Intangible Townsquares: Where Community Really Lives Online

In 1999, Robert Putnam wrote about how Americans had stopped joining clubs. “Kids today just aren’t joiners,” people said then. Now, a quarter-century later, I find myself asking: was this the death of community, or its transformation?

The conventional narrative says we’ve lost our social fabric. Bowling leagues disappeared. Rotary Clubs shrank. Church attendance declined. The physical spaces where communities formed, the literal town squares, emptied out. But I think we’re looking in the wrong places.

The Myth of the Global Townsquare

Elon Musk calls X “the global town square.” Mark Zuckerberg positioned Facebook as connecting the world. These platforms present themselves as the new community spaces, the digital equivalents of physical gathering places. I don’t buy it.

A platform is not a townsquare. It is something else entirely, something we don’t quite have language for yet. When I use X, I’m not gathering in a single communal space with everyone else on the platform. I’m navigating through countless micro-communities, each with its own norms, inside jokes, and shared references.

No one joins X for X itself. They join for the network effects: the specific communities and conversations that happen to exist there. The platform is the infrastructure, not the destination. It’s the road system, not the town.

Where Community Actually Forms

Here’s what I’ve observed: community hasn’t died. It has dematerialized. The new townsquares aren’t physical locations or even platforms. They are intangible (shared interests, fandoms, values, memes, intellectual frameworks). People organize themselves around these intangibles, and the connections they form are real even when they never meet in person.

Think about how this works in practice. A group of people passionate about mechanical keyboards finds each other across the internet. They share photos, debate switch types, organize group buys, develop inside jokes, and form genuine friendships. Some eventually meet up in person, but the community exists primarily in this intangible space of shared enthusiasm.

The townsquare isn’t Reddit or Discord; those are just the tools. The townsquare is the shared passion for mechanical keyboards itself. It is an intangible space that people gather around, and platforms simply facilitate that gathering.

Why Running Clubs Feel Cringe

This helps explain something that’s puzzled me: why do so many people find adult running clubs cringe? I think it’s because running clubs try to create community around an activity rather than around an intangible. There is no deep lore, no inside jokes that take months to understand, and no shared intellectual framework. It is just running together.

In a culture where “trying too hard” is uncool, organizing your social life around such a straightforward activity feels forced. Compare this to communities that form around games, shows, or intellectual interests. A Dungeons & Dragons group isn’t cringe because there is rich lore, inside jokes, and shared references: intangibles that create genuine bonds. A book club works when it is really about discussing ideas, not just reading books together.

The intangible creates the gravity that holds the community together. Without it, you’re just people doing an activity in proximity, which is functional but not deeply bonding.

Platforms as Infrastructure

This reframes how we should think about digital platforms. They are not community spaces themselves; they are infrastructure that enables community formation around intangibles. A good platform:

• Aggregates people with shared interests.
• Allows organic self-organization.
• Facilitates connection around intangibles.
• Gets out of the way once communities form.

The value isn’t in the platform becoming a unified community. It is in enabling thousands of micro-communities to find each other and cohere around their particular intangibles. X isn’t one townsquare; it is infrastructure that hosts thousands of townsquares. Each hashtag, each community, and each shared interest becomes its own gravitational center.

The Evolution, Not Death, of Community

So back to Putnam’s observation: have we stopped being joiners? I don’t think so. We’ve changed what we join and how we join it. Previous generations joined geographic or activity-based organizations: the Rotary Club, the bowling league, or the church congregation. These were based on physical proximity and shared activities.

Modern communities increasingly form around intangibles that transcend geography. Shared interests, values, aesthetic preferences, intellectual frameworks, and humor styles create bonds that feel as real as (and sometimes stronger than) geographic proximity.

Someone passionate about urbanism might feel more kinship with urbanists worldwide than with their geographic neighbors. Their “townsquare” is the shared interest in urban planning, and they gather around that intangible wherever the infrastructure allows, such as Twitter threads, Discord servers, Substack comment sections, or occasional in-person meetups.

What We’ve Gained and Lost

This transformation isn’t purely positive or negative; it is different.

What we’ve gained:

• Finding highly specific communities of interest.
• Connecting with people who truly share our passions.
• Transcending geographic limitations.
• Access to diverse perspectives.

What we’ve lost:

• Forced proximity with people unlike us.
• Geographic community bonds.
• Serendipitous interactions with difference.
• Physical presence and its unique bonding chemistry.

The old model forced us into community with whoever happened to be nearby. This had costs (limited options, enforced conformity) and benefits (exposure to difference, geographic solidarity). The new model lets us find our specific tribes. This has costs (echo chambers, geographic isolation) and benefits (deeper shared interests, global connections).

The Real Question

The question isn’t whether we’re still joiners. It’s whether intangible townsquares can provide what geographic townsquares once did. Can communities formed around shared interests replace communities formed around shared space? Can the bonds created through common passion substitute for bonds created through common place?

I’m not sure yet. But I know this: community hasn’t died. It has evolved into something new, something that exists in intangible spaces we’re still learning to understand and navigate. The townsquares are still there. We’re just looking for them in the wrong dimension.

This essay is part of a series exploring Connection Replacement Theory: how modern technology transforms the nature of human connection and community formation.