When you pay rent to your landlord and are exploited by your job to afford it… that is the community everyone thinks is so great.
We never were civilized. At least we stopped pretending.
Comment on Human Intelligence Sharply Declining
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week agoDefine community. I genuinely want to know because I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of a community that wasn’t on reference to online forums.
When you pay rent to your landlord and are exploited by your job to afford it… that is the community everyone thinks is so great.
We never were civilized. At least we stopped pretending.
MichaelScotch@lemmy.world 1 week ago
What the fuck? Are you serious? You don’t know what community is outside of the internet?
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
…Yeah? At least I don’t think I do. English is my second language so maybe I’m missing some nuance here, but no I have never heard of a “community” IRL.
A community to me is just members of something like an online forum or a subreddit or subscribers of a content creator. I’m not that young either, I remember being on IRC back in the day and I’d call that a community.
People I know IRL are disparate acquaintances and friends and friends of friends, none of them know each other or share anything in common, so I don’t think that’s a “community”.
People at work are coworkers. Neighbours are just people forced to cohabit nearby due to finite amounts of land, you’re usually enemies with them or on friendly terms, so that’s not community.
Most of the time I hear “community” it’s a dog whistle meant to make something sound more polite than “people” so e.g. “LGBTQ community” - there is no such thing, it’s just people, but no one would read articles saying “LGBTQ people fight for rights” because that sounds too sad, so they say “community” or e.g. “migrant community”. It’s a euphemism.
Infynis@midwest.social 1 week ago
Interesting. Well, community is a common word lol
It’s usually used to refer, non-specifically, to people that live around you. You’ll see it in places like “community gardens” or “community centers”. The usage on the Internet is pretty recent, linguistically, obviously lol
LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
See that’s counter-intuitive to me because doesn’t it usually imply some level of knowledge of the people or at least something you have in common?
I don’t know them, I’ve never seen any of them more than once, I’ve never spoken to or been spoken to by them anywhere I lived, because people IRL generally keep to themselves and just talking to random strangers is pretty weird all in all.
With your usage of the word “community” in “community centre” i just figured it’s an extremely old timey generic way to generically refer to a settlement, including cities, towns, residential areas/neighbourhoods, districts, zones, boroughs, areas and other localities.
In that case I’m not sure how OP is using the word community because I don’t know how I’d do anything with literally random collections of people on the street lol.