digitally transformed social landscapes, the total pole of psychological health is probably Resurrected > Precipitated > Atomized > Circled Wagons.
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21/ This adaptation scale is partly due to the fact that those who most strongly desire physical community are also the most scared of losing it, and therefore scared to try bolder cultural practices of transformation that risk death of the community.
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22/ For Circled Wagon types, fear of ending up Atomized far exceeds allure of ending up Resurrected, so they largely don’t try. Stick to the community forms you know.
Except for alienated kids in basements who know they have too many decades of life left for it to work out.
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23/ An interesting tech challenge is working more on Resurrection and Precipitation products. This might increase the confidence of Circled Wagon types, assuage their (unacknowledged under bluster) fears and give them the sense of security to try more open adaptation.
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24/ It is really pathetic that in the last couple of decades the best we’ve been able to do with Precipitation tech is meetup dot com.
There is no good Resurrection tech that I know of, besides randomly finding old school friends you actually want to reconnect with on Facebook.
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25/ Until there are products that better meet this need, we’ll keep having to deal with entrenched Circled Wagons. They’ll continue to die slowly, painfully, and angrily. With their Boomer edge eventually dying and leaving behind a radicalized youth in unviable/unlivable towns.
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Good sir what about online dating?! That has got to be the biggest win of precipitation tech. Maybe you opted out of that game early :P
There's been a couple LA based efforts to find new people via digital things though seemed to have largely failed: beta.techcrunch.com/2013/11/07/soc
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Haha yes I met my wife IRL :)
Agreed, it’s a huge precipitation tech, but for n=2, so not quite community-seeding.
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Looking forward, this isn't a pure tech so much as tech + institutions game IMHO. Schools are a great example. Done right there's an opportunity to reinvent public schools as centers of community and use digital tools to enable lifelong learning.
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WhatsApp does this job quite well in India. For every old physical community I was a part of (including some from 35 years ago) I'm on a WhatsApp group. And mini reunions get organized whenever one person is visiting a town with a critical mass of people.
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