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.
When a platform migrates its user base to a new architecture, the implicit promise is that the community will survive the move. When a city demolishes a public housing block and offers residents vouchers for market-rate apartments across town, the implicit promise is that they'll rebuild what they had.
These promises are always broken, and the people making them either don't understand why, or they're relying on the rest of us being too blind to see it.
What Robert Moses got wrong...
Robert Moses displaced an estimated 250,000 people over the course of his career, razing entire neighbourhoods to make way for expressways and public works projects. The defence of Moses, then and now, is utilitarian: more people benefited from the infrastructure than were harmed by its construction. The calculus assumed that the displaced residents could form equivalent communities elsewhere, and the relationships severed by a highway cutting through a block were replaceable with relationships formed in a new location. Jane Jacobs spent much of her career arguing that this was catastrophically wrong. The old neighbourhood was not a collection of individuals who happened to live near each other; it was a living organism with its own immune system and its own way of metabolising change. When Moses bulldozed it, he killed a community and scattered the remains.
Jacobs understood that the value of a community isn't in the people as discrete units. The value is in the specific, unreproducible web of relationships between them. You can move every single resident of a street to the same new street in the same new suburb and you will not get the same community, because community is a function of time and ten thousand microtransactions of reciprocity that nobody tracks and nobody can mandate.
...and what economists miss
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