log entry ID: m.da..... 2026-09-29 15:12:55 EESTThe USA has always been a pretty dysfunctional place. Weak campaign finance rules, unfair elections, an actually crazy private prison system, an actually crazy private healthcare system, etc.. There is one thing the US has got, though, that often makes up for all of its shortcomings. They’re rich. And the richest among them are really rich. And when they can be bothered, they have used their wealth to fix problems in years that even a functioning government might take decades to fix. Andrew Carnegie built most of the first libraries in the US. There is such a library in my hometown, and that’s in Canada.
Maybe, this is happening again.
People living in the Western world are becoming more isolated and more anti-social.
People used to live in communities of about a hundred people, where everybody knew each other and the whole community got together regularly. This is how humans have lived for ten thousand years. In the 20th century in the Western world, it was mostly church congregations, but not all of them. There were also various clubs. In Canada, there was the Rotary club and the Lions club, for instance. Sometimes, the community would center on the neighbourhood elementary school. Other times, a cheap local bar might function as a de facto community centre, with its own little community, like in Cheers. Church or no church, everybody in a typical suburban neighbourhood used to know each other.
Now, nobody knows who their neighbours are any more. Friend groups have gotten smaller, and less diverse in personality and in values. Liberals do not have any conservative friends anymore and vice versa. People are just kind of sitting alone in their apartments, doing Tiktok or writing log entries on their personal websites that nobody is ever going to read.
A country where people who disagree can no longer communicate, can no longer make good decisions. If left unaddressed, the whole country will fall apart.
It’s easy to blame the internet and social media. It has certainly made things worse, but the trend started before that. This isn’t even the first time it has happened. There was a period of increasing social isolation and polarisation in the US in the late 19th century as well, from which they recovered. This is documented in Robert Putman’s The Upswing. Social media could be destroyed tomorrow, and the problem would probably persist.
The communities that have sustained our cultures for the last ten thousand years must be restored. The solution needs to scale to the size of the entire US. It might have to happen quickly, to avoid the worst of what is to come. This can’t happen without money and organisation.
This is the goal of the people who founded and the billionaires who fund Weave. It is an organisation dedicated to organising the efforts of the community leaders around the US who are trying to undertake the necessary repairs—people this organisation calls the weavers. Weave also donates a lot of money to these communities, in the form of various microgrants on the order of thousands of dollars per grant.
It is worth asking whether social isolation would have been such a problem in the first place if the US had better urban planning—something that is difficult to do without taxes. Maybe instead of funding efforts like Weave, the US would have been better off if these same billionaires had instead been paying said taxes. In this case, probably not, because social isolation and polarisation are problems here in Europe, too, including Finland, where I live now.
Anyway, it is a cool idea, and I hope it works.
If you want to get involved, you can join in the Big Read. It’s a virtual book club, which Weave is hosting. For the whole month of October, thousands of people across the US and at least one person in Finland will be reading David Brooks’s How to Know a Person, with one virtual meeting per week to discuss the book as they read. (David Brooks is one of the founders of Weave, and the current Chair.) The book contains skills helpful for forming friendships between very different people, an important skill in a large, diverse community. It should be interesting. I hope to see you there.