Essays From West of 98: The Art of Community Building
We live in a world of automation. Community defies that.
In the early 2000s, office supply company Staples introduced an advertising campaign centered around the “Easy Button.” This fictional button would instantly provide the Staples customer with whatever item or service was needed. Fantastical as it was, the “Easy Button” was a metaphor (intentional or not) for decades of technological innovation. If the modern consumer wants it, they generally want it immediately. Microwaves, fast food, Amazon Prime, streaming television, and more are manifestations of this ideal. These conveniences are not necessarily bad, but I have been thinking about how it translates through the rest of society. Plenty of inventors, investors, and dreamers see automation as the solution to everything. Let the machines do the work, make the decisions, and determine the path. If the decision does not pass the muster of automated decision-making, it is not worthwhile.
Instead of showing us what our friends post, social media companies use machine algorithms to show us what they think we want to see. Factories continually become more automated to dispense with the messiness of employing human beings who are susceptible to illness or exhaustion. Financiers use computer analysis to determine the value of investments and credit worthiness, to avoid alleged human bias. Even now, companies are creating artificial intelligence systems that can substitute for humans in complicated writing.
This all came to my mind recently when I was exchanging letters with a friend (more on that in a future essay). My friend wrote me a letter that included commentary on a new housing development near his hometown. Thousands of people would reside in this proposed subdivision, commute daily to the nearest large city for their 8-5 job, and then commute home. In my response, I wrote about how this development was surely a good investment. The developers had run the numbers, surely with the aid of computer analysis. They knew the costs and the expected return on their investment. If it was not a good investment, they would not build it, plain and simple.
And I thought about how this contrasted with communities like Stamford. To be sure, many older communities arose as a good investment (or were sold as such). Promoters from “back East” bought cheap land and established new towns to make a buck. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t, and sometimes the promoters were hucksters and scammers. But over the years, a community takes root in a manner that defies any sort of automated analysis or machine-based decisions. Sure, builders construct new houses and hope to make a profit and small business owners intend to be successful. Yet, there is much space in between.
“Community” is not merely a group of people living in the same proximity, whether you interact with other residents or not. “Community” is the act of sharing various aspects of life together. It is attending community events in some shared capacity—church, recreation, youth activities, and such. It is working together for the mutual improvement of your shared life, in whatever circumstances that may require. Building community requires intentional, overt action.
Last time, I wrote that community-building can be hard, mundane, exhausting, discouraging, fun, and rewarding. Much of this comes in the spaces between home and work. As our world demands more automation and instantaneous action (or thrusts it upon us), community-building defies the machines and automated decision-making. Investing in each other’s lives defies computer analysis. Volunteering is not recommended by an algorithm. We do these things because they matter and because they are important to thinking and feeling humans. We are innately designed to live in community with one another, not to live merely in a world of machine-based decisions.
In every sense of the world, community-building is an art. Let us defy the algorithms, the automation, and the machines. Let’s build community.
James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.