Searching For My City
On local connection in the age of the internet
How did we get from public computer terminals in laundromats to Yelp and Nextdoor? Today’s essay takes us on a tour through the past, present, and future of the different online platforms through which we interact with our cities—and asks what’s been lost along the way.
Searching For My City
Despite its name, Cafe International is very distinctly “San Francisco.” A chalkboard menu (characteristic of other cafes in the city that grew up in the ‘90s) offers everything from smoothies to baba ganoush for the full spectrum of residents that come through its doors. For years, the space has also been home to poets and jazz musicians who regularly fill the evening air with their tunes. Zahra, the owner, has evidently spent decades pouring her heart and soul into the place, transforming it from a run-down cafe into the vibrant, reliable “town square” that it is today. Even after moving across the Bay, I’m unfailingly greeted with laughter and warmth whenever I’m in the neighborhood.
Of everything that fills that room, I think nothing captures the essence of Cafe International more than its celebrated bulletin board. It’s a behemoth in its own right, spanning much of the entryway and hosting dozens of advertisements; this week, it’s filled with posters for music lessons, a new pottery studio, a drag show, a meditation retreat, and other quintessential San Francisco offerings. Every poster feels like a link to something new and exciting around me that I wouldn’t have known about otherwise. Patched together on the board, they are a map of a diverse city that is actively and continually shaped by residents. It is “international” in some ways, yes, but deeply local in others.
But online, I would be hard pressed to find the same concentration of local people, discussion, and culture that this humble cafe is able to create. The painful reality is that the internet somehow makes it easier to find friends who live halfway across the world than to connect with the people who live down the street. From my point of view, we’re already one foot into a metaverse of sorts—a web of online communities, information, and experiences that all too often exclude the people and places we physically contend with each day and depend on for our survival. There’s some beauty in our newfound ability to explore beyond home so easily, but there’s also a risk of forgetting, of losing our relationship with what actually sustains our lives.
Despite the internet’s boundless capacity for connection and expression, I’m still searching for my city online.
Dialing In
Before the meteoric rise of the World Wide Web, Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) were a popular form of communication and digital community. Operated by individuals or small groups, BBSs were essentially text-based websites that users could dial into using a modem and phone line. In many ways, they resembled early internet forums and offered ways for users to post messages, share files, play games, and participate in online discussions. The humble hobbyists that ran them played a crucial role in the early development of digital culture in these early days, gathering people in the miniature worlds that they created. Most importantly, they were local; these systems relied on dial-up connections, and the fees for long-distance transmissions disincentivized cross-country or even statewide connections.
Early on in this movement, the Community Memory Project took that limitation and doubled-down on it by placing computer terminals in supermarkets, record stores, cafes, and laundromats all across the Bay Area. Born from the countercultural roots of Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement, the founders hoped to create a local network of information that always pointed back to the person providing it (basically, a digital bulletin board). The first terminal in Leopold’s Records helped rising musicians find collaborators, clients, and other resources in the area to advance their craft, and over the course of its 20 year tenure, the Project supported a healthy ecosystem of spontaneous relationships through a local, digital commons. In the words of Lee Felsenstein, “[they] opened the door to cyberspace and found that it was hospitable territory”—not just to countercultural computer geeks, but to just about any neighbor who happened upon one of their terminals.
When the internet came along, a daring few built on these early examples to create digital twins of the cities where they were based. Blacksburg Electronic Village was one of these experiments, initiated as a joint-venture between Bell Atlantic (now Verizon) and the Virginia Institute of Technology and built specifically to “increase access to and participation in community life”. Research on the BEV often refers to it as a “community network” through which churches, clubs, senior centers, and more could share information and coordinate their activities; apparently, most of the network’s use boiled down to education, civic interests, and supporting local social relations. By the end of its tenure, BEV was universal to Blacksburg in the way Facebook (or the Meta ecosystem) is near-universal to the world—nearly 87% of the city was connected through the electronic village, and actively used it to mediate their relationship with the place they loved and lived in.
Examples like Community Memory and BEV captured an optimistic vision of how computers and networks can assist in “placemaking”: the open, participatory process of shaping a physical space through the dreams and histories of the people who live there. In these early infrastructures, every graze with the machine reinforced the importance of the people that you lived with, rather than pulling your attention away from them. Meetups in the physical sites of these networks were common and reinforced social bonds with people you may have never met otherwise. Jack Carroll (a professor at Penn State and archivist of the Blacksburg network) once said that BEV was about creating a “new way of life”—one that was deeply connected and yet rooted in place.
To be fair, much of this local orientation is because there wasn’t an alternative when these experiments arose. Over the years, the “connected” part of internet culture has intensified, but we’ve traded depth for breadth and our internet communities now sustain an infinite number of worlds and subcultures beyond what our cities and towns could apparently offer. But with the slow demise of these local social networks (a trend influenced by far more than just technology), I still can’t help but wonder what we’ve lost along the way.
Tapping Out
Even as the online world expanded beyond the local, mapping the world never ceased to be a fascination. With the rise of geographical information systems (GIS) and other supporting technologies, early pioneers like Mapquest aspired to put the places where we live on the World Wide Web. Google Maps quickly took over by investing more heavily in easy navigation and mobile technology, making the map a basic utility for anyone with a smartphone. Combined with the ability to track users’ locations in real time through mobile GPS, location-based services went from a novel fascination to an everyday encounter, with recommendations and advertisements for businesses and services becoming an inseparable part of the digital economy.
With all of these developments, modern digital platforms have made reviewing the places around you the most common way of engaging with your city or town. Yelp, Foursquare, and Google Maps provide star ratings for just about every “point of interest” around you, whether it’s a pizza parlor or a park. This tendency shapes the default definitions of places around us as well: a brief search of “Lower Haight” yields a never-ending list of things to see and do, ranked lists of restaurants, and moving guides for those who might consider Lower Haight their new home.
But these platforms don’t really scratch my itch for finding a sense of community online. With the exception of a few pictures of families walking through the city’s parks, scrolling through Instagram’s hard-to-find “Places” feed for San Francisco is chock full of semi-professional food pictures and tourists posing in front of landmarks. It is a series of atomized (and often commercialized) experiences that happen to be co-located; no one is encouraged to make meaning of the place they live in together or question the way that things are, much less actually spend time with friends and neighbors. Perhaps worse, it presents a surface-level understanding of a place that I know to be incredibly diverse, full of people of many backgrounds, languages, and lores. Opportunities for connection are generally removed from the picture, even more elusive than the Places feed is to begin with.
The trend towards consumption within location-based platforms is something that William Payne (a geography and urbanism professor at Rutgers University) describes well through his piece “Crawling the City.” As highlighted in his studies, the quantification of a business’s character through views and five-star reviews feeds into a speculative perception of place; by seeing which places and spaces are becoming “hot,” developers and entrepreneurs from around the world are able to target new sites for growth. While the underlying socioeconomic shifts of urban life are clearly influenced by much more than just Yelp reviews, the production and interactions on these platforms might actually accelerate the gentrification of these places, and the displacement of the very people who made that place special at all.
This orientation reinforces the idea that the city itself is something to be consumed, rather than co-created among its residents. There’s a stark difference between this “way of being” and that of the Community Memory Project or BEV, which were designed to facilitate both online and offline engagement with the same group of people over time within the environment that they shared. When today’s platforms do focus on location, hosting civic or cultural dialogue is more of a risk than a benefit; in fact, both Google Maps and Yelp often remove content that is considered overly political or otherwise unrelated to the individual’s perception of the space. This might be okay if there were alternatives for meaningful local connection or dialogue, but given that most social networks never prioritize place-based interactions, it seems that we’re left with little idea of what our cities are for but to serve us.
Of course, none of this is to say that neighbors aren’t talking to each other online. Over the years, I’ve collected my fair share of groupchats and email lists based in the Bay Area, for everything from house music to mutual aid. Craigslist has remained an invaluable utility for finding used goods or places to live (and occasionally, delighting in people’s romantic “missed connections”). But too often, these groups feel like rare and infrequent accessories to the usual modes of online social interaction that whisk our attention away from the people around us. Collectively, they lack the gravity necessary to reestablish a sense of responsibility for the people and places around us.
In these isolated oases, I find some hope—but I am still searching.
Tuning In
There’s almost nothing preventing us from creating online communities that are more firmly rooted in place. The same infrastructure that enables connection across oceans can connect people who live right next door to one another, and reap similar or magnified benefits for everyone by doing so. There’s no reason why these online communities can’t thrive at multiple scales simultaneously, either; how culture and politics evolve in San Francisco and Oakland can translate to Accra and Hong Kong. That balance (and tension) between the local and global is an essential theme of our modern world.
Still, this isn’t to say that building and sustaining place-based digital networks is easy. Like many other projects like it, both the Community Memory Project and Blacksburg Electronic Village eventually shriveled due to a lack of funding and an inability to compete with the rise of the internet and home computers. In more recent years, Nextdoor also promised to “cultivate a kinder world where everyone has a neighborhood they can rely on,” raising millions of dollars and acquiring a host of smaller local networking companies and organizations along the way. But in its relentless pursuit of scale (and the advertising revenue that comes from it), the demographics gradually homogenized and less investment went into the cultural features that would have helped it shine. It’s fairly well-documented at this point that the most popular place-based application is less of a town square and more of a homeowner’s association, suppressing political speech and fearmongering about unhoused individuals (often with anti-Black undertones). Without the same attention to conscious hosting and onboarding that the original community network stewards adopted, this and platforms like it often devolve into fiery conflict, misinformation, and harassment.
While it’s often frustrating to see how today’s platforms subsume or commodify the notion of place by default, I’ve been thankful to find inspiration through DIY internet radio stations in the Bay Area, such as HydeFM, BFF, and Lower Grand Radio. The studios themselves, growing quietly in unexpected corners of their respective cities, are often brimming with energy once you step inside; artists, DJs, producers, and show hosts mingle as their friends spin their art on air. Their shows are often broadcast online 24/7, and their websites often include chat rooms for audiences across the world—or down the street—to connect with each other and the music. Stitched together, these hybrid online-offline places feel like cauldrons for local culture, actively encouraging everyone from all backgrounds to add something into the mix. The result is magical: a medley of sounds and perspectives that could exist nowhere but here.
This is where I find my city online, alive and well. It’s nothing extraordinary, really; the technology that these communities use to stream their shows has existed for decades at this point. What inspires me about these internet communities is the fact that they are designed to welcome a broad swathe of the city onto their airwaves or into their events. It’s their embrace of the connective power of the internet balanced with their emphasis on place. It’s their cultural value, and how they add a new page to the history of the city with every day they stream. With a faithful focus on the creative communities they support, they are emblematic of a new way of living together in a digitally-mediated city.
Like Felsenstein said in his reflections on the Community Memory Project, I still believe that the internet is a hospitable territory, even for those of us who believe in the magic of the city. Sustaining these online communities locally is still probably harder than it is to build more dispersed networks, and the draw of the latter is as strong as ever. But if we are willing to try, we might just discover abundance in the places that have been alive all the while.
Humphrey Obuobi is an editor of Reboot. They are a student at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, where they research collaborative methods for community development. They also run LETS, a creative studio dedicated to democratic social innovation.
microdoses
🕊️ Rest in peace, Akira Toriyama (legendary creator of Dragon Ball Z and other classics)
🌁 Out with “platform urbanism”—in with “cyberplace”
🤖 Tim Hwang never misses:
🌇 a pretty sunset in oakland
closing note
At Reboot, we’re proud of the online community here—but see the importance in bringing people together in real-life, too. Bay Area readers should join us for our first-ever Community Day on March 23 to meet fellow technologists/ researchers/ advocates, join intimate discussions on our shared future, and celebrate the launch of Kernel Issue 4: LUCK.
Searching for our cities,
Humphrey & Reboot team
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼
Reconnect people to places and each other. IRL ≠ URL. By rebinding people to locality they are able to notice the subtle effects of climate change that are obscured by rapid transit modes. Only by healing locally can we achieve solutions at scale.
Thank you.