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“The mass phenomenon of loneliness...has achieved its most extreme and antihuman form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world.”

Ted Gioia • What You Can Learn from Just Seven Pages by Hannah Arendt

Democratic erosion coincides with shortage of democratic practice when social life migrates online.

Nathan Schneider • Governable Spaces: Democratic Design for Online Life

This is how algorithmic normalization happens. Normal is a word for the unobtrusive and average, whatever won’t provoke negative reactions. Whichever content fits in that zone of averageness sees accelerated promotion and growth, like “Strange” did, while the rest falls by the wayside. As fewer people see the content that doesn’t get promoted, ther

Kyle Chayka • Filterworld

“In the tech world, people crash and burn quickly, but the idea of these controlled micro-communities is something that will persist,” Eichhorn says.

Tanya Basu • Why private micro-networks could be the future of how we connect

dismantling institutions they could produce communities: face-to-face relations of trust and solidarity, relations constantly negotiated and renewed, a communal realm in which people became sensitive to one another's needs.

Richard Sennett • The Culture of the New Capitalism

cities should be designed for people,

John A. McArthur • Digital Proxemics: How Technology Shapes the Ways We Move (Digital Formations Book 110)

Zooming out: great communities, in the traditional sense, required limited options so people would remain dependent: no specialists or external trade (to ensure we all collectively worked together), and no diversity or weird ideas (to ensure a homogenous group with a focus on tradition). We had far worse medical treatment, underwent excruciating ma... See more

Erik Torenberg • Markets and Communities

Now we know that the suburban environmentalists had it backward. Manhattan and downtown

Edward Glaeser • Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

A lucky few, larger cities—some of the heroes of this book—have already attracted so many well-off people into their downtowns and close-in neighborhoods that these places are in danger of becoming social monocultures. Despite their wealth, these can also be detrimental to street life, since yuppie overachievers tend to spend less time in the publi