The educational philosopher Kieran Egan developed a concept which he called "learning in depth." The idea is simple: a student is given a single subject at the start of their schooling. Throughout their primary education, they will continually research that subject, discovering new ways to approach it and different ways to broaden their understanding of it. The subject itself doesn't matter: what's important is giving students an understanding of what learning is, and of how deep even the simplest subject matter ultimately runs. The point isn't to teach the student about a specific topic: it's to teach them what it means to learn.
I think about Egan quite a bit in the context of community development. One of Egan's concerns about modern education was that, by overemphasizing curricula and testing, it forgets to teach us about learning itself; the result is a society that's susceptible to anti-intellectual "ideas," because its members never learned what actual knowledge looks like to begin with. Similarly, the vast majority of us have never experienced communities that placed actual expectations on its participants, because we've forsaken those for digital environments whose creators never cared about socializing their users at all.
We've reached a point, I suspect, where many people find the idea of "socializing" people within a community to be strange to begin with. App designers fetishize what they call "frictionlessness:" complete ease of use, with as few interruptions as possible. And what is socialization if not friction? Why would users bother participating in a space that expects us to learn how to take part to begin with? How could such a community ever gain traction, in a day and age where we've been taught to pursue only the easiest-to-consume platforms at all costs?
It's an interesting and challenging question. And it's an important one, for anyone who believes that there's a future worth building, and that there's a potential outcome for our world that isn't just endless enshittification and decay.
Like Egan, I think the question of what a community's expectations for its members ought to be is secondary. Getting too in-the-weeds about that is jumping the gun a bit. It presumes that we know how to push a community's expectations onto its participants in the first place—and I don't think that we do. It's far more important that we learn how to create a community that socializes its members than that we figure out exactly what that socialization ought to entail. Because, as with Egan, I think that teaching people why socialization is important does most of the work in and of itself. If you can get someone to understand that they ought to welcome and embrace the idea of living up to the community that they belong to, you've done the hardest work already.
My phrasing there gives away some of my thoughts about how, exactly, we need to go about this—specifically, that bit about people living up to the community. The implication, there, is that this is a community that needs to be "lived up to." This is not simply a collection of people who share a common interest. It's not—yech—a meet-up group. Those communities lack a strong identity, a discernible sense of self. Any personality developed by groups like that is purely accidental, and usually weak. It's a sign of the times that so few people recognize this as a serious dilemma.
Healthy communities need a powerful sense of identity: they need to be distinctive, they need to have value, because they need to be something worth belonging to. Any community worth its salt makes people want to take part, simply for the glory of getting to belong to the community itself. It needs an identity, so that it can become a part of its members' identities. If it means nothing to identify as part of a community, then it means that that community means nothing to you—which means, in turn, that you have no reason to invest in it, and no reason to invest in yourself as a part of it.
Some people wrongly think that it's an elitist, exclusionary mindset to think of a community as something to live up to. They could not be more wrong. By holding itself to a standard that makes it actively appealing to outsiders, by turning itself into something that people want to join—or will actively make an effort to join—a community makes itself inclusive. How can you call yourself an inclusive community at all, in fact, if you don't value making yourself a community that's desirable to belong to? Apathy is far more exclusionary than desirability. Shrugging and saying "I don't give a shit whether you join or not" fundamentally implies that you don't care about the person you're talking to. "It's hard to live up to, but it's worth joining" is, by contrast, an inclusionary and an aspirational mindset. It says that you could join, and that you should join... and that, by telling you this, I clearly want you to join. I'm not saying that you automatically get to join, no. But I'm saying that you joining would be worthwhile, not just for you but for me.
That's the crucial one-two punch. On the one hand, this is worth doing. On the other hand, it is a "doing." Joining is not a passive decision. It is an active choice. It takes effort... but the reward is worth it.
Not surprisingly, this is the same basic psychology that drives most game design. Bernard Suits defined playing a game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." The obstacles in a game—the friction, to use app designers' parlance—becomes redefined as something to be embraced, even enjoyed. They aren't there to impede your progress: they're the value in and of themselves. And it puts a lie to the idea that people hate friction and difficulty and are doomed to lives of passive consumption, because people famously love difficult games. They find meaning in the challenge. Gamers will even go out of their way to make games harder for themselves, just to try and prove to themselves that they can do it. That's true even when there are no in-game rewards for their behavior: at some point, the challenge itself becomes the reward.
Andrew Hussie, author of the famously complicated and monstrously long web series Homestuck, once noted that complexity itself has a way of drawing in audiences. Citing the then-popular TV series Lost, whose lore was infamously complicated and confusing, he pointed out that people are drawn to things specifically because they're intricate and complex: the complexity has value to them in and of itself. People want richness. They want meaning. They want tangible depth. And what better way to signify depth than by offering something that isn't wholly accessible or straightforward? How can you possibly offer something substantial without its taking time and effort to delve into and properly appreciate?
(Conspiracy researchers have pointed out that this is precisely why so many people find conspiracy theories so appealing: the complex nonsense that purports to "explain everything" is in fact the draw of a conspiracy theory, more even than the theory itself. We are stimulated by engagement: we want to be given something we can really chew on, even when that "something" is absolute faff.)
In other words, we should not buy into the bullshit idea that frictionless accessibility is the only way to draw people to something. And we should actively champion the idea that communities need to do the exact opposite. It should take effort to belong to a community—because effort is engagement. What's more, that effort should be genuinely meaningful: it should require actual commitment, actual involvement, actual participation. "Engagement" has been turned into a vacuous marketing term, even for people who aren't familiar with the marketers they're echoing; we've come to think of it as a way to spark activity, any activity, just a little dopamine twitchery to keep people idly around. But there's a difference between mere diversion—the kind of "amusement" or "entertainment" that only leaves you feeling more bored and restless—and genuine absorption. A community that only offers diversion makes it clear just how empty and vacuous it really is. A community that absorbs inspires passion, devotion, fervor.
(Some people are wary of words like this: fervor, devotion, passion. They fear that these words imply cultishness, zealotry, dogma. But not all devotion is cultlike; not all passion is zealotry. You can't fear passion: you have to acknowledge the deep human need for passion, for devotion, and you have to offer it to people in ways that aren't cultlike, because that's the only way to keep them from joining cults. What does an ideal society look like, to people who are afraid of such things? Is it a world completely drained of fervor and passion and devotion? That sounds like a horrible world, even beyond the fact that it would be utterly untenable. People will never be satisfied with mere politeness. Give them nothing but bloodless pleasantry, and you'll eventually beget a bloodthirsty mob.)
The important thing, here, is that we need to stop being afraid of the idea that communities ought to have values and expectations. I don't just mean "expectations" in the negative sense: don't be bigoted or hateful, don't be rude, don't be creepy, don't harass anybody. Expectations need to positively, well, expect things out of people. They don't have to demand things of their members, but at the very least, they have to proactively ask. (And sometimes, believe it or not, they might have to do more than just ask, scary as that might be.)
Similarly, a community's "values" have to be serious and concrete. They can't be abstract handwavey nonsense, or else nobody will believe in them. A community has to have material values, not the kind that every member automatically fulfills just by living and breathing. It needs to give its members something to work towards, something to rise to. Note those words: towards, rise. These are words which imply movement. A community exists, in part, to give its participants reasons to move. It exists to fight against idleness, languishing, stagnation, decay. It has to be a constructive effort. Community is an act of creation—and it is only created when people act. Without action, community disintegrates. And without values, serious values, a community cannot act in unison. Without expectations, without values, without action, that thing you call a community is not a community: it's a delusion, an idle hope, a stillborn dream.
Yes, it is a challenge to persuade people to belong to a community that places expectations on them. It is the challenge of every community, in fact. It is the challenge you voluntarily undertake when you decide to form a community. This is the game—the unnecessary obstacle. If you want to form a community, really form one, then this is what you have to take on. You can fool yourself into thinking that this part is optional. You can form your little meet-up group and tell yourself that you've created something real. You can choose not to form a community and call it a community anyway. As with Egan's philosophy, either you know what learning is or you don't; either you create a community or you don't. I'd say that you'll never know what you're missing, but that's a lie. You'll feel the hollowness, you'll feel the despair, you'll wonder why it all feels so futile, and you'll live like that every day until you die, or until you let yourself try things the other way.
I think about Egan quite a bit in the context of community development. One of Egan's concerns about modern education was that, by overemphasizing curricula and testing, it forgets to teach us about learning itself; the result is a society that's susceptible to anti-intellectual "ideas," because its members never learned what actual knowledge looks like to begin with. Similarly, the vast majority of us have never experienced communities that placed actual expectations on its participants, because we've forsaken those for digital environments whose creators never cared about socializing their users at all.
We've reached a point, I suspect, where many people find the idea of "socializing" people within a community to be strange to begin with. App designers fetishize what they call "frictionlessness:" complete ease of use, with as few interruptions as possible. And what is socialization if not friction? Why would users bother participating in a space that expects us to learn how to take part to begin with? How could such a community ever gain traction, in a day and age where we've been taught to pursue only the easiest-to-consume platforms at all costs?
It's an interesting and challenging question. And it's an important one, for anyone who believes that there's a future worth building, and that there's a potential outcome for our world that isn't just endless enshittification and decay.
Like Egan, I think the question of what a community's expectations for its members ought to be is secondary. Getting too in-the-weeds about that is jumping the gun a bit. It presumes that we know how to push a community's expectations onto its participants in the first place—and I don't think that we do. It's far more important that we learn how to create a community that socializes its members than that we figure out exactly what that socialization ought to entail. Because, as with Egan, I think that teaching people why socialization is important does most of the work in and of itself. If you can get someone to understand that they ought to welcome and embrace the idea of living up to the community that they belong to, you've done the hardest work already.
My phrasing there gives away some of my thoughts about how, exactly, we need to go about this—specifically, that bit about people living up to the community. The implication, there, is that this is a community that needs to be "lived up to." This is not simply a collection of people who share a common interest. It's not—yech—a meet-up group. Those communities lack a strong identity, a discernible sense of self. Any personality developed by groups like that is purely accidental, and usually weak. It's a sign of the times that so few people recognize this as a serious dilemma.
Healthy communities need a powerful sense of identity: they need to be distinctive, they need to have value, because they need to be something worth belonging to. Any community worth its salt makes people want to take part, simply for the glory of getting to belong to the community itself. It needs an identity, so that it can become a part of its members' identities. If it means nothing to identify as part of a community, then it means that that community means nothing to you—which means, in turn, that you have no reason to invest in it, and no reason to invest in yourself as a part of it.
Some people wrongly think that it's an elitist, exclusionary mindset to think of a community as something to live up to. They could not be more wrong. By holding itself to a standard that makes it actively appealing to outsiders, by turning itself into something that people want to join—or will actively make an effort to join—a community makes itself inclusive. How can you call yourself an inclusive community at all, in fact, if you don't value making yourself a community that's desirable to belong to? Apathy is far more exclusionary than desirability. Shrugging and saying "I don't give a shit whether you join or not" fundamentally implies that you don't care about the person you're talking to. "It's hard to live up to, but it's worth joining" is, by contrast, an inclusionary and an aspirational mindset. It says that you could join, and that you should join... and that, by telling you this, I clearly want you to join. I'm not saying that you automatically get to join, no. But I'm saying that you joining would be worthwhile, not just for you but for me.
That's the crucial one-two punch. On the one hand, this is worth doing. On the other hand, it is a "doing." Joining is not a passive decision. It is an active choice. It takes effort... but the reward is worth it.
Not surprisingly, this is the same basic psychology that drives most game design. Bernard Suits defined playing a game as "the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles." The obstacles in a game—the friction, to use app designers' parlance—becomes redefined as something to be embraced, even enjoyed. They aren't there to impede your progress: they're the value in and of themselves. And it puts a lie to the idea that people hate friction and difficulty and are doomed to lives of passive consumption, because people famously love difficult games. They find meaning in the challenge. Gamers will even go out of their way to make games harder for themselves, just to try and prove to themselves that they can do it. That's true even when there are no in-game rewards for their behavior: at some point, the challenge itself becomes the reward.
Andrew Hussie, author of the famously complicated and monstrously long web series Homestuck, once noted that complexity itself has a way of drawing in audiences. Citing the then-popular TV series Lost, whose lore was infamously complicated and confusing, he pointed out that people are drawn to things specifically because they're intricate and complex: the complexity has value to them in and of itself. People want richness. They want meaning. They want tangible depth. And what better way to signify depth than by offering something that isn't wholly accessible or straightforward? How can you possibly offer something substantial without its taking time and effort to delve into and properly appreciate?
(Conspiracy researchers have pointed out that this is precisely why so many people find conspiracy theories so appealing: the complex nonsense that purports to "explain everything" is in fact the draw of a conspiracy theory, more even than the theory itself. We are stimulated by engagement: we want to be given something we can really chew on, even when that "something" is absolute faff.)
In other words, we should not buy into the bullshit idea that frictionless accessibility is the only way to draw people to something. And we should actively champion the idea that communities need to do the exact opposite. It should take effort to belong to a community—because effort is engagement. What's more, that effort should be genuinely meaningful: it should require actual commitment, actual involvement, actual participation. "Engagement" has been turned into a vacuous marketing term, even for people who aren't familiar with the marketers they're echoing; we've come to think of it as a way to spark activity, any activity, just a little dopamine twitchery to keep people idly around. But there's a difference between mere diversion—the kind of "amusement" or "entertainment" that only leaves you feeling more bored and restless—and genuine absorption. A community that only offers diversion makes it clear just how empty and vacuous it really is. A community that absorbs inspires passion, devotion, fervor.
(Some people are wary of words like this: fervor, devotion, passion. They fear that these words imply cultishness, zealotry, dogma. But not all devotion is cultlike; not all passion is zealotry. You can't fear passion: you have to acknowledge the deep human need for passion, for devotion, and you have to offer it to people in ways that aren't cultlike, because that's the only way to keep them from joining cults. What does an ideal society look like, to people who are afraid of such things? Is it a world completely drained of fervor and passion and devotion? That sounds like a horrible world, even beyond the fact that it would be utterly untenable. People will never be satisfied with mere politeness. Give them nothing but bloodless pleasantry, and you'll eventually beget a bloodthirsty mob.)
The important thing, here, is that we need to stop being afraid of the idea that communities ought to have values and expectations. I don't just mean "expectations" in the negative sense: don't be bigoted or hateful, don't be rude, don't be creepy, don't harass anybody. Expectations need to positively, well, expect things out of people. They don't have to demand things of their members, but at the very least, they have to proactively ask. (And sometimes, believe it or not, they might have to do more than just ask, scary as that might be.)
Similarly, a community's "values" have to be serious and concrete. They can't be abstract handwavey nonsense, or else nobody will believe in them. A community has to have material values, not the kind that every member automatically fulfills just by living and breathing. It needs to give its members something to work towards, something to rise to. Note those words: towards, rise. These are words which imply movement. A community exists, in part, to give its participants reasons to move. It exists to fight against idleness, languishing, stagnation, decay. It has to be a constructive effort. Community is an act of creation—and it is only created when people act. Without action, community disintegrates. And without values, serious values, a community cannot act in unison. Without expectations, without values, without action, that thing you call a community is not a community: it's a delusion, an idle hope, a stillborn dream.
Yes, it is a challenge to persuade people to belong to a community that places expectations on them. It is the challenge of every community, in fact. It is the challenge you voluntarily undertake when you decide to form a community. This is the game—the unnecessary obstacle. If you want to form a community, really form one, then this is what you have to take on. You can fool yourself into thinking that this part is optional. You can form your little meet-up group and tell yourself that you've created something real. You can choose not to form a community and call it a community anyway. As with Egan's philosophy, either you know what learning is or you don't; either you create a community or you don't. I'd say that you'll never know what you're missing, but that's a lie. You'll feel the hollowness, you'll feel the despair, you'll wonder why it all feels so futile, and you'll live like that every day until you die, or until you let yourself try things the other way.