L.A. Town and the return to community
I vote we all bail on social media and join more tight-knit virtual communities.
I heard someone on a podcast make a brilliant comment about how social media is the modern equivalent to the Colosseum in ancient Rome. We're all crowded around our handheld arenas watching people destroy each other for entertainment.
Worse, we're cheering them on with every like, retweet, and comment.
This analogy resonated deeply with me because I've been considering saying goodbye to social. There are pros. But I’m growing increasingly suspicious that the cons far outweigh them.
Social gives us the feeling that we’re never quite good enough. That someone else is always better looking, more talented, or owns more yachts. And while that’s literally always going to be the case… how helpful is it for us to be constantly reminded of that?
Social makes us feel like what we’re watching—news, entertainment, and life updates from our friends—is real. It’s not. It’s reality television. But instead of catching up on the latest episode of Survivor, Big Brother, and The Bachelor every week, we’re trying to catch with over a thousand posts on Instagram every second. Or nearly 6,000 tweets every second.
Every second?
The fuck?
It’s literally too much. Which is why we have The Algorithm, the latest all-powerful, human-created entity that “works in mysterious ways.” Unfortunately, those “mysterious ways” manufacture a world view that’s all-too-often incendiary and polarizing. And at some point we have to ask: how relevant is any of this to our real lives?
The other thing I’m starting to feel lately is how high the time trade-off is: every minute I spend scrolling is a minute I spend not reading, not calling a friend, not taking a walk outside, not playing piano. Honestly, it was probably always this high and it’s just that I'm finally fatiguing from it. I think I’ve scrolled long enough to realize that there are only about 10 interesting things that happen every year, but we cycle them ad nauseam as though they're constantly hot off the press.
And then there’s the existential crisis of who I want to be versus who social media trains me to be. I want to be someone who isn’t reactive and thinks deeply about life. Social trains us to react instantly and without much thought at all. And this shitty training doesn’t just disappear when we turn our phones off. No, we carry it and its consequences into our real lives.
The more plugged in I am to the feed of the world, the more I feel like it’s tearing me away from the person I want to be.
Sounds serious.
I think it is.
But what if our feed wasn’t of the world, but of our immediate community of friends? And what if it wasn’t based around performative one-upmanship, but of using digital connection as means to meeting up more in real life?
This is where I think smaller, more curated communities are the way back to real connection.
L.A. Town is a curated, virtual community I’m hosting through WhatsApp. It’s essentially a collection of group chats organized by topic, and contributed to by the best people I’ve had the pleasure of meeting who live in and around Los Angeles. I’m calling these groups “Towns.”1
L.A. Town’s deliberately smaller network of friends has the potential to bring people together in the exact way that social media drives us apart. With this community, Los Angeles can feel like a small town, with folks knocking on each others' virtual doors, asking to borrow a cup of sugar and checking in to see if anyone “still hasn’t seen Dune 2 because I’d love to go but I don’t want to go by myself”2 or if anyone “is going to see Troye Sivan at The Forum in October ‘cause I’m thinking of getting floor tickets.”3
L.A. Town is the destination for the people I know to come together online, so that they can get together offline.
If you are not yet a part of L.A. Town and are interested, click here to request to join.
There are always going to be larger arenas like the Colosseum where mobs gather to watch the world beat the shit out of itself.
But that doesn’t mean we have to be a part of it.
Also, just picture a town. It’s quaint. It’s fucking adorable. Town squares, one-screen movie theaters, the diner, that creepy house at the end of Bennett Lane where Old Man Johnson supposedly died 20 years ago but people have definitely seen him peering through the back bedroom window.
And yes, Noah still hasn’t seen Dune 2.
And yes, I’m going to Troye Sivan in October and I have floor tickets.