I write this in the aftermath of a 15 month old having been the victim of gun crime in Oakland – the poor baby was hit by shrapnel during an armed robbery of a nanny in broad daylight at 11 am. Horrific. Devastating. So frequently helicopters circle above our neighborhood. Crime here is out of control. It feels like the apocalypse.
Our world faces increasing problems: inequality, poverty, resource scarcity, climate change, misinformation and all of these are feeders into crime. Now some will say “well the world is better off than it was 50 years ago” and why not be optimistic instead of focusing on the negative? There’s no point going into arguments about whether the past was worse or better. And yes I would like to focus on how to live in a society where a 15 month old is safe out on a walk with their nanny. We don’t want to live in this state and we can imagine a better one, and here’s real optimism for you: I believe a better world is possible. The past may have had its own terrible things, but the promise of human existence is continuous improvement, not stagnation. And that promise is being broken every day and it’s painful.
As I’ve noodled on the crime uptick, the environmental degradation, the online trolling and nastiness even on “neighborly” forums like Nextdoor, that are part of our everyday lives, I’ve come to see a few patterns in what facilitates these maladies: anonymity, distance, globalization.
I think the solutions lie in the opposites of these forces: community, nearness, localization.
I usually find it so annoying when politicians talk about our “communities” because for most of my life I didn’t feel like I was part of any community, and not in a unique-to-me way – no one was part of a local community around me. I lived in neighborhoods where people barely knew their neighbors. So I didn’t know which “communities” these politicians were talking about in every speech. It seems to me that in most cities, more people know who Kim Kardashian is than know who their neighbor is. May be more people know what Kim had for lunch on Tuesday than what their neighbor does for work?! Sad. If I were a politician, I’d focus on building communities, not engaging in wishful thinking that they already exist everywhere.
Now in Oakland, my partner and I have been trying to build a community – encouraged by neighbors who are like-minded. It’s a continuous journey – slowly we’ve been working on getting to know more of our neighbors and more deeply. This is so important.
The more people in a neighborhood know each other and pay attention to each other, the more they can identify visitors who are not part of the community, and unusual behaviors. The more people know each other, the more social pressure there is to act a certain way. In a big sea of anonymity like most cities are now, people can walk around being unrecognized and do all kinds of terrible things without being recognized. You could go into an apartment block and walk around the corridors pretty easily, rob an apartment and walk out without anyone realizing to stop or pay attention to what you look like because no one knows who their neighbors are anyways. I’ve had friends who lived in fancy apartments with concierges in San Francisco (who are supposed to prevent that kind of thing) get burgled! And it was totally untraceable who did the burglary – no one would have known who to pay attention to.
Communities also have hive minds – the collective is more intelligent in problem-solving and being resourceful than the individual. A response to crime has to be more community.
What about all the other maladies like climate change? How are they connected to localization? On a simple level, the more goods travel, the worse for the climate. And the global nature of production has made it really easy to detach consumers from the externalities of their consumption. The companies that make my kid’s toy trucks are based in China and probably dump toxic waste products in rivers there, affecting the people who live there, but not me in a direct, observable way (though it all comes around in some way). Now if I switch to buying locally made goods/services from people I know, I have more control with my wallet in supporting the production techniques I want to see, and my COMMUNITY is directly affected by these production techniques and so I care. (For the record, we borrow our toy trucks from the local library, and use our local Buy Nothing groups for nearly all toys — no new toy purchases here!)
Whether net better or worse which is debatable (and not that useful a debate), the world is becoming more complex. With the rise of AI and deep fakes, the prevalence for the past decade of all the echo chambers on social media, it’s getting hard to see anything big-picture. We’re encased in algorithmic narratives, and overworked and overstretched with little headspace left to really tease out truths from mistruths. I don’t know that we can totally fight all of this. But another solution to all the deep fakes for now is more community. If you interact with the people you live around in real life, not just virtually, and if more of your interactions are local than virtual, you’re less likely to get duped by a “deep fake”. Conversely, if your network of meaningful interactions is all with people online, how good will you be at telling whether a video clip is fake or not? How well do we know celebrities or politicians that we think we know? How much time do we spend in one-way interactions with these people compared to with the people who live right next to us? How do you know whether that thing you bought from Amazon is a knock-off or not? It’s getting really friggin’ hard living in a world with so much information and misinformation swimming about – notably most of it produced from people we don’t actually know.
All of this is to say, get to know your neighbors. Where possible, transact with your neighbors, trade with your neighbors – “buy local” or my favorite non-money-centered eco-conscious alternative: join your local “Buy nothing” group! Read from your neighbors or people you know ;). Hang out with your neighbors. Be friends with your neighbors. It’s probably the best insurance you can buy in these turbulent and uncertain times.
