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@ gino
2025-06-01 15:33:20Safety as a Community Creation
I quickly learned that Japan is known for being one of the safest countries in the world—yes, I didn't even realize that until I arrived there. But understanding safety as a statistic is different from witnessing it as a lived reality.
One of the most striking signals of this safety was watching first graders take themselves to school on public transportation in Tokyo. These tiny humans, navigating one of the world's largest cities completely independently. In contrast, my Chicago suburban hometown requires parents to wait at the bus stop for children of that same age, even if their house is just across the street.
I witnessed nearly everyone glued to their phones while out in public. Literally dozens of heads planted facedown into their palms while crossing major intersections. While that's not a trait I admire, it reflects the absolute safety every citizen must feel to be able to walk around like that. Similarly, Tokyo is definitely the place where you can show off designer fashion trends if you can afford to do so. While the style is far more modest and homogenous than here in the USA, expensive fashion statements are still blatantly made in the many high-trafficked districts of the mega city.
The contrast hit me viscerally when I remembered my friend's experience in São Paulo a few years ago. During a short three-mile run, while he was checking Google Maps, he was nearly mugged by a thief on a motorbike. The difference was unmistakable. Take heed of all warnings to not use a smart phone in the streets of Sào Paulo. Tokyo however - accidentally leave your phone at the Izakaya? Don't be surprised if it is personally returned to you by the owner of the Izakaya with a note thanking you once again for your earlier patronage.
Community M and the Dissolution of Transactional Relationships
While in Japan, I was invited to spend the weekend in an exclusive, members-only community nestled along a river flowing down from the mountains—remarkably, all still within Tokyo Prefecture. It felt like a hidden gem: only 5% of the prefecture consists of this kind of natural landscape, and I never would have discovered it without that special invitation.
There, I participated in a unique Bonsai class led by a woman who has been cultivating Bonsai her entire career. I also shared meals, nature walks, and sauna sessions with other community members. It was an eventful weekend, meeting and integrating with an entirely unique culture. The weekend felt truly memorable, special, everlasting—essentially boiled down to a priceless experience.
It's an experience I will remember and appreciate more than the time I've spent in several corporate luxury hotels. Don't get me wrong, corporate luxury hotels are very nice. Their amenities are much more comfortable than anything Community M could offer me. They feel safe, and they make me feel just a little bit entitled—in the sense that "I'm spending A LOT of money with the company that keeps you employed... so are you working for me to the maximum of our mutual expectations?" That's certainly okay. The hotel is offering a service and I am paying for it. Ultimately, it is indeed a mutually valuable transaction everyone is happy with.
But that time spent with Community M was something different. The amount of money I could have spent with them didn't matter. Friendships were formed over shared interests and probably genuine interest and curiosity in each other's cultures. Those values get washed away when the power dynamic shifts too much toward a monetary transaction—service in exchange for cash.
This experience crystallized something I'd been feeling but couldn't articulate: the difference between being served and being welcomed. In transactional relationships, your value is determined by your purchasing power. In genuine community, your value comes from your participation, your curiosity, your willingness to share and receive.
What Online Communities Could Become
What should online communities of the future look like? I think an amazing community could pull some of the best traits of American and Japanese culture. Reliance on oneself and personal responsibility is incredibly important. But as communities grow, it becomes so much harder to exercise personal interests without feeling like I'm "barging in" or something. I've never felt compelled to become the center of attention. What gets me excited is seeing people come together and being their best selves naturally and organically around one another, without any single person being too much "the center."
The way I see a lot of online communities advertised today is less desirable to me. It often looks like there's an influencer selling something and inviting all their followers to join "the community." This replicates the same extractive, transactional dynamics I experienced in luxury hotels, just digitally.
I left Japan with a sense of respect for what's possible when people come together under a shared understanding of a few basic human principles. The most obvious one being a sense of shared responsibility to look out for one another, thereby providing safety for all—a large, functional neighborhood watch, so to say. In Japan, I got the sense that the means to provide general well-being through shared responsibility is far greater than the more exclusive reliance on oneself and distrust of others that often appears in large American cities.
The Internet as Unsafe Territory
When thinking of safety and shared responsibility, the internet today is more like New York City than Tokyo. It's not safe for children, and outsourcing our own responsibility for maintaining safety to centralized, profit-seeking organizations makes no sense. These platforms have the undisputed goal of extracting value from the very communities they attempt to serve.
Current online communities are built backwards. Instead of communities creating tools for themselves, external platforms create tools to extract value from communities. The power dynamic is fundamentally extractive rather than generative.
Communities Building for Themselves
Eve will allow us to build intranets that are safer than anything YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, or any other platform could ever provide because they'll be built by communities, not for-profit organizations seeking to extract value. All applications will be open source, therefore all algorithms will be open source, thereby empowering everyone to exercise their shared responsibilities for maintaining safe, prosperous communities.
Communities will be enabled to create applications that deliver unique experiences specific to their rules and guidelines. Compare it to my Bonsai class. Someday there may be a Japan-oriented community where Bonsai masterclasses and other Bonsai-related services and products are offered. Communities won't be as dependent on platforms. Because of the open-source standard, more tradespeople will be enabled to quickly build whatever the community deems necessary. Communities will be in full control and not reliant on any one platform, nor any one person to maintain the community.
What I experienced in that members-only community by the river was a space where relationships form around shared interests and genuine curiosity - where the community itself determines its needs and builds its tools, where safety emerges from collective responsibility rather than external enforcement. In our digital age of abundance - I see a very real future where communities are enabled to free themselves from irrelevant distractions and build what they need to achieve both individual and collective prosperity.