Some thoughts on economy as community

I was born into a tradition of middle-class American suburban existence at the turn of the millennium. I grew up in communities — schools, sports teams, churches, family gatherings — but also in isolation, a 2 mile walk from the nearest public gathering place, and almost never walked down a sidewalk passing people I’d never met.

As I got older, I started to hear about something called the economy. It had a lot to do with how I was able to get things I wanted and needed, what the men on TV said at 7:30 each evening from my mom’s black and white Walkman television which she turned on during dinner because she worked with little people all day and needed to hear about adult things, and when I got into high school, it became the set of parameters which dictated what I could do when I grew up.

I am often tempted to think of economy as community. This characterization seems neglected or rejected by some people I talk to, but if a community can be understood as a group of people who interact with one another in a consistent, organized way, the economy is exactly that. People need and want things, and they have almost always gotten these things with the help of other people.

The problem which more and more people around me are beginning to notice is the fact that almost everyone we’ve ever heard of lives and works in the same global economy, and yet we don’t feel as though we live in community with most of the people around us. We need churches and special interest gatherings for that, or we need houses with lots of our friends inside them, or we need online networks and messaging boards. We’ve found ourselves able to travel to and exist in almost anywhere in the world with a little plastic card that says Visa on it, and yet when we travel to these places, we do not feel at home, even though everyone we pass is technically involved in the production of something we need — someone who we are in community with.

It seems clear to me that there are two ways to have an economy — one is large, standardized yet diverse, technically efficient, and global (it has no boundaries), the other is small, looser yet relatively homogenous, and local (it has boundaries). In a global economy, people can choose from many different things, while in a local economy, people might not have the same degree of choice, but they have a better chance of knowing who they interact with economically. It seems as if we are interested in particular goods that we want or need, we might prefer a global economy, but if we are interested in economy/community as something we are a member of, we might prefer a local economy. And yet this is certainly not the end of the story, because there are many nuances on each side of this distinction, and like many other distinctions, the reality they try to describe is not binary but rather exists on a gradient.

I began thinking about economies this morning while I was thinking about the type of work I’ve done for the past several years. I create digital products. In the past, I created websites for local businesses in my small town — Southsiders Irish Pub, Adele’s Massage Therapy, Kick n’ Stitch Brooms, Crossroads Coffeehouse. These clients all did business in their local community in the realm of sales (even though some ran their business using products from other places — Guinness from Ireland, coffee beans from Nicaragua). Their customers were people that they knew something about, and they found me because I advertised a local service — website design in Waxhaw. As time went on, however, I began to create websites for online or less local businesses — MyTennisStore, which sells women’s tennis apparel to people all over the country, or Daily Thermetrics, a multinational petroleum technology corporation. While these people existed in a global community in the realm of sales, I still interacted with them as individuals — I’ve spoken to them about their lives, I’ve even eaten dinner with their families. Now, I build consumer-facing software, a product whose value is ultimately correlative to the number of people who can use it at once. But while I may get a small display of emotion within in a support email now and then, I necessarily can’t get to know my customers — there are thousands of them, and I’ve spoken to less than ten.

It’s clear that I’ve been making an argument for the benefits of local economy, or at least for the perks of working for or running a business whose realm of sales is local. And yet I’m not sold on this either. It does seem somewhat problematic to create boundaries on my community, to say “I’ll only do business with these people.” One thing I’ve learned to love about the software design process is the fact that if I think something works well, it means nothing — my opinion necessarily has to be humbled before the needs and opinions of my users, in a somewhat democratic fashion. If all of my efforts are spent getting to know my community better, that makes certainly makes my interactions richer and more personal in some sense, but it does seem isolating or selfish in some sense — shouldn’t I want to serve more, or different, people?

Lately I’ve been fantasizing about (and directly planning and preparing for) a life where every day my existence is concerned with the things that are directly in front of me — I’d like to work on a farm, growing and consuming food with a community which is very much dependent on place, providing simple products to people who live close to me, or in a restaurant, where I serve food to people whose faces and emotions I get to see. In both, the practice of working is very much a community exercise — planting, cooking, cleaning can all be done over active conversation. In both of these situations my contribution to an economy is at least in some sense direct and tangible, my labor is immediately useful, and the large-scale expansion and growth of the service I provide is not imperative. In these situations, both my mission and my compensation are sufficient rather than competitive.

This life seems both enjoyable and virtuous on some levels. I know I might miss the sense of imperative and creativity that I’ve gotten from building a dynamic product, but I know I can direct similar efforts towards pursuits (maybe journalism or art) that require the same mindset but are not necessarily oriented towards profit. And yet I am not ready to admit that such a decision is without certain ethical sacrifices. It is easy to run from globalizing technology because of the harm it causes others (cultural dominance, etc), but also because of the moral discomfort that it causes myself. A lack of exposure to and concern with the global community cannot be considered ethically neutral, especially when I have and will always benefit from what has already been established by forces of global power. Ideologically, I might be setting an example of moving towards a localized economic reality that fosters friendship alongside material exchange. However, in the material realm, I will be ignoring the plight of previously local economies that are now struggling with a transition that has in some ways been forced upon them, and I will also be ignoring the potential for insight into varied human experience that is now available to me should I only exert the energy to humbly learn about the economic and non-economic lives of people existing far away from me.