Community Against Scale
I’m starting to incorporate the trajectory of what happened with “spirituality-posting” in my internet neighborhood into my understanding of how religious community works, and it’s beginning to make a lot more sense.
It’s perfectly natural that it started off very legible and specific and gradually retreated into simple slices of life and accompanying in-jokes. I didn’t realize why at first, but now I do.
It’s not “community” if it is held together by rote behaviors. It requires continuous, mutual affirmation and adjustment. The particulars serve to condense the sites of that work, to make them tractable. They don’t stand in for doing it, though, and they don’t matter as much as the signs of work themselves.
The thing that happened here, online, is that we had to find the people who were doing the work first, and we did. After that, it was clear who was doing the work behind the legible signals and who wasn’t.
The proof of this is that more others still do continue to find us, one at a time, because they already get the jokes.
That is, the quality of people is increasing over time.
That’s the sign of a healthy and growing ritual community. It’s very satisfying to stop and appreciate!
This is why this kind of community cannot be built in an environment governed by algorithmic sorting of people and messages. Relying on machine learning for pre-processing of culture is an outcome of social laziness. It’s an alternative to doing the work.
Humanity’s cultural algorithm is built into its process of culture-making. It’s called “relationships.” And those require shared context and ongoing work in a way that stands opposed to viral scaling.
I think Dunbar’s number is probably a little small for our actual optimal community capacity, maybe with a little technological augmentation, but it does seem like there’s some kind of Conservation of Virtue principle that applies to roles that hit right around there.
It’s not just that that’s how many people you can know. It’s that that’s how many people with whom you can be mutually responsible for each other in roles that are socially satisfying.
