The thing that holds all societies together is providing opportunities for people to connect. To create…
The thing that holds all societies together is providing opportunities for people to connect. To create community. Without it things like this happen, people can be dead for years and nobody even notices. Social media pitched itself at this gap. Its community is fake. /1 https://t.co/bqE4BnTZv9
Community is not something that sits alongside work. Work is a dominant venue for community life. But an economy says ‘go to where the jobs are’. It has zero care for actual physical community, the whole function of an economy is to delocalise. FIFO. And social media? /2
No doubt people connect there, I do too. But does it translate into the actual physical communities inside which we all actually live? Every community I observe is being torn apart by interest groups, who mobilise on social media. The righteousness is scary to watch. /3
While communities crumble, these interest groups bully, harass, obstruct, all because to them their cause is sacrosanct. To hell with a functioning community, their ‘team’ has to win. *That’s* what overflows into actual community life. Vicious, zealous zombies. /4
As our actual collective mechanisms have been dismantled, people have re-grouped around isolated issues, which they then inject with all of the anger deriving from their dismantled community lives. Team sports, like I always say. Only the team winning matters. /5
Why we can’t even fight a pandemic. Because every even tiny practical methodology, used for generations to fight infectious disease, is immediately turned into a new game of team sports. A fake binary, with a team on either end of the binary. Masks or no-masks. Etc. /6
Now the assault is on, on working from home. Because the thing the economy can never allow is any sort of meaningful sense of territory. Of home. That gets in the way of the great delocalisation, the mobilisation of people and resources. More community smashing. /7
People get up and seriously say that without going to work, people have no life and are at risk of poor physical and mental health. What does that say about the communities in which they live? Destroyed, by the economy. And work doesn’t give a shit. /8
At best you may get referral to an EAP. As if there’s something wrong with you. None of this is capitalism or neoliberalism or all those big juicy -ism words. It’s much simpler, it’s the absence of basic community. People who grow up without one reproduce that absence. /9
It’s all they know. They reproduce the only social structure they know. High school. Popularity-driven social status. That’s our life now, in this fantasy fiction we call an economy. /end