9 September

Anybody dealing with the public now is feeling this every day. They’re under assault. As the article says, it got a lot worse after the lockdowns. Often this is given as a reason we shouldn’t have locked down, but then those who say that never give a reason why not going to work or school for a while would make people like this. There’s a very obvious reason though. The distinction between vertical (online) and horizontal (the town you live in) communities I’ve posted about. During lockdowns people joined and/or extended their allegiance to online vertical communities. That became even more their real community, to them. Vertical communities have none of the usual community values or practices that keep horizontal communities running. They mostly just love to fight, against other vertical communities. Everything is a war to them, a battle for status and identity. And that’s now overflowed back into the horizontal communities, which are struggling to even exist. I know right from the heart of one town that the governance and stability of a horizontal community is collapsing. The town ‘Bathurst’ is becoming not much more than a whole collection of battling social media groups. Listening to their respective podcasts, drinking expensive coffee, and abusing every older horizontal institution trying to keep the town running.