This Is Where We Belong: Finding Connection and Community in Our Hybrid Lives

Join Isabela Granic as we consider radical social transformations developing across the globe, and how the science and practice of belonging helps us navigate the implications of those changes.

Many of us have felt our most profound moments of loneliness in the last several years. Although the pandemic surely has played a major role, signs of our social discontent were rising for decades before Covid arrived. Smartphones, social media, the breakdown of traditional family and community values, the dropoff in religious practices, and the individualism that underpins late-stage capitalism, have all been implicated. But amidst the confusion about what’s causing the “loneliness epidemic”, a genuine sense of hope and excitement for new forms of community and collectives is emerging.

In this first salon in the Our Hybrid Lives series, we’ll focus on the wide range of self-organizing social experiments that are arising everywhere online and offline. We’ll explore new pockets of microcommunities that describe themselves as distributed and often decentralized, converging within and across time zones, practicing a wide range of communication processes for groups of 3 to > 300 people, all working on different projects, goals, and timelines. Despite their diversity, what most of these nascent collectives have in common is their attention to developing and nourishing new modes of belonging.

These creative collectives inspire us to think differently about work, play, friendships, romantic relationships, raising children, building community, and making art. Join us as we talk about our basic, biological and psychological needs for belonging and how these needs are being met in new ways within our hybrid lives. We will talk about our trials and triumphs in Discord conversations, on Substack chat threads, and in DJ’ed Clubhouse corners. We’ll hear about Zoom rooms where we’re falling in love, the hours of voice messages we’re leaving for our friends in group-chats, online DAO discussions that have led to construction sites for offline cabins, and the desert party we’re planning to share with our Twitter friends. Come gather to talk about all of it in one of the most inspiring and creative collectives in our current hybrid lives: the Interintellect salon.

• Great to read or watch pre-salon:
  • The Self and The Other: Social Baseline Theory (7 min video)
  • Small Group Experiments in Radical Belonging
  • What if Competition Isn’t As “Natural” As We Think?
  • The Era of Antisocial Social Media
  • Sc3nius: We’re all Going to Make it

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