How Communities Die

A “gossip trap”   is when your whole world doesn’t exceed Dunbar’s number and to organize your society you are forced to discuss mostly people. It is  Mean Girls  (and mean boys), but forever. And yes, gossip can act as a leveling mechanism and social power has a bunch of positives—it’s the stuff of life, really. But it’s a terrible

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Society can be destroyed when further growth of mass production renders the milieu hostile, when it extinguishes the free use of the natural abilities of society’s members, when it isolates people from each other and locks them into a man-made shell, when it undermines the texture of community by promoting extreme social polarization and splinterin

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The upshot is this: Communities and cults are both valid and reasonable ways to organize social structures. Flat communities worked well in the early internet of high barriers to participation and limited people and content. Hierarchical cults work better today, when the internet has a plethora of content and people, and all those barriers have fal... See more