Who Will and Can Really Build A Community?
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg just unveiled the Company’s new mission around building “community.”
“To give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”
According to the Verge, “it is a culmination of months, perhaps years, of apparent soul-searching on Zuckerberg’s part and strategic directional changes for Facebook as a product. The social network has been moving in this direction for quite some time, away from a place of silly life updates and selfies and toward becoming the hub of modern community-building and digital discourse.”
This week, two — seemingly unconnected — events brought me to the realization that it is Airbnb and WeWork that stand the best chance of building true community and not Facebook.
While traveling this week, my home country of Israel erupted into debate over the Israeli Government’s dual decisions to not expand the access to the Western Wall to more pluralist prayer services and to not recognize converts from private courts under Israel’s Law of Return (Israel’s law enabling all Jews to receive citizenship in Israel). As I was far from home, I watched the debate play out on my Facebook feed as if there was no other issue in the world this week. It also played out on a WhatsApp group of young leaders that I am a member of (I am not a leader nor young in this case, just an old voyeur). You could literally hear people shouting at each other, referring to the other side as “sons of darkness” or “disingenuous fools.” Commenters lambasted the dual decisions as capitulation to Israel’s “Haredi” public on the one hand and saving the world from the nefarious objectives of Reform Jews and their supporters on the other. Thereafter, it turns out that many of the government ministers involved and certainly the people yelling on Facebook and Whatsapp, had never met someone of the other opinion and certainly not recently. The meetings of Israeli members of Knesset with leaders of American Jewry and Haredi leaders after the decision only served to reinforce how distant they all were one from the other. Nonetheless, many of the politicians, NGO leaders and other talking heads took to Facebook to explain their opinions, excoriate the other side or support the government in text and video.
While reading this venom, I was staying with my son at an Airbnb in Spain. I came home on the second night of our stay to find out that our friendly host Oscar was an IT executive at a large chemical company. We had a super interesting discussion about technology trends generally, Israeli technology and the tech scene in Barcelona. It was thoughtful, engaging and interesting. It came right after we came back from fishing and having our fish cleaned by Hisham, a Moroccan born Muslim chef who cleaned our fish near the beach. You see Hisham saw my son’s Yarmulke and my Aleph hat and was concerned that if he removed the scales of the fish, the fish would no longer be kosher (kosher fish must have fins and scales). Our fishing guide, a German-Spanish resident of Spain who is knowledgable about Judaism and Medieval Catalonian Jewish History, asked me about it and then explained to Hisham that he could remove the scales. Upon learning of Hisham, I went to the kitchen and used my broken Arabic, Spanish and decent English to wish Hisham a Happy Holiday, for it was the Muslim Holiday of Eid Al Fitr this week following Ramadan. He thanked me and said “Shalom.” I gave Hisham our extra fish from our haul that we would not finish by the time we left Spain, which he took home to his family.
While sitting there and drinking, the owner of the bar muttered some comments in Spanish to our fishing guide and then got up and left. Our fishing guide explained to us that this Spanish chap, who is a “normative nice guy,” is actually anti-semitic so he might have been uncomfortable with us there. Our guide told him that Anti-semitism has no place here or anywhere, so he left.
Herein lies the core point, if you want to build community and communication you need to talk to people in the flesh. You need eye contact and a warm smile. Anti-semitism and bias can flourish on Facebook because you do not need to look someone in the eye. Your real name is insufficient to cause sufficient discomfort or, conversely, engagement in order to form a community. Facebook is a conversational, sometimes voyeuristic and oftentimes obnoxious feed divorced from the self.
On the other hand, Airbnb forces interaction. It is a very different interaction from a hotel room where there is staff who are almost invisible. I am in someone’s house and I am his guest. We formed a bond, connected on LinkedIN and discussed a really interesting topic of shared interest. You see it also turns out that both Oscar and his wife are immigrants to Spain like I am an immigrant to Israel. He told me about the best local Paella place while I apologetically explained that I could not eat there because I only eat Kosher, something he knew nothing about until the conversation. Hisham and I connected in a way that we could not over Facebook. It turns out he knew about scales and kosher fish because his neighbors in his birthplace of Morocco were Jewish.
Facebook will not likely succeed at real community-building because there is not human interaction. There is no flesh and blood. No shame. No forced engagement. There is too little that is really deeply human about it. Communities are deeply human.
I often get asked what caused me to invest in WeWork when I first saw it. Was it not just a real estate deal? Today I can formulate that thesis well: It was community at its best. It was humanity at its best. When I asked early WeWork members why they stayed, they told me that they were there and stayed for the people, the family, their community, that they would help out when in need. They were in tight quarters, forced to interact in common space and make space for each other. They had to look at each other and look out for each other through the thin glass walls. When I think about it more, the Company reflects its founders Adam Neumann and Miguel Mckelevy who are deeply human people, filled with emotions students of the ups and downs of life. WeWork changed commercial real estate because it changed the environment and reason to be in space from “Bricks and Mortar” to “Flesh and Blood.” WeWork engenders engagement and understanding. No jerks allowed. Airbnb has changed travel because of the engagement, the very human shame in not cleaning up behind yourself or not treating people well. Concomitantly, it has created a conversation where there is no hiding. It is WeWork and Airbnb that are the true global communities of understanding. Facebook still has a lot of people using pithy, abusive rhetoric, shouting at others while hiding behind a browser with no real skin and blood in the game.
P.S. You can build an online presence on Facebook and then do meetups to create human interaction as some have done successfully but that is not core to the product.
P.P.S. I guess Facebook could build community by buying Meetup and really scaling and varying it.
