Zoë Bernard | Vox

The perfect escape from our online world

2024-09-12T09:07:43-04:00

Miscellaneous second hand vinyl LPs of rock and pop music from the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s in record shop, London, UK. | Alex Segre/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

Earlier this year, Justin Murphy, the founder of the media and education company Other Life, wanted to offer a premium product to his newsletter subscribers. But for months, he’d been grappling with a problem familiar to anyone who writes online: an attention deficit.

“Words on the internet are undervalued,” he said. “There are too many of them, and it’s too easy to generate them.” Aware that many people who subscribe to his online newsletter don’t actually get around to reading it, Murphy decided to go retro: In June, he wrote up a newsletter, printed it out, and sent it to his subscribers’ mailboxes — their physical ones.

Sending out a physical newsletter forced Murphy to be more thoughtful with his work. “A print newsletter will differentiate the experience,” he said. “People will remember my ideas in a way that is separate from the oversupply of words online.” It has received an enthusiastic response from some of his readers, one of whom tweeted that Murphy is “officially part of the Analog Revolution.” Murphy believes that offering a print newsletter is a smart business decision, because capturing attention online is bound to get only more challenging.

This concern is especially pertinent with the introduction of generative AI which has lately been filling up the web with robot-produced content. As online content continues to be used as training fodder for AI models, offline mediums inaccessible to the greedy clutches of large language models may become not only more valuable, but a key component of a sustainable business.

“The whole internet social complex … and the way people use their computers to conduct life is doomed sooner than later,” Murphy said. “The smartest people, the people who are the most cutting-edge, will increasingly live their lives outside of computers.” He believes that in the future, people — especially those who are educated and rich — will reserve their phones exclusively for work. “[They’ll] read only on paper and interact in person,” he said. “There is going to be a mass defection away from screens.”

For anyone who can’t break their own phone addiction, a mass defection from screens may sound like wishful thinking. Technology still encroaches on virtually every aspect of our lives, with the digital world increasingly dictating not only how we work, but how we spend our attention and valuable leisure time. Scaling back even marginally can feel impossible. We are bound to the computers in our pockets — a product that’s begun to feel less like a helpful tool than a medium through which we live out most of our lives, whether we want to or not.

While society is nowhere close to abandoning computers writ large, there are signs that we are reaching peak digital saturation. This has felt especially true in the years following the screen-addled pandemic, in which there’s been a concerted push towards spending more time in person.

Today, the damage of social media is being scrutinized as never before, with the US Surgeon General introducing a campaign in June that would put warning labels on social media products, similar to what we’ve seen on tobacco and nicotine products for decades. But the most telling indicator may be a recent embrace of analog technologies like flip phones, vinyl records, and cassette players. The printed word, too, seems to be experiencing an unlikely resurgence, from old-fashioned magazines to broadsheet newspapers.

There are plenty of theories as to why people may be, if not exactly abandoning technology, at least flirting with the idea of a conscious separation. One is that the internet has become cluttered, predictable, and homogenous. In other words: It’s boring. In its early days, being online often felt like stumbling onto someone’s kooky basement party. Today, online spaces are governed by corporate-owned algorithms that churn the lowest common denominator content to the top. Now, being online often feels like entering an air-conditioned mall in which the exit signs have been carefully concealed.

There’s another theory, however, that runs counter to this: The online world, especially social media, is too addictive. And like all addictions, it makes us hate ourselves even as we can’t break free. “Maybe we’re reaching a point where we were kids in a candy store and now we’re sick and it’s making us nauseous,” said August Lamm, 28, a writer and artist who swapped out her smartphone for a Nokia flip phone in 2022 after spending too much time on Instagram.

Lamm frequently daydreams about what it might be like to live in a world freed from the grips of social media: “What would make social media feel dead?” she wondered. “What could make it feel that social media was gauche or even similar to crossing a picket line? I think it’s possible. How many of your friends would need to leave for it to feel irrelevant?”

Perhaps the simplest explanation for what many people are beginning to call a “return to analog” is the need for a reprieve, however brief, from the digital world’s all-pervasive reach. “People are fighting against the claustrophobia of abundance,” said Will Page, an economist and author of the book Tarzan Economics: Eight Principles for Pivoting Through Disruption. The online world is engineered to remove every last bit of friction, but Page added, people “want the friction back in their lives.”

Return of the flip phone

This friction is best represented by the resurgence of some of the clunkiest, least efficient tech there is: flip phones.

Sales for flip phones or “dumb phones” without real access to the internet, have been on the rise for the past two years. In 2023, sales for Nokia’s basic mobile phones more than doubled, compared to 2022 sales. A group of flip phone-carrying teens who formed a “Luddite club” embodied the face of a new youth movement after they were covered by the New York Times. Earlier this year, New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill wrote extensively about the virtues of owning a flip phone and floated the idea that in the future, people may have a yearly smartphone detox, similar to Dry January.

Lately, the role of smartphones at schools has come increasingly into question, with some schools banning them entirely. This coming fall, Eton, the elite British boarding school, will require incoming students to swap out their smartphones for a school-issued “brick phone.” (“Eton routinely reviews our mobile phone and devices policy to balance the benefits and challenges that technology brings to schools,” an Eton spokesperson wrote in a statement.)

Ironically, the desire to ditch smartphones is proving especially popular among young people who have only ever known a world saturated by digital devices. According to Adam Thomas, a spokesperson at Punkt, a company that makes “minimalist” brick phones with increased privacy protections, the biggest demographic that visits the company’s website is young people “in the low to mid-20’s, and seemingly getting younger,” Thomas wrote in an email. One reason for this sudden popularity among young people? A “good old fashioned rebellion against the status quo,” writes Thomas.

Another increasingly popular product is one that may sound like an oxymoron: Bluetooth-enabled cassette players. When Romain Boudruche first launched his cassette player company We Are Rewind in 2022, he had thought that the product would mostly appeal to people in their 50s and 60s nostalgic for the Walkman era. But he discovered that the product is most popular among young people who may not have been able to identify a cassette player before they stumbled upon the company.

Boudruche believes that We Are Rewind, which has more than doubled sales each consecutive year since its launch, is taking off precisely because it’s an annoying product to use. The cassette players are clunky and inconvenient, too big to be slipped in a back pocket, and time-consuming to rewind and fast forward. In other words, they’re unapologetically tangible, the exact opposite of the smartphone’s frictionless, glossy surface. People are tired of digital music, says Boudruche. “They need to touch something.”

Other physical music formats, like CD and vinyl, are having a similar resurgence. Revenues for these products in 2023 were up 11 percent from the year prior, earning nearly $2 billion worldwide, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. (Vinyl sales in particular saw 10 percent growth in 2023, outpacing CD sales.) While this renewed interest in vinyl may be artificially buoyed, like everything else in the music industry, by Taylor Swift, who sold 7 percent of all US vinyl last year, vinyl seems to be taking off mostly among listeners who crave a more lasting connection with artists in addition to richer audio quality.

Page, the Tarzan Economics author who formerly worked as an economist at Spotify, said that he’s noted a phenomenon in which people are buying vinyl records even without owning a record player. These are buyers who are purchasing alternative music formats not for the sake of listening to them, but for the opportunity to buy “a sense of intimacy that comes from belonging to an artist and their tribe,” he said. “The internet can scale just about everything but it can’t scale intimacy.”

Bringing back print

Print, too, is on the rise, from books to magazines to newspapers. Print book sales had a pop with the pandemic in 2020, and have continued to maintain sales of more than 750 million units sold each year. Meanwhile, even though they’re cheaper, sales for ebooks are down slightly, which may be owed to the fact that younger readers, much like older generations, overwhelmingly prefer printed formats. For the first time in years, the book retailer Barnes & Noble is expanding with plans to open 50 more new stores in 2024. And publishers who have long focused on digital formats are now doubling down on print products.

One such publisher is the Atlantic, which saw a 44 percent increase in newsstand sales between 2024 and 2023. When so much of our time is spent reading digital text that’s hemmed in by distracting ads, sitting down with a print magazine or book often feels leisurely by comparison. A word that comes up again and again with people who favor physical products over their digital alternatives, is “luxury:” a signal that people now regard the draining, congested thoroughfare of the internet as a new status quo that spare money and time can allow them to escape.

“Going offline is a form of luxury,” said Sean Thielen-Esparza, an entrepreneur who designs tech interfaces. “It’s this idea that you can signal luxury or status and be different from the masses by gatekeeping, by being in in-person networks, by quieting down.” For knowledge workers who spend most of their time on computers, spending time away from the internet is increasingly considered a privilege.

“With the exception of Elon Musk, you don’t see powerful people typically spending a ton of time online,” said David Samuels, the editor of County Highway, a publication which is sold as a printed broadsheet newspaper containing feature stories about the Western US. The online world is reserved “for the lower orders who have to spend time peddling their asses on these sites.”

Publishers like the Atlantic are eager to capitalize on this idea of offline luxury. “There is a significant shift in terms of what we think print can deliver for us in terms of brand elevations,” said the Atlantic’s chief growth officer Megha Garibaldi. “Our magazine is almost like a brand statement for us.”

Not only do print readers have a tendency to retain more of what they’ve read compared to reading online, but they often establish a deeper connection with printed work. The Atlantic has found that subscribers who buy its print bundle have higher retention rates than subscribers who purchase its digital package. There’s the reality, too, that articles that live online are interacted with differently than their print counterparts. Online stories have a tendency to serve only as “footnotes to tweets,” said Samuels, the editor of Country Highway.

Samuels himself decided to launch a print publication in 2023 out of a growing anxiety that in the future, reading would be wholly governed by “horrible machines and algorithms,” he said. “Obviously social media is here to stay, but the idea that that’s all that should exist feels very destructive.” Samuels believes that people who read printed products will always prefer them to the cluttered, distracting atmosphere of reading online. “Humans, when given a choice, do prefer a home-cooked meal to gross takeout that’s mushed together in a bag,” he said.

Alongside these older technologies which are making a comeback is a concerted revival around one of the oldest ways that humans have interacted since the beginning of time: spending time together in person. While society has never fundamentally rejected hanging out in person, the internet has significantly changed the way we interact. Today, it’s estimated that American adults spend 30 percent less time socializing in person than we did 20 years ago, with the most significant impact among teenagers, who spent about 45 percent less time hanging out with their friends in 2022 than in 2003.

Now, there’s a growing movement around cultivating in-person interaction in people’s daily lives, as seen through the resurgence in social clubs and members clubs which are slowly replacing the role that religious institutions formerly held. Susan MacTavish Best, the founder of Posthoc, a company that hosts intimate gatherings and salons centered on discussions with writers and entrepreneurs over home-cooked meals, has found that attendees relish the opportunity for in-person discussion. MacTavish Best believes that curated gatherings like social clubs and salons are growing in popularity because they provide the opportunity to socialize with people across a mix of different ages and backgrounds. Such social gatherings provide “a lot of what church has to offer — minus the God,” she said. “It makes [people] feel like they have a place in the world. The digital world does not make me feel like that.”

The bright future of analog

Some of this shift to the analog world could be a signal that society, as a whole, is not so much ready to return to older forms of technology as it is for a new kind of technology, one that would better suit our lives. “There is a dream and a passion for technologies that slow you down at first but in the end offer a lot of feeling and sensation that digital tech cannot give you,” said Florian Kaps, the founder of an analog manufacturing shop in Vienna called Supersense. The majority of the tech products we use today are distracting by design; using them tends to feel like hanging out in “an extremely cluttered mall” rather than what it should be: “a quiet home,” said Thielen-Esparza.

Thielen-Esparza, who is currently working on a project that involves refurbishing Sony mini-discs, believes that a total return to analog is far from the answer to our oversaturated online lives. Nostalgia “is a cheap shot,” he said. He believes that future innovation lies in building better tech, specifically eyes-up interfaces that allow us to interact with the world around us. We need to “get away from that image of the subway where everyone is crouched over their iPhones in the worst possible posture,” he said.

If there’s one thing that the return to analog shows us, it’s the fact that new forms of technology — no matter how seemingly entrenched — tend to be in vogue for only a few short decades. The internet as we currently know it could “be a trend, like bell bottoms,” said Lamm, the artist and writer. “Maybe, a few years from now, we’ll say, ‘Remember when we were all addicted to that website?’”

It shouldn’t be so hard to live near your friends

2024-07-23T12:28:47-04:00

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Logan Ury and her partner Scott received devastating news: Scott had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and his right foot needed to be amputated.

At the time, they were living in what Ury describes as a “kind of sad apartment” in San Francisco’s Mission district. It didn’t help that as Scott underwent chemotherapy in a nearby hospital during the early days of social distancing, Ury found herself increasingly isolated from friends and family.

When Ury’s friends, married couple Kristen Berman and Phil Levin, stopped by for a visit, they had a quick assessment of the situation: “They looked around … and said, ‘This is really sad. You need to move to Radish,’” Ury said.

Radish is a co-living space in Oakland that Levin founded in 2019. Today, it’s made up of five houses, alongside a communal space that’s outfitted with a kitchen and a yard on one-third of an acre lot that’s shared by 19 adults and five babies. Unlike the communes of the past where participants share the same living space, most of Radish’s members have their own standalone homes — a way to live communally without sacrificing privacy or squabbling over housework.

Ury and Scott, who asked to be identified by his first name to maintain his privacy, took Berman and Levin up on the offer, moving into Radish in August 2020. It was a decision that turned out to be perfect. “It was such an amazing support during this hard time,” said Ury. “And it was a really fun way to ride out the pandemic.”

Later, Ury wrote about her experiences living at Radish for the New York Times’ Modern Love column in a piece that urged people to lean on “Other Significant Others”: friends who provide an integral role that romantic partners are unable to fill.

Nearly four years later, Radish is still at the center of Ury and Scott’s lives. In April 2023, they bought a house half a mile away, but they regularly stop by Radish for communal dinners and casual hangouts around the firepit. When Ury threw a party for her birthday, she invited a big group of friends, most of whom were people she knew from Radish.

But the benefits go beyond socializing: During a recent trip to the emergency room, she was struck by how many people she could ask to help out around the house. “Most people don’t have, like, 28 people they can call on in an emergency,” she said.

Like many millennials, Ury is experiencing what’s becoming an aspirational lifestyle: living within walking distance of close friends. As more people work remotely, friends, rather than offices, are becoming the central compass around which people are seeking to orient their lives. Online, friendship is having a big moment: Videos on social media about living near friends frequently go viral, a flurry of recent media stories and newsletters suggest that people should be moving closer to their friends, while an article in the Atlantic wondered whether friendship, rather than romantic partnership, ought to be at the center of life.

But this celebration of friendship contrasts starkly with the realities of hanging out: Simply put, we’re not. Today, Americans spend less time with friends and family than at nearly any other point in history. It’s a trend so disturbing that, in 2023, the US surgeon general issued a public advisory statement describing loneliness as an “epidemic” rivaling both tobacco smoking and obesity in terms of its impact on health.

People like Ury — 30-somethings who still spend a lot of time with a big group of friends — are increasingly becoming the exception. Not only do Americans spend less time with their friends, they also have fewer friends, a fact that’s particularly true for men. Despite having more technology than ever before centered on social connection, there are fewer social institutions that support spending time together in real life.

Americans are less oriented around common social pursuits, whether it be going to church, which, for the first time in history, less than half of the country attends, or playing youth sports, from which participation has declined since the early aughts. There’s also a steep dropoff in social clubs, a former staple of American life. Freemasons, for instance, have lost 3.8 million members since the 1950s, and the civic institution Rotary has only 330,000 members, 90 percent of whom are 40 or older.

Not only this, but Americans lack trust and commonality in the places they live: 57 percent of people know only some of their neighbors, while 23 percent of people under 30 say they know none of their neighbors at all.

How do we change this? There are two significant ways to invest in “community infrastructure,” said Dr. Jeremy Nobel, who teaches at the Harvard School of Medicine and wrote the book Project UnLonely: Healing Our Crisis of Disconnection. “[F]ind friends within half a mile of where you live by engaging in meaningful community activities like volunteering,” or, the other way: “Recruit a bunch of your friends to live near you.”

Wouldn’t it be cool if we lived near each other?

Living near friends does seem like an obvious way to offset much of the loneliness creeping into American life. For one, it’s a solution that cuts out a lot of the reasons that prevent people from spending time with close friends in the first place, like meticulous scheduling or long commutes across town. “If a gym is closer, you go to the gym more,” said Berman, who lives at Radish and is the co-founder of Irrational Labs, a consulting firm that advises companies on behavioral economics. “If friends are closer, you see them more.” Upon joining Radish, new members are given a pair of Crocs: the only transport vehicle required to travel the distance between their friends’ homes.

In many ways, living near friends replicates life on a college campus where socializing is centered around shared pursuits and people can walk between their friends’ dorms. Research shows that social bonds peak at about age 25, the same age at which many people are leaving the campus behind.

There are steep barriers, though, to building functioning communities. For one, most people lack a big group of friends who can agree on the same city to live in, much less the same neighborhood. There are serious logistical complexities as well. Finding available real estate within close proximity isn’t always realistic, and even if it is, housing is often unaffordable. This is especially true for popular cities, like those in the Bay Area, where the average price of a home is $1.25 million as of February.

It was only possible for Levin to start Radish due to a few advantageous circumstances: He had a group of friends that pitched in with him on the property, and a new California state law made it possible to build more housing, called Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs, on Radish’s land. Part of it, too, was luck. When a home adjacent to Radish’s property went on the market, Levin convinced his close friends, now members of Radish, to buy it.

Radish is what Levin calls a “very difficult, pretty maximalist version” of living near one’s friends. Gathering 19 friends on the same plot of land in a city where housing is in high demand is no easy feat. But Levin believes that more people can have a smaller-scale rendition of what Radish offers: neighborhood communities, or “mini hoods,” founded on the guiding belief that people are happiest and healthiest when they are surrounded by those they love and admire.

To help them, Levin has built a website geared at making it possible for people to find housing within walking distance of the people they love. Called “Live Near Friends,” the site surfaces available real estate (both to rent and buy) located within a five-minute walk of a given zip code. For now, the website is a pared-down concept, a digital nudge in a conversation among friends that begins with, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we lived near each other?” But Levin believes that Live Near Friends could surface an untapped market for communal living in the same way that Airbnb created phenomenal demand for short-term rentals.

Levin has experience building out large-scale real estate projects that, at first glance, may seem like absurdist utopias. He was a part of the founding team at Culdesac, a real estate developer that builds car-free neighborhoods in some of the most car-reliant cities in America. Its first project, a housing community in the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, banned cars to free up parking spaces and enhance walkability in a place where summer temperatures regularly climb to 100℉. The project was deemed impossible by naysayers when it broke ground in 2019, said Levin. But today, the $140 million housing development is home to nearly 200 people — with plans to house 800 more.

Levin, a self-described “tech optimist,” has raised a small amount of venture funding for Live Near Friends, a company that he envisions could change not only the type of real estate that’s being built but also the way people think about buying real estate. By aggregating demand for community-based neighborhoods, Live Near Friends could “influence the rest of the [housing] ecosystem,” said Turner Novak, the founder of the early-stage venture fund Banana Capital, which invested in Live Near Friends. “They are sitting at the top of this discovery stack of helping people live next to or close to the people they care about.”

What if, instead of thinking about buying or renting real estate from what Levin calls the perspective of a “single-player application,” we thought about it from a “multiplayer frame”? “We want people … to think about a home not [just] as four walls, but the people and the stuff around you,” he said.

This would diverge dramatically from how people have thought about choosing housing in the past: a decision in which countertops and light fixtures typically carry more weight than the amount of time it takes to walk to a friend’s house. But it’s a shift in values that many millennials — the older of whom are entering their 40s and settling into more permanent living situations — are endeavoring toward.

“I feel like a lot of people I know are unhappy,” said Ury. “[They’ve] strived for a career, and that’s felt good, but then it doesn’t feel good for that long. There’s just a lot of emptiness around other things.”

The embrace of living near friends isn’t just about real estate. It represents a reframing of what success looks like in America, where upward mobility has always flowed toward more privacy. The more money you have, the more you can afford to shield yourself from the messiness that arises from sharing space with other people — whether through living alone or hiring support like housekeepers or nannies. But as Berman put it, people may have begun to understand that they are often using their money to “buy more loneliness.”

“I think rich people are worse at community because you get used to getting everything your own way,” said Joe Green, a friend of Levin’s who co-founded a mixed-income community in downtown Los Angeles called Treehouse. “In community living, you have to give up your preferences.”

Most of the people who live at Radish work in tech and have good jobs and decent salaries. Even in the expensive Bay Area, if they wanted they could live in their own homes with their own private slice of astroturf. These aren’t people who are seeking out co-living simply for financial perks like sharing rent, mortgages, or property taxes. Yet many of them are willing to put up with slight inconveniences for the deeper benefits of co-living.

When I visited Radish for a communal dinner around the backyard firepit in March, many residents told me that what they most liked about living there was the knowledge that they could leave their house and bump into a friend at any moment. It was a low-stakes way of hanging out from which they could just as easily withdraw, unlike the increasingly typical scheduled friend date, which turns a hangout into one more to-do item.

In the kitchen, two couples were discussing a car swap for the weekend — one of them was going out of town and they were letting the other couple use their roomier vehicle to run errands. There were a lot of subgroups at Radish, people who did laundry together or worked out together. A few people who reluctantly turned down dessert told me they were in a no-sugar group. For parents, co-living opened up a new range of social possibilities once they put the kids to bed: Just about every parent at Radish had a baby monitor propped up beside them as they ate and chatted with friends.

There are a lot of intangible benefits to living among friends that are profound but difficult to qualify, Gina Gutierrez, an entrepreneur who lives at Radish with her husband, told me. “You shift your mood when you’re having a bad [day]. You get to take some of the pressure off when you’re having a tiff with your partner, and then you come back and you’re in a better mood.”

A new kind of communal living

From hippie communes to hacker houses, communal living has always figured at some level in American life. It reached its height in the ’60s and ’70s — a period of social upheaval mirroring our own tumultuous times — which led many people to reject traditional values and seek out alternative ways of living, from sharing farmland to sharing each other’s spouses.

Today, the emphasis in communal living has shifted from co-housing to co-living to living near friends. This is true for Fractal, a loosely defined co-living collective based in New York that is steadily taking over an apartment building in East Williamsburg.

Fractal has none of the top-down leadership, founding manifesto, or shared list of chores you might expect in a communal living environment. “It’s basically just a bunch of people coordinating to live in the same apartment building,” said Priya Rose, Fractal’s co-founder.

Since 2022, Rose and her friends have been moving into units in the same apartment building as soon as they become available. Currently, about 30 or so Fractal members live in 10 of the 72 units. Rose and her husband, who were expecting a soon-to-arrive baby when we last spoke, recently moved into another co-living house about five miles east in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where they are building out a secondary community called Fractal Two.

While Fractal has no formal agreement with the building in which its members reside, the building managers are aware of it, and for the most part are okay with the project, said Rose. The only commune-style aspect of Fractal is “Merlin’s Place,” a shared community space located within the apartment of one of the larger units that Fractal members can access at any time to co-work or hang out.

Recently, they’ve been offering classes, open to the public, called “Fractal University,” in which Fractal’s members teach everything from painting to poetry. Rose, an entrepreneur and software engineer, has also been teaching a class, one course that’s geared at helping other people live near friends and build their own Fractal-style communities.

It’s not surprising that projects like Fractal and Radish have sprung up first in densely populated cities like New York and Oakland, where it’s much easier to build communities made up of friends who live within walking distance. Less obviously walkable urban areas require foresight, planning, and, as with the Culdesac Tempe project, serious real estate investment.

One such project is West Village, a residential community in the northern Alabama town of Florence. Currently under construction, it will soon have 170 condos available to buy.

Joel Anderson, who founded West Village’s real estate development firm, Mainstreet Communities, designed the project with walkability and community as core components. Condos face open courtyards where he envisions residents will socialize (a common building design in Europe); local businesses and coffee shops will occupy the around two dozen available commercial units; two public plazas will feature live music and events; and, to ensure that people aren’t car-dependent, each resident will be given an e-bike upon moving in.

Anderson became interested in urban design and development after reading about how living environments have a profound effect on every aspect of people’s lives, from how healthy they are to how much money they make. “The urban fabric of our cities is what water is to fish,” said Anderson. “If the water is dirty, [the fish] probably won’t notice, though they may not live as long.”

One issue Anderson is attempting to solve in his own real estate projects is the lack of density even within most US cities, a design flaw that requires people to be both car-dependent and to “spend enormous energy and money to do something basic like seeing a friend or getting groceries,” he said.

Within Florence, which has a population of about 40,000, the project has been greeted with great enthusiasm. West Village has yet to put any units on the market (some residences will become available in May, starting at about $225,000), yet it already has a waitlist of several hundred people, both for residential units and for its commercial spots.

This reception has only further strengthened Joel’s conviction “that people today don’t want to spend hours commuting,” he said. “They don’t want to be isolated on an island.”

“Can’t you just join a community?”

Despite the growing emphasis on living near friends and what seems to be an authentic and often unmet desire for social connection, the reality is that building community and keeping up with connections is hard work. It is seldom convenient, and it has a tendency to be crowded out by more seemingly urgent concerns. Case in point: I live a 10-minute walk from one of my oldest childhood friends, yet we’ve somehow been unable to find time for coffee in the past three months.

The truth is that if making friends is a priority in your life, it’s something you’ll cultivate wherever you live. “One of my friends was like, ‘Why do you always need to create a community? Can’t you just join one?’” Green, the Treehouse founder, told me. (At the time Green and I spoke, he was signing paperwork for a home in Sonoma that is located within a short distance of his rabbi and a group of Jewish friends, bringing him one step nearer to his goal of living within “a spiritual Jewish community.”)

There are many ways to cultivate a community where you live, something that Katherine Berry, a Seattle resident and community advocate, has learned firsthand. After reading numerous articles on the benefits of living closer to friends, Berry moved to a neighborhood in Seattle where many of her friends live within walking distance. But she also made gestures to foster community in her apartment building, throwing a party and inviting her new neighbors with handwritten notes she tacked to their doors.

Her friendly gesture was greeted with enthusiasm and, in the case of one longtime resident who had lived in the building since the 1980s, shock. “[He told me] that nobody in his history had ever invited people in the building to their apartment,” said Berry. “Like, damn. I didn’t [realize] I was a pioneer for putting notes on people’s doors.”

Correction, July 23, 12:15 pm: The original version of this story, published June 20, misstated the name of Fractal’s community gathering place; it is Merlin’s Place.

It shouldn’t be so hard to live near your friends

2024-05-06T09:07:23-04:00

At the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Logan Ury and her partner Scott received devastating news: Scott had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and his right foot needed to be amputated.

Wouldn’t it be cool if we lived near each other?

A new kind of communal living

While Fractal has no formal agreement with the building in which its members reside, the building managers are aware of it, and for the most part are okay with the project, said Rose. The only commune-style aspect of Fractal is “Berlin’s Place,” a shared community space located within the apartment of one of the larger units that Fractal members can access at any time to co-work or hang out.

One such project is West Village, a residential community in the northern Alabama town of Florence. Currently under construction, it will soon have 170 condos available to buy.

This reception has only further strengthened Joel’s conviction “that people today don’t want to spend hours commuting,” he said. “They don’t want to be isolated on an island.”

“Can’t you just join a community?”

Silicon Valley’s very masculine year

2023-12-22T13:52:35-05:00

Silicon Valley is embracing a new era of masculinity. Its leaders are powerful, virile, and swole. They practice Brazilian jiujitsu and want to fight each other in a cage. They can do 200 push-ups while wearing a 20-pound weighted vest. They can spend $44 billion on a website as a sort of elaborate joke. They can do all this because if these tech executives are one thing above all else, it is this: They are men.

This renewed sense of masculine dominance hit a fever pitch in 2023. The softer, soulful leaders of Silicon Valley’s previous decades have vacated. Gone is the delicate, ascetic presence of Jack Dorsey and the laissez-faire leadership of Sheryl Sandberg. Gone are the girl bosses. In their absence, the richest, most powerful men in tech are leading Silicon Valley toward a more macho future, one in which strength can be measured in muscles, women are absent from the boardroom, and ruthlessness is a virtue.

“All of Silicon Valley reminds me of the first Top Gun movie: the abundance of testosterone, like 1970s, 1980s all over again,” said Manu Cornet, a cartoonist and software engineer who formerly worked at Twitter, now X. “It’s not even sarcastic or second degree.”

“It’s a very jacked up movement,” said Glenn Kelman, the CEO of Redfin. “The people I know are thinking about testosterone and eating 500 grams of protein a day. They are ravenous, carnivorous, and totally yoked.”

Only two decades ago, Silicon Valley’s expression of masculinity was at odds with the status quo. Tech champions were nerds and geeks: skinny outliers in hoodies armed with a nonconformist mentality — a mindset that would prove indispensable to the creation of dozens of companies that launched the digital age. Then came the Obama years, when tech companies were propped up as progressive bastions of diversity and forward-thinking corporate culture. Under the influence of Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley ceded board seats and C-suite jobs to more and more women.

But more recently, these same Silicon Valley companies have begun to look like the conventionally bloated behemoths at the pinnacle of corporate culture. Their leaders, too, have adopted a performance of masculinity that’s strikingly conventional and includes angry rhetoric, muscular physiques, and a newfound interest in physical combat. The men responsible for building the products that touch the daily lives of billions of people display an increasing preoccupation with flaunting masculine bravado. It’s not just for show, either. The way these powerful men run their companies is impacting who is considered welcome in Silicon Valley.

Today, there are fewer women in tech leadership roles than only a few years ago, with women representing 28 percent of tech leadership (it was 33 percent at its height). And this number may only be decreasing: A 2022 McKinsey study found that women are leaving corporate roles faster than ever before and that they have less representation in technical roles than they did in 2018.

While it looks like Silicon Valley is regressing, there’s a chance this suddenly hypermasculine culture is just the next logical step in its evolution. Like Wall Street before it, the tech industry is ultimately hell-bent on making as much money as possible. And as economic conditions have shifted, preserving progressive values isn’t necessarily part of that mission.

“The truth is that, through these ups and downs, women and people of color haven’t made much progress,” said Kelman. “It’s been a tragedy. I’ve been doing this 30 years — I really thought we would be different by now.”

The vibe shift: “Now, no one pretends to include women anymore”

Only a few years ago, it was not so easy to be so unapologetically male in Silicon Valley.

These were the 2010s, when Silicon Valley outwardly championed diversity. At the time, having an all-male executive team was considered regressive and slightly embarrassing. Companies introduced diversity initiatives, venture capital firms loudly backed startups led by women and people of color, and the media wrote glowing profiles about female CEOs.

“When I started working in this space [a decade ago], it was very male dominated, but everyone pretended to include women,” said Joelle Emerson, CEO of Paradigm Strategy, a Silicon Valley consulting firm that specializes in diversity and inclusion. “Now, it’s still very male dominated, but nobody feels the need to pretend that it’s true. ”

These years of PR-friendly progress were only heightened by the pandemic, which ushered in growing awareness surrounding social injustice, racial inequity, and income disparity. Tech employees, suddenly with ample time on their hands and without access to the office’s free-flowing kombucha, began questioning their role not just at work, but in society.

“I got to this point pre-Covid where I was hustling, and then Covid hit and I had this awakening,” said Brent Boeckman, a coach for the men’s wellness community Evryman who worked in sales at startups and enterprise tech companies for more than a decade. “You’re working but for what?”

Such personal revelations were highly inconvenient to the bottom line of Silicon Valley’s many corporations. Tech employees began putting in minimal effort at work or quitting their jobs to pursue passion projects. The media wrote about “quiet quitting,” “the Great Resignation,” and labor rights. The status quo was shifting, and tech executives felt it. To appease their employees’ demands, they adopted a meeker stance.

“I would talk to CEOs — all men — who would say, ‘I’m not really enjoying my job. I’m the king of the jungle, and yet I’m tiptoeing around my employees,’” said Kelman.

By the end of 2022, FTX collapsed and the crypto bubble burst. An uneasy pall fell over the valley. There was a sense of “Holy shit, there’s nothing there!” said Ed Zitron, founder of the consumer tech PR firm EZPR. It was a revelation that made people insecure: One of the most buzzworthy technologies Silicon Valley had produced in decades appeared to be nothing more than hype. As the economy tightened, the venture capital frenzy cooled, and many of the unprofitable companies of Silicon Valley drew their last breaths.

“There was something that cracked in them,” said Zitron. “They saw the world they loved going away, while at the same time making more money than they ever made.”

Buff Bezos and the rise of swole entrepreneurship

To fully understand how we reached this moment of hypermasculinity, you must look farther back, before the pandemic, to 2017, when a pair of arms were first photographed emerging from the sleeves of a snug black polo shirt at a conference in Sun Valley. The arms were tanned and vascular, and they belonged to Jeff Bezos, a formerly reedy bookseller whose public image up until that point had embodied a sort of endearing, sexless twerpiness.

Bezos’s new appearance signaled a shift in the tech executive’s aesthetic makeup. Previously, the male costume of Silicon Valley was one of studied nonchalance: rumpled T-shirt, messy hair, anemic build — an appearance meant to convey that what actually mattered was the merit of a man’s ideas, not his physical strength.

But as Silicon Valley generated the richest men on the planet, these men, in turn, were deploying their millions to become more closely aligned with the prototypical image of masculine desire, whether by employing Tom Cruise’s personal trainer or purchasing a full head of hair.

It was an inflection point that slowly rippled through the ranks of Silicon Valley. Soon, venture capitalists were posting shirtless photos of themselves on Twitter, flaunting their gains and dropping fitness routines. The message was clear: Physical strength and stamina were necessary prerequisites to building a massive tech company. The more you demanded of yourself physically, the more you could demand of your company.

There was also the reality that many tech companies’ leading executives, Bezos included, had reached middle age. Mortality’s inevitable creep was closing in. It seemed unfair — cruel, even — that people who had acquired all that the material realm had to offer might be forced to face a fate so pedestrian as old age and, eventually, death.

Soon, the notion of living a healthy life for as long as absolutely possible became a core component of Silicon Valley dogma. A new cohort of health and longevity influencers emerged. Among them is Andrew Huberman, a buff, straight-talking Stanford professor of neurobiology who recommends HIIT workouts and cold baths on his popular podcast, Huberman Lab. And there is Bryan Johnson, a former venture capitalist, who is attempting to achieve his mantra, “Don’t Die,” through a longevity regime that involves a strict diet, going to bed at 8:30 pm, and tracking his nightly erections.

When it comes to the Bezos effect, there are some very “boring economic issues” at play, said Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a business psychology professor at Columbia University. “There is a cycle in which innovation leads to growth, and then growth hinders innovation.” If the leaders of big tech companies are performing an expression of masculinity identity that feels infinitely more traditional compared to what was championed only a few decades ago, it might be because their companies have become infinitely more traditional.

The original founders of today’s tech juggernauts — people who were once “anarchic and rebellious” — have become the institution, according to Chamorro-Premuzic. “These startups matured and started getting lawyers, HR people, sales people,” he said. “They became corporations. They’re more interested in maintaining the growth than being creative.”

Mark Zuckerberg learns to fight

No company signifies the shift from scrappy startup to corporate establishment more than Meta, a company that’s better known for ripping off other companies’ ideas than producing its own. And so far, its most original innovation in years — a $10 billion bet on the metaverse — has come up mostly empty. Meanwhile, Meta’s primary strategy to keep growing has been sputtering, posing an existential threat to the company. In February 2022, for the first time in history, Facebook was losing users. Its stock plunged by 26 percent, wiping out $230 billion in market value.

It makes sense, then, that Zuckerberg seems to be searching for new ways to transform not only his company’s public image but his own. During the pandemic, Zuckerberg, a self-improvement hobbyist whose wide-ranging interests include learning Mandarin and slaughtering his own meat, discovered the combat sport Brazilian jiujitsu. Immediately, he was hooked. “Like five minutes in, I was like, ‘Where has this been my whole life?’” Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan in a 2022 interview. “It really is the best sport.”

Soon after taking up the new hobby, Zuckerberg was posting about it on Instagram — everything from photos at UFC games and sweaty, shirtless selfies with professional kickboxers to videos sparring on a barge to the theme of Mission Impossible. One of the most iconic images of Mark Zuckerberg following the Cambridge Analytica scandal was a photoshopped portrait on the cover of Wired’s March 2018 issue: Zuckerberg, badly beaten, with two black eyes and a bloodied brow, his face made up in an expression of weary introspection.

Now, plenty of pictures of Zuckerberg’s bruised and beaten face grace his Instagram, but this time, the beatings are genuine and hard-won. “Sparring got a little out of hand,” a caption reads beneath a selfie in which he is pictured with bruises beneath his eyes.

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Zuckerberg’s infatuation with MMA has swept through Silicon Valley, too. “MMA isn’t just a sport, it’s the sport,” an effusive Marc Andresseen wrote in a July 2023 newsletter entitled “FIGHTING.” The prominent venture capitalist added, “It’s important to understand how important — how primal — MMA is in the story of our civilization. MMA is the original combat sport.”

Zuckerberg’s interest in MMA also happened to coincide with the 2022 departure of Meta’s most public female executive, Sheryl Sandberg. For years, Sandberg’s leadership had come to signify the advent of corporate feminism, bolstered by her bestselling book, Lean In, in which she encourages women to relentlessly pursue their ambitions. But in Sandberg’s absence, Meta has become unrelenting in its own right after Zuckerberg launched his so-called “year of efficiency.”

The company laid off 10,000 employees in the first few months of 2023, and its stock has rebounded.

Zuckerberg, in turn, has succeeded in reforming his public image. In a recent interview with the Information, Khai Wu, a professional mixed martial artist who has trained with Zuckerberg, described his impressions of the Meta CEO: “This nerd is a silent killer.”

Elon Musk’s ruthless rhetoric

But even as tech executives flaunt their undisputed dominance, dealmaking in Silicon Valley has become increasingly cutthroat. In August, the Wall Street Journal declared: “Startups Are Dying, and Venture Investors Aren’t Saving Them.” Only a few years earlier, these investors had sparked a financing hysteria so frenzied that it was compared to the dot-com boom, but now they were closely guarding their capital. Total venture spending slowed by 48 percent in the first six months of 2023.

Today’s rocky market has given tech executives plenty of opportunities to flex their newly acquired muscles. Or as Kelman, Redfin CEO, puts it, “Capitalism — tooth and claw — will always come out when there’s volatility in the market.”

Nowhere is this tone of ruthlessness made clearer than in the rhetoric of Elon Musk, who has spent a good part of 2023 focusing on X, formerly known as Twitter, where he’s been harassing his own employees, posting conspiracy theories, and entreating his competitors to a “literal dick measuring contest.”

“Elon Musk is pushing back, saying, ‘You literally can’t take me down,’” said Kevin Gibbon, CEO of the e-commerce infrastructure marketplace Airhouse. “Behind closed doors, people are saying the same things that Elon Musk is saying, but he’s one of the only people who can get away with it.”

There is the aggressive way in which Musk runs his companies, too. Cornet, the former Twitter engineer, describes it as mayhem by design. In the days following Musk’s takeover at Twitter, Cornet experienced this firsthand: Musk issued orders with urgent deadlines, threatening to fire employees who didn’t meet them. In Cornet’s view, it was a matter of strategy: These impossible-to-meet deadlines ensured that employees would be incapable of questioning Musk’s decisions. The approach seems to make his companies especially difficult for women.

“After Musk hired a bunch of people it seemed like a disproportionate number of women retired,” Cornet added. “It seemed clear that Twitter had become this really bro-ish place.”

This kind of abrasive management style has become the new norm in Silicon Valley. In the past year, Rajkumari Neogy, a Silicon Valley executive coach, has been asked to intervene on behalf of companies whose executives exhibit a bullish management style.

“I’ve had to tell very senior leaders, ‘You can’t keep acting like this,’” said Neogy. “It’s all about bullying, micro-managing, reprimanding — it’s always the stick and the carrot.”

As we enter 2024, it’s clear that Silicon Valley’s masculinity phase is far from over. While the pendulum may eventually shift toward a climate that’s slightly more welcoming to women and minorities, it seems unlikely that social progress will become a priority anytime soon within the tightening tech economy.