How “community” became corporatized

Companies are selling you on the promise of friendship. vox.com/culture CULTURE   The Wednesday edition of the Vox Culture newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. The Wednesday edition of the Vox Culture newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. 💰 Social isolation isn't just a smartphone problem, it's a class problem 🧑‍🤝‍🧑 In early May, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy [announced]( an advisory for the public health crisis of loneliness and social isolation in the US. For the past three years, it’s been one of the defining experiences of American life: Shut inside during the pandemic, we’ve emerged into an even more antisocial society, one in which health care is still only [afforded to the rich](, one where working mothers are [under ever-greater pressure](, where [non-sentient technology is prioritized]( over the human labor it depends on. When people ask how to get involved in their communities or make new friends, the typical response is something like this: Join a club! Take a class! Hang out at cafes or bars and strike up conversations! The problem with that advice isn’t that it doesn’t work, it’s that the idea of “community” in modern life is usually tied to something that costs money — a lot of it. In an age of declining religious affiliation, more [people are turning to, say, pricey fitness classes]( as a means of fostering relationships, leading to what one researcher refers to as the “privatization of community.” Harvard Kennedy School Fellow Sam Pressler studies the ways in which financial, geographic, and cultural shifts have replaced previously accessible spaces and institutions with inaccessible, expensive ones. In neighborhoods full of college-educated people with disposable income, this leads to lots of pay-to-play activities that offer the promise of community for a price, like SoulCycle, pottery studios, and pricey cafés and bars. Poor neighborhoods tend not to have such amenities, nor do they have affordable, accessible “third places,” leading to stark divides in the social connectedness of the rich and the isolation of the poor. In our interview, we discuss how issues like loneliness and civil participation actually begin at birth, why there’s such a decline in third places, and the smartphones of it all. How did you first become interested in the privatization of communities? I'm not a traditional academic: I spent my six years after undergrad building a nonprofit called the Armed Services Arts Partnership, or ASAP. We work with veteran and the military community and reconnect them to a sense of belonging, purpose, and translatable skills in civilian life through community-based arts, programming classes, workshops, performances. The veteran space gets a lot of funding to meet the needs of purpose and belonging, because we [view] veterans as a class of citizens deserving of that investment. But all these issues are not just veterans’ issues. They may be a little bit more acute because of the abruptness of the military transition, but these are very much human issues that other people in American life are experiencing. So after I handed that organization off, I took a graduate fellowship at Harvard, where I researched this topic. What are some of the structural reasons we have so many more privatized communities than we used to? One is the decline of institutions that provide meaning and relationships in life: religion, secular civil society, unions. People who live in more distressed places tend to have weaker institutions, and a lot of the accessible institutions and experiences of American life have been replaced by those that have higher barriers to entry, whether that's geographically, culturally, or financially. You can apply that to every stage of life. The kind of associational life of the mid-20th century had its flaws, but [Robert Putnam’s research]( seems to indicate that organizations like the Lion’s Club, 4H, or YMCA were fairly cross-class communities. [Theda Skocpol in particular]( describes the process of how the highest socioeconomic-status people began pulling away from those institutions in the latter half of the 20th century as we begin to live in increasingly sorted regions and neighborhoods. Over the past half-century, the [proportion of families]( living in poor or affluent neighborhoods doubled while the proportion living in middle-income neighborhoods declined by more than one-third. This increasing geographic isolation of the well-off means that a growing proportion of society’s resources are concentrated in a shrinking proportion of its neighborhoods. Where does that leave us? How are these shifts affecting us on a societal level? There is a cumulative and compounding disadvantage that occurs among people with lower socioeconomic status and the children of people without degrees. In childhood, we have the residential sorting of our schools (if you go to school in Palo Alto, you basically have to afford a $3 million or $4 million home). Schools in our sorted, high-income neighborhoods have become exclusive, but then school activities have become pay-to-play. [Robert Putnam has]( great research on when activities become pay-to-play — like travel sports teams and extracurriculars — it’s lower socioeconomic-status people who stopped participating in those activities. One study he cites found that, prior to the institution of fees for sports, roughly half of all kids were playing sports. When fees were introduced, one in three athletes from homes with annual incomes of $60,000 or less dropped out due to the increased cost, compared to one in 10 athletes from families with incomes of over $60,000. You're cultivating habits of social connection, and if there's not easy access to a Boys and Girls Club or whatever it may be, they're losing that attachment to institutions and also the social connections that come with it. The adult transition is really interesting. In American life, it really started after World War II when all these young men were called to serve and were having a shared experience across class and connected to an institution. By 1960, 40 percent of men over age 18, and [the vast majority of men]( in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, had military experience. We created the GI Bill after World War II as a means of broadening access to college beyond just the aristocratic. But in a kind of perverse way, college has now become the replacement for that adult transition experience. College, particularly, is reserved for mostly selective four-year schools, and it's mostly for the top 20 percent of earners’ children. [Approximately 50 percent]( of students at the most selective colleges (480 schools) come from the top quintile of earning families, and among “Ivy-plus” colleges, [more students come from families]( in the top 1 percent of the income distribution (14.5 percent) than the bottom half of the income distribution (13.5 percent). We took this cross-class experience for men and replaced it with one that is pretty sorted by class and mostly reserved for the most well-off kids. In college, you build your social networks, you foster habits of attachment, and it follows you afterward. We don't have an alternative pathway in American life for people who don't go to college, so if you just enter the workforce, you don’t have that institutional [backing]. When we get to adulthood, this is where we see neighborhoods that are sorted by class, where the “third places” are maybe a nice coffee shop or maybe it’s Soho House, where you have to pay $200 a month to be a member. A lot of adult activities have become very much tied to your socioeconomic status. Going to CrossFit could cost $250 a month, or SoulCycle founded this [idea of “peoplehood”]( and making friends while using the SoulCycle revenue model. You get to the point in adulthood where all these things are compounded, and [folks without college degrees or of lower socioeconomic status]( generally are not participating in community as much. They have much [lower levels of friendships]( and social connections than those with degrees. 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