Humanities & Cultures

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 a group of people who share space and history can be captured in a metric and deployed at scale.

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.

...A mass of people bound together by years of shared context, inside jokes and collective memory is not.

And yet we keep treating communities as though they are.