At some point, someone decided that meeting people needed a strategy.
A personal brand. An elevator pitch. A LinkedIn profile optimised for discoverability. Coffee chats with people you’ll never see again. Following up within 24 hours. Giving before you take. Building “genuine relationships” with the explicit goal of extracting value from them later.
We called this networking. And then we wondered why everyone felt so hollow after doing it.
Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe what happens when platforms start out serving users, then start serving advertisers, then collapse inward under the weight of their own extraction. The product degrades. The experience degrades. What was useful becomes unusable.
That’s exactly what happened to community.
Someone took the very human need to belong — to know people, be known, feel part of something — and ran it through a productivity framework until all the warmth was gone.
The result is a room full of people performing connection at each other.
The real thing isn’t a growth strategy. It doesn’t have a follow-up email. Nobody’s tracking the ROI.
You just show up. Repeatedly. Until something real forms.
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