

What Tech Hasn't Learned From Urban Planning - gesticulator
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/14/opinion/what-tech-hasnt-learned-from-urban-planning.html

======
vbuterin
Here I feel like it's the urban planners that need to learn more from tech.
The article's entire point seems to be that the tech community is not acting
like a community because its gathering spaces are not open to members of the
local public. That strikes me as an incredibly facile and outdated
understanding of the concept of "community". The whole point of globalization
and the information revolution of the late 20th century is that location
increasingly does not matter. "Communities" are stronger than ever - but they
are defined by shared interests and ideals, not historical accidents of where
you happen to be located. I personally care not a single more for my own
neighbor than for some random individual living in China; in fact, I would
probably care more about the Chinese person if he was a "Mozillan" and my
neighbor was not. The local Starbucks the author praises is closed to everyone
that is not geographically close to its location in Menlo Park; the public
Mozilla coffee house is closed to everyone that is not close to Mozilla in the
social graph. The latter actually seems like a much more of a real "community"
than the former, which allows individuals to whom I have no interest in
speaking. That is not to say open and non-discriminatory businesses should not
remain the dominant type of commerce; Starbucks has provided me a truly
invaluable service by providing a consistent experience of hours of personal
office space with accessible free wifi in every city or country I go. But the
author has it exactly backwards in his general point; "community" is the
antonym, not synonym, of "everyone".

~~~
malandrew
True, but having lived in NYC, which is also known for communities of shared
interest co-habitating in a small geographic area, I totally related to the
article.

I work in SoMa and think it sucks hard community-wise because despite having
so much interest-wise with many of the employees of the companies in my
building and most of the buildings within a 5 minute walk, I have few if any
meaningful interactions on a daily basis. Yes, there are meetups, but there is
relatively no serendipity with special interest groups. I don't want to know
only the people within 1 degree of separation on the interest graph. That's
essentially an echo chamber. I would like to meet many more people who are
maybe 2-3 degrees away, e.g. still in tech, but working on completely
different problems and with different technologies than I do. A lot of those
people are nearby and there are practically no spaces that foster interactions
with those people.

The only time I get those interactions farther than a single degree of
separation is when I go out at night with people outside my daytime bubble.

In NYC, in contrast, it wasn't uncommon for me to buy my lunch and sit in a
public space where someone might sit down at the same public table that I was
sitting at.

I would love a public food-court style space in SoMa organized like a German
beer hall, with large communal tables, where a large part of the draw would be
sitting down and overhearing interesting conversations and having your
conversations heard as well and maybe using that as fodder for meeting someone
new.

SoMA strikes me as a place where people know the value of strong ties, but
completely discount the value in weak ties [0] and mechanisms that foster weak
ties, such as the lack of physical community spaces.

[0] Mark Granovetter, The Strength of Weak Ties.
[http://sociology.stanford.edu/people/mgranovetter/documents/...](http://sociology.stanford.edu/people/mgranovetter/documents/granstrengthweakties.pdf)

~~~
vbuterin
Good point about needing to meet people outside your echo chamber. Although I
suppose that for me I get that sort of interaction from Reddit; I don't really
see myself actually interacting with people in any of these spaces that are
supposed to foster interaction. When is the last time you've actually talked
to someone in a public cafe?

