The Non-Fungible Nature of Communities: How Tech Platforms Misunderstand Social Bonds
By
tardibear
3mo ago· 9 min readenInsight
75/100
Toasty
Bagelometer↗
Right out the toaster. Reliable, with some real depth.
Score75TypeanalysisSentimentnegative
Summary
The article critiques Silicon Valley's approach to community-building, arguing that tech companies treat communities as fungible assets that can be replaced or replicated through metrics and algorithms. It contrasts this with urban planning perspectives that recognize communities as unique entities shaped by shared history, space, and context. The piece explores how tech platforms misunderstand the organic, non-fungible nature of real communities and the limitations of trying to engineer social connections at scale.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledThere's a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you 'lose' one, you can manufacture a replacement
Economists have a word for assets that can be swapped one-for-one without loss of value: fungible. A dollar is fungible. A barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude is fungible.
that the value of a group of people who share space and history can be captured in a metric and deployed at scale
A mass of people bound together by years of shared context
There's a default assumption baked into how Silicon Valley builds products, and it tracks against how urban planners redesign neighbourhoods: that communities are interchangeable, and if you "lose" one, you can manufacture a replacement; that the value of
