Hi friends,
Hello world. What words do we have left to greet the world? What is civic responsibility in the face of attack? What is collective organizing in the face of despair and disparity? (For anyone who stumbles on this at a later date, Russia invaded Ukraine the week before publishing.)
On the note of the collective…I bring you friends who talk about the messy, unscalable intimacy of community, as it relates to our digital worlds. Read in full; you won't regret it. Trails we meander down:
- The role of tech in digital communities
- The contrasting incentives of public welfare and private capital
- What participation and investment looks like - touching on a bias we're seeing in looking to solutions through a web3 model - and how does work and value fit into this vs. belonging
- Increasing accessibility to emerging tech
Contributors:
- Words: Jessica Waal is a designer, strategist and educator working in systems and innovation. Originally from Perth, she worked with IDEO in New York City and is currently at Frog in Amsterdam. She's happiest in the garden.
- Words: Vicky Gu is an editor, designer, and strategist based in Brooklyn, with roots in Dallas and Shanghai. She's working on being available for the art she was meant to make.
- Art: Nya, the Pawfessional Cat is an arrtist making many happy accidents running across her hooman Anya’s work. All work and no play makes 100% hooman but a terrible cat, so cats everywhere demand to play more. (Ed note: based in Singapore.)
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INT. HOME OFFICE - MORNING IN NYC / AFTERNOON IN AMS. WE OPEN in a WhatsApp chat on an uncharacteristically warm February Friday, at least for New York. JESS and VICKY engage in introductory banter on the digital proverbial stage, a secret conversation about autism and conditioned performance that has meandered into the topic du jour.
Jess: cue COMMUNITY! love a segue. ps. i apologize for the many typos that will happen today
Vicky: no apologies, just joy
Jess: yes - let's move forward with Joy - love that
Vicky: to kick us off, i'm going to reshare one of your original thoughts from our brainstorm:
Jess: on community - there's this gap and i haven't figured out how to clearly articulate it. there's my lived experience of community - which is loving, messy, painfully human, requires vulnerability and the expression of need as well as the grace of accepting help, and has traditionally relied so much on lucky interactions and introductions. to this new online world which has a very intentional sense of community and a less human, unfamiliar interface to navigate.
Vicky: i love this starting thought of yours and how it encapsulates the tension in community. first responding with some slides from a presentation i stumbled on from Goldie "Red" Burns, who was a chair of the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. (she was known as the "Godmother of Silicon Alley", New York's technology district.)
Jess: let's start with a slow clap for that deck. what a treat to have those single considered thoughts linked across 100 pages…
Vicky: so, i love her ethos - though that slide on "enhancing the human spirit" makes me hesitate because of how we're seeing companies interpret that in ways that might not be…fully grounded in raw, gritty, lived experience? visionary but sometimes exclusionary?
Jess: for me, the tech we're using is at most a facilitator for the exchange and interactions that build relationships.
Vicky: mmm yes. so right now my mind is thinking about two differing takes on social relationships - one from a public welfare perspective, and one from the private profit perspective.
backing up: in college, i interned under dr. vivek murthy, then the 19th US surgeon general (also now our current 21st!), and i distinctly remember how increasing emotional well being and decreasing social isolation were big on his public health priorities.
in his book Together, he shares his dream for a third bowl society:
"What [a third-bowl society] looks like is organizations that build and design workplaces to strengthen human connection by creating opportunities for people to truly understand each other as human beings, not just as skill sets. It looks like schools that invest in social and emotional learning so they can give children a foundation for how to build healthy relationships. It looks like neighborhoods where we put more of a premium on reaching out to and getting to know neighbors. It looks like a society that recognizes that we are truly interdependent creatures who need each other, which means that there are times when we have the ability to serve and times where we need to be served."
then i juxtapose that with an a16z published piece on "go-to-community" strategy being the new "go-to-market" strategy. look at this contrast! it's jarring, it's fascinating:
"Community is the “new” moat (or so some have said), and it’s true: Having a community helps protect against competitor companies or products entering your territory. Whether that community is a group of power users, open source contributors, creators, or even just a brand (or franchise)’s super fans, it lends greater brand awareness, higher switching costs, and scale economies."
Jess: what an internship! how do we manage the tensions between these two: the search for human connection vs. the commoditization of the collective.
i see it in my work. in the companies that hire design to build community around their brand / product. for me, it's an inside/out notion. the brands want to build relevance and engage with a customer. we/designers try to connect them to actual customers and their needs, behaviours and aspirations. we then build something to unite this group. but in reality, nobody really has a relationship with a “company” - it's always people at the end of the day.
which is why tools and platforms - facilitators - seem to be emerging with less of a brand agenda. well, some…i'm being hopeful with that “agenda” bit. the shift to communities being "empowered" is interesting to me.
Vicky: yes, i think it'd be interesting to talk to someone at discord about the incentives behind how they build their platform, given their $982.6M funding. because at this point - as someone who's managed communities and social media professionally - my relationship with social media is transactional at best. i have no interest in using social media 1.0 for community building, but discord (social media 2.0 / 3.0?) changes things.
Jess: …and what's your motivation for building community first if you already have that money?
Vicky: the money! let's talk about the money!
Jess: bridging this is a challenge for me. as a designer, i’m often trying to simplify interactions. but when we’re motivated by curiosity, enjoyment - like you say on discord - it's the result of planning but also serendipity. it's hours of exploring, playing, diving down rabbit holes. heaps of reading and listening then maybe participating. this experience of community isn't about scale or speed, and certainly not the $$$ 🤣
Vicky: yes, and the blasted part is that given what today's work does (when i say work i'm referring to white collar, knowledge workers who can do their jobs remotely) - it sucks out the energy for us to do things like…read fiction! for fun! for nothing! even with tv - some days i have no energy to watch happy people do happy things (e.g. great british bake off) or bad people do bad things (e.g. succession).
Jess: YES. this is a conversation i have with a lot of people. when did this happen to us?! time can sometimes get a bit distorted even if i’m working on things i like…because at the end of the day, i just have to get away from a screen. and it takes a lot of will to remember it would also be a cool idea to hang out with friends. because so often i think of all the other “productive” things i think i should / could / need to be doing.
does productivity kill community? i guess it makes it less accessible.
Vicky: zooming out a bit, i think of it like: shared drive unites community. and when that drive is sincere - which we often hear as "authentic" or "genuine" - that's where we see "productive" movement evolve in natural response. but if you try to reverse engineer it by uniting people around productivity - well, that's not a real conviction. the most effective drivers in my experience are deep dark things like pain and suffering, or blinding bright things like freedom and redemption. what we define as “ambition” - sometimes i wonder, where is the broken heart? when is ambition not just a flashy veneer of lukewarm fear?
circling back to community and incentive - i just remembered something i previously pitched to real life mag, here's a selected blurb:
You don't have to work in social media to intuit that "community management" too often stands as a euphemism for "customer and audience acquisition." We don't need more words on the trappings of social platforms, or brand marketers to articulate (or manufacture) reasons to organize; we need new language for sore eyes, minds, and souls.
Of course, tech-smart companies are very excited about the future of digital organizing, especially as a function of creative media. Democratize, decentralize. (But don't unionize!) Experimental developers, artists, and publishers have moved from Web2 to Web3, building alluring packages around collective mobilizing: decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) fueled by blockchain.
Yet similar to how the decentralized web didn’t work as we expected—the urgency to usher in this new paradigm trivializes cost and labor, to earth and society. Do we trust ourselves to build more equitable collectives out of the dust?
Still, the dream contains wisps of truth. It'd indeed be exciting to see new community models mature into fluid equilibrium. Imagine a world where we weave between wild, uninhibited digital spaces that value us for our humanity, not our wallets or clicks.
But long after the waves of COVID are quelled, Americans will still be dealing with the loneliness epidemic. Millions will not be able to afford the price of belonging that DAOs command, in this generation or the next or the next. Creators will continue organizing and forming alternate economies as an alternate to crypto economies. (Meta, they call it.)
Jess: we all acknowledge there has to be a more sustainable approach for creation and building collective value. the current DAO space feels like an early iteration of that. it's just incredibly skewed in a DeFi space that still requires a level of technical literacy and financial backing to participate - at least when it comes to governance. i know there's onboarding collectives popping up… but i hope, long term, we get smaller communities building their own models and internally circulating their own exchange of value. and that the tech is sitting in the background - servicing the contractual side of things.
Vicky: ah yes, that reminds me of this piece on how web3 is a backend revolution. it's just a clunky hypey path to getting there.
Jess: we bridge this with huge investments - time, intention… and yeah money - into accessibility and building a shared understanding/language for forms of value other than money.
anyone can set up a DAO. but finding the right people to moderate a discord that grows a community is a whole other challenge. I've started seeing job descriptions popping up around community managers in web3 and thought it was interesting.
Vicky: i've recruited for community roles with VC backed software companies, and a convo i am adamant about emphasizing is the vast amounts of emotional labor involved. it mirrors historical roles in press or social media. part of the job is being people's paid best friends.
Jess: super interesting… why brands try to personify companies - so they can create a "relationship" with people. the whole time there are two humans trying to wizard-of-oz-style facilitate some kind of connection.
Vicky: i thought about this all the time with working with brands - like when "brands" are friends, when you pull back the curtains it's often just the social media managers because they're literally the ones sending the messages to each other.
Jess: would love if the brands could just go make friends with each other please. More entertaining and valuable than targeted advertising shouting at us.
Vicky: "go make friends" like a parent sending their kid off to 1st grade :')
now i'm looking at an event from that On Deck page you linked, called "Fireside Chat: Scaling Intimacy with top VP of Community" and it reminds me of this piece on carceral tech and community defense in Logic Mag, wherein sarah t. hamid talks about the care involved in the "scale" of activism:
"Our work happens at this scale. The scale of friends, family, and loved ones. And yes, the answers often point to the role of giant sociotechnical systems. But we’re answering individual questions. And we’re doing it because we care about the people we are in community with, not because we’re trying to develop the best idea to sell a book. Our intervention is effective when we’re able to find the knowledge that allows people to enact meaningful change in their lives."
and going back to your point on accessibility, i think a lot about this concept of belonging and community applied specifically to the digital space. as a conventionally able bodied and able minded person, i have the fortune to operate in physical spaces and find incredible people and rich worlds in front of my eyes. it's interesting that most of the messaging and marketing i see from web3 companies operate from an assumption that our digital lives will become very important - perhaps even more important in some areas - than our physical lives. (the things covid has accelerated!)
that may be true for people who have the wealth and literacy to participate, but there are so many people - for example, the 37.2 million Americans in poverty in 2022 (11.4% of our population) - for whom digital lives will not carry significance anytime soon. for whom signaling digital belonging is not a priority over say, eating consistently nutritious meals.
Jess: 🤣 still recovering from "scaling intimacy"…i wonder is this the "right" / best goal for us in community building?
Vicky: i think community builders - at least those involved with private capital - need new language for what we're doing.
Jess: amen. language is really at the heart of connecting and making shared meaning.
Vicky: i get what they're trying to communicate but if we look at nonprofits, grassroots organizers, co-ops, faith groups…people have been engaging in these communal, collective ways for centuries (millennia?) already.
Jess: is the scale approach better represented by developing something which provides great value for the group and then opening it up? sharing it out as a tool and using that as the basis (platform) for connection rather than this branded membership view?
Vicky: yes and recognizing that sometimes it's the unsexy stuff that needs to scale first. pleasing packaging and polish is a nice-to-have.
Jess: yes! and in these groups, we get to grapple with the really interesting tensions like the need for autonomy and freedom of expression while balancing it with collective belonging…
Vicky: going back to how good design is about how it works, not how it looks.
Jess: form follow function 4eva
Jess: *follows
Vicky: no no leave the typo, we are beautiful imperfections tehe
Jess: so many other thoughts to add. think we could have this chat in 12 months and it would be an entirely different view…i guess we'll see!
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