Squad-Level Community

Description

Scott Moore et al. :

"Belonging is itself a fractal concept. Most communities start with a core group or squad, which itself ultimately emerges from the energetic, passionate people who engage in its formation and continued sustainability. At the risk of going too far, people start with the self and any such notion starts with our ability to internalize and act on behalf of a core identity, formed through our experiences in the world. In this way, every community is deeply personal, and we reflect our communities the same way they reflect us.

As Other Internet writes, squads have existed for literally thousands of years and are arguably the most personal kinds of social groups (e.g. friends on the playground). And today, in the post-pandemic era, squads are absolutely thriving. Even though we've all spent so much time physically distancing ourselves, these smaller groups have grown closer by having deeply resonant, emotional experiences with each other, and hence finding shared meaning, often entirely online. An important consequence of the close, hyper-personal nature of squads is that they have extremely tight boundaries and limited membership, curated by informal rules around a shared sense of connection and meaning

Internet-Native Squads have been on the rise since well before the pandemic, even just as evidenced by the tools we use (e.g. moving from the "Facebook wall" era of the 2010s towards a nascent / evolving collective "group chat" era in the 2020s) But on the internet today, social media is still where squads mostly tend to converge. On platforms like Twitter, which act as de facto online town squares, squads often come across each other's unique cultures and languages, and start to converge on new memetic narratives that allow for a kind of unintentional, collective world-building. The connections and lore that form between these squads lays the foundation for the communities and scenes we've become familiar with across the internet.

Although squads don't have to ask the question of how to expand, it's a natural question that arises as they form networks and become interdependent. Through this networked evolution, squads risk losing many of their typical characteristics, and become a different creature with unique attributes. Often, this can result in growing pains as they find themselves navigating where to live on a spectrum from closed, orderly, and rigid to open, chaotic, and fluid.

What squads gain by working through these tradeoffs and integrating into larger groups is, at its end point, the same benefit we all get by participating in society. By introducing structured agreements we can support each other's ambitions, benefit from the positive externalities our specific squads create, and ultimately work together towards grander visions for the future. By sacrificing familiarity, we can strive towards a greater purpose and find a deeper sense of meaning."

(https://www.forefront.market/blog/internet-native-organizations)

Discussion

Maxwell Kanter et al.:

"Although we've talked about squads evolving in order to support the goal of creating larger, more resilient communities, we haven't explicitly asked: why do we even need to evolve beyond small, independent groups?

Fundamentally, squads get by on vibes because they have high trust and alignment. By spending so much time together and sharing experiences, squads are able to build empathy and see each other as full 3D humans. But as groups scale from 15, to 150, to even 15,000 members, per Dunbar's number, the vibes may not, as our ability to connect with each other, and in turn our ability to find alignment and solidarity, diminishes.

Without alignment, most organizations at scale either fall back into separate squads, or introduce structures (i.e. guardrails) that keep them moving in the same direction. Importantly, for the anarchists in the room, structure does not mean hierarchy, but it does mean collective organization. Any community that wants to find and act on a shared purpose requires one of these ways of keeping on track.

To better define our terms, alignment derives from informal consensus building while structure is generated by formal rulemaking. It's often said that alignment is stronger than structure in the sense that it builds from intrinsic motivation and energy rather than extrinsic interests. As Venkatesh outlines in his Online Governance Primer, if alignment gets too low, it's easy for people to stop following any guardrails that exist, and fall from Gaia (synergyTM) to a kind of Hobbesian world (chaos) that no one would want to stick around in very long.

To scale DAOs then at the social layer, it's crucial for us to think about how to scale alignment as far as possible in order to achieve their shared purpose . But knowing that this won't last forever, it's equally important to build structures that take on the messy work of coordination and lower its cost over time."

(https://www.forefront.market/blog/internet-native-organizations)

More information

* Article: An Exploration of Internet-Native Organizations. By Scott Moore and Maxwell Kanter. Forefront Journal, Aug 23, 2022

URL = https://www.forefront.market/blog/internet-native-organizations