community

Community, Circa 2024: A Field Report from the Glorious Ruins of Togetherness
By L. M. Valdez, Foreign Correspondent, presently somewhere between a WeWork in Singapore and a refugee tent in Gaziantep

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The word “community” once conjured images of kindly grandmothers swapping soup recipes over white picket fences. Today, the same word is more likely to summon a Slack notification at 2 a.m. from a DAO treasury working group debating whether to spend 200,000 USDC on a pixelated ape mascot. Somewhere between those two data points, humanity misplaced the instruction manual on how to actually live next to one another without monetizing eyeballs or weaponizing empathy.

From the kibbutzim of Israel—now partially converted to gated tech accelerators—to the bodega-lined blocks of Brooklyn where neighbors communicate exclusively via passive-aggressive Post-it Notes, the global experiment in communal living has mutated into a Rorschach blot. Everyone sees what they need to see: venture capitalists see “network effects,” populists see “voting blocs,” and your aunt in Manila sees a Facebook group where people still type “Amen” under photos of strangers’ tumors.

Take Singapore, that air-conditioned petri dish of technocratic aspiration. The Housing Development Board assigns neighbors by ethnic quota, which sounds dystopian until you remember the city hasn’t had a race riot since color television was futuristic. Meanwhile, in Sweden’s “Egalia” preschools, staff avoid gendered pronouns so aggressively that toddlers reportedly refer to fire trucks as “it-objects.” Both societies claim to be building inclusive communities. Both also report record antidepressant sales. Correlation is not causation, but it is terrific branding.

Zoom out and the contradictions multiply like conspiracy theories on Telegram. In Rwanda, President Kagame’s monthly Umuganda community clean-ups boast participation rates most democracies reserve for tax audits. Streets are swept, ditches are dug, and any citizen who opts out risks a friendly visit from the neighborhood surveillance committee—proving that community spirit is most efficient when backed by the gentle persuasion of state apparatus. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the United States has pioneered the “gated community,” a place where the houses are close enough to smell your neighbor’s truffle-oil popcorn but legally distant enough that you never have to learn their pronouns.

Refugee camps—those involuntary flash mobs of displacement—offer the clearest stress test. In Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, 900,000 Rohingya share 26 square kilometers and a single dream: leaving. Yet even here, micro-economies bloom: barbers, madrassas, and an informal Grindr grid coded in emoji to dodge taboo. Community, stripped of mortgages and Instagram handles, becomes a matter of who will lend you phone charge and who won’t steal your tarp when the monsoon hits. It’s vicious, fragile, and—if you squint—almost beautiful.

Western charities parachute in with “community-building workshops,” distributing flipcharts and markers like communion wafers. Refugees nod politely, then return to the urgent project of not dying. The irony is lost on no one except the consultants.

Of course, the digital realm promises transcendence. Here, 14-year-olds in Lagos trade crypto tips with retirees in Ohio while bonding over their shared hatred of NFT rugs. Discord servers have replaced bowling leagues; moderators are the new parish priests, handing out timeouts instead of penance. Yet even the cloud has gated neighborhoods. Blue-check Twitter stands above the frothing masses like a medieval keep, occasionally lowering the drawbridge to toss down a ratio.

And so we arrive at the meta-irony: never have humans been more densely networked, and never have so many felt so atomized that they pay $12.99 a month for Calm-app narrations of Matthew McConaughey whispering that they are, in fact, alright, alright, alright.

Conclusion
Community, it turns out, is not a place or a platform but a desperate improvisational theater where the script is rewritten nightly. Some nights it’s a potluck, other nights a pogrom. The props change—fiber-optic cables, refugee tarps, HOA fines—but the plot remains: a species trying to figure out how to share oxygen without eating one another. We may not succeed, but the ratings are fantastic.