The Inevitable Demise of Untended Communities

Whether it’s an online community, a workforce, or a democracy, communities need attention

Scott Monty

Mar 15, 2023

The painting as described by the artist: "The scene of Desolation. The sun has just set, the moon ascends the twilight sky over the ocean, near the place where the sun rose in the first picture. Day-light fades away, and the shades of evening steal over the shattered and ivy-grown ruins of that once proud city. A lonely column stands near the fore ground, on whose capitol, which is illumined by the last rays of the departed sun, a heron has built her nest. The doric temple and the triumphal bridge, may still be recognised among the ruins. But, though man and his works have perished, the steep promontory, with its insulated rock, still rears against the sky unmoved, unchanged. Violence and time have crumbled the works of man, and art is again resolving into elemental nature. The gorgeous pageant has passed — the roar of battle has ceased — the multitude has sunk in the dust — the empire is extinct." — *The Course of Empire - Desolation* by Thomas Cole, 1837 (Wikipedia - public domain)

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.” — T.S. Eliot, 1925

It’s tempting to think that entities we’ve created will simply go on forever, like perpetual motion machines that require neither maintenance nor intervention.

But the stark reality is quite the opposite. Nothing is permanent.

Humans are natural tinkerers, and we need to pay attention to the things we build to improve upon them.

As an engineer, Henry Ford knew this. He tinkered in his shed at 58 Bagley Avenue in Detroit until he created the Quadricycle in 1896.

He created Ford Motor Company in 1903 (after two false starts with other companies), introduced the Model T in 1908, and kept tinkering with the assembly process until he introduced the moving assembly line to the auto industry in 1913.

“The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all but goes on making his own business better all the time.” — Henry Ford, 1923

But even as he improved and simplified the assembly process, Ford began to lose workers. They were bored and frustrated by only doing one or two tasks repeatedly, and found work at other manufacturers.

Henry Ford decided that in order to retain his workforce, he had to make it worthwhile to work there, so he created the $5 workday that involved profit-sharing that more than doubled wages and created a path to profitability for workers, who could now afford to buy the very cars they built:

“We believe in making 25,000 men prosperous and contented rather than follow the plan of making a few slave drivers in our establishment multi-millionaires.”

In short, he paid attention to his community and determined a way to satisfy its needs.

The opposite could be said of Twitter right now. Aptly observed in The Verge (“How a Social Network Falls Apart”), Twitter is suffering from lack of care and attention.

We saw the same thing happen with other platforms like Tumblr and LiveJournal: new ownership didn’t understand the community, and people eventually disengaged, stopped using the platforms, and left.

The result: digital ghost towns with familiar infrastructure and architecture, but lacking in certain functionalities and devoid of interaction.

Even more stark at Twitter is the significant number of employees who were fired, leaving some teams with a skeleton crew or even disbanding teams entirely — including the team responsible for accessibility features that allow disabled users to engage with tweets.

The company was hollowed out, and the echoes there are reverberating throughout the platform.

It reminded me of T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men,” an eerie and dream-like poem that describes a desolate world, populated by empty, defeated people.

Originally written to reflect the aftermath of European affairs following World War I, it literally refers to life after death, but can reflect any kind of existence following a traumatic event.

I
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V…
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Read the whole thing.

But it’s not just Twitter or Eliot’s poem — it could happen to any community that doesn’t receive our attention and care.

It could happen to your neighborhood, your employees, your friends, your family.

Where are you putting your attention? What needs tending to in your life?

Thanks, and I’ll see you on the internet.