Spacetime Displacement Club

youve been a bad *remembers youre plural* people

There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.

The part about it being envisioned specifically as a "village" is relevant, I think, in that these kinds of people romanticize small rural villages as this ideal form of close-knit community to which we must retvrn, in contrast to the hard, alienating city life. But I'd argue that sure, dense urban environments can be alienating in certain ways, but they're also in many ways more utopian simply in that they force people to learn to peacefully co-exist as a community with others very different from themselves. The rural village appears to live in idyllic consensus because everyone who did not fit in has either been ostracized away, worn down into conformity, or has voluntarily fled to the nearest big city as soon as they were old enough.

the utopian character of the city is not only in that it teaches coexistence but also in that it fosters the development of communities within its community. a city is a thousand villages you can visit and join and leave without abandoning the comforts of your home and the stability of your lifestyle and the fundamental sense that you still ultimately belong. you can have even more tightly knit communities of maximally compatible people when more people have the opportunity to self-select and be accepted into them, and to self-select out of them without the coercive force of exclusion from your entire societal context. you can also have looser communities that benefit their members without them having to holistically get along with each other! people can be in multiple of both of these at the same time!! social butterflies can flourish to the greatest extent their own bodies and brains can handle, and the most closed-off self-sufficient loner in the world can still benefit from cooperation without it being predicated on connection. the community of the city itself is simply that of sharing space, but sharing space means sharing the myriad resources and opportunities that occupy it

they told me not to get lost in the weeds, but these are lush, beautiful, and ecologically necessary native plants so it's probably fine