Much of the research on the shaping power of technologies and the barriers to technological change tends to focus disproportionately on structures like urban form, missing the more subtle influence of other technical features of contemporary societies.1 Everyday techniques and artifacts could better help develop citizens that are more disposed and prepared to act communally. Changes to these technologies are at least corequisites to achieving thicker communities. What are the barriers to alternative gadgets, tools, and child-rearing techniques, and how could they be lessened?
The barriers I discuss are somewhat different from those for urban and large sociotechnical systems. Infrastructures tend to be large, expensive, and ultimately reliant on some form of public or collective coordination. Although televisions or child-rearing techniques inevitably depend on communication networks or systems of pediatric information and authority to function, they are implemented to a much more significant degree by their users. That is, users “choose” to purchase and locate a television in their home or to acquire a concealed-carry handgun license (CHL). In what ways would the decision landscape faced by users need to be altered to enable them to make more communitarian choices? What policies, infrastructural and organizational changes, and realignment of incentives might be necessary?
In chapter 6, I argued that domestic environments better prepare citizens for the practice of community when they encourage social gathering and interaction rather than dispersion and isolation. Home heating is one of the most significant shapers of domestic environments, at least in nations with a cold winter season. Homes would better encourage domestic gathering if they were heated by centralized point sources rather than by distributed “forced air” or boiler systems. The point source need not be a woodstove, which produces soot and may aggravate respiratory ailments, but could be fueled by almost any type of energy: natural gas, wood pellets, or electricity. Air- or ground-sourced heat pumps could easily be designed to terminate in one or two large radiators or central fans. Moreover, even passive solar home design can provide a comfort incentive toward congregating by locating the main living space in rooms with the most wintertime sun exposure. Put bluntly, the barriers to more communitarian home heating are not technical; suitable alternatives already exist.
Might the barriers be financial? Installing ground-based heat pumps or converting a home to reflect passive-house standards undeniably entail significant up-front capital costs that might take a decade or more to recoup. Publicly subsidized low-interest loan programs for such technologies would need to be expanded if such approaches are to become feasible for a greater portion of homeowners. The financial barriers to replacing old furnaces with centralized gas/pellet stoves or air-based heat pumps, in contrast, are not so significant. Indeed, the upfront costs of buying and installing such alternatives are often no more than that of a new centralized furnace. Moreover, simple fans for pushing warm air between floors and rooms, to prevent bathrooms from becoming frigid, are less than a hundred dollars and can be installed by even minimally competent do-it-yourselfers.
That more homeowners have not sealed their distributed HVAC systems shut and installed some nondistributed heating unit appears to be mostly the result of ignorance as well as entrenched practices and patterns of thought. Forced air systems are frequently perceived to be more “modern” than centralized heaters or stoves.2 Many home dwellers have become habituated to sleeping in seventy-degree bedrooms in the winter, and hence might find wearing pajamas or sleeping with heavy blankets to be an adjustment. People with compatibly arranged homes have likely never even considered replacing their forced air system with a centralized stove. Offering tax credits for these heating alternatives, as is already done for high-efficiency furnaces, could help lessen the effect of the relevant cultural and cognitive barriers. Given the role of centralized heating technologies in promoting domestic togetherness, champions for these tax credits might be easily found among those elected officials whose image relies on the promotion of “family values.”
Ensuring more communitarian thermal environments in new construction would demand changes at multiple levels of the building industry. As sociologist Elizabeth Shove has argued, contemporary architectural science has come to idealize a standardized conception of comfort that ignores cultural and geographic differences.3 Architectural science tends to portray the uniformity and stability of temperature offered by complex climate-control systems as unequivocally ideal; natural patterns and other forms of thermal contrast become problems rather than features. Architects, of course, are not solely to blame for this state of affairs: they are constrained by building codes, dominant cultural expectations, and the designs, practices, and standards of heating and air-conditioning engineers. Insofar as such understandings of thermal comfort, as well as their ancillary standards and codes, continue to predominate, new homes are unlikely to include features such as centralized heating elements.
Real estate agents and developers, moreover, can erect their own barriers. They tend to err on the side of conservatism, because homes that deviate too significantly from the status quo represent a financial risk. Certainly the above-mentioned tax breaks for heating systems that better promote domestic community would entice home builders to include them more often in their designs. Nonetheless, they are likely to be more responsive to changing consumer preferences, which could be nudged by new furnace labels. These would be similar to the EnergyGuide labels that provide an estimate of an appliance’s yearly gas or electricity usage, instead describing its likely social effects. One might read “Warning: Forced air heating systems are designed to distribute heat fairly uniformly within homes and buildings. Such systems have been found to encourage social privatism and lower amounts of interaction among household members.”
Ensuring that more domestic environments promote gathering over dispersion may require discouraging a range of other technologies, including personal electronics and individual microwave dinners. Although thick community is probably best supported when television is not central to domestic leisure, discouraging households from having more than one TV would be an incremental improvement. The isolation of household members within their own media cocoons benefits advertisers at the cost of preparing citizens for political community. Numerous countries in Europe, Africa, and Asia already charge residents television licensing fees. If these fees were scaled with the number of televisions, such countries could discourage televisions in residents’ bedrooms at the same time that they raised funds for public television and other collective goods. Instituting such fees in North America, where there is little history of television license fees and broader cultural opposition to taxation, would likely be infeasible. Nevertheless, regulators might more deftly sidestep popular opposition to influence consumer behavior by attaching graduated licensing fees to the set-top boxes needed for cable or satellite access.
Policies designed for television and set-top cable or satellite boxes, however, may become obsolete and ineffectual as more and more viewers shift to streaming video services like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. For those with basic high-speed Internet service, streaming two movies simultaneously is often infeasible, which forces household members to negotiate over what to view and when to view it. As Internet infrastructure improves in countries such as the United States, however, the need to negotiate over what to watch on Netflix might someday be technologically obsolete. If Internet service providers were allowed to differentially charge for content access based on the type of content, then policy makers could use disincentives to steer viewer behavior. The cost of residential Internet access would float based on type of use. Downloading multiple video streams on a single connection, which signals domestic dispersal, could be made to cost more. Such policies, however, are likely to be infeasible insofar as citizens consider a “neutral” Internet to be an almost natural right.
Domestic environments are more communitarian, moreover, when meals are collective rather than solitary affairs, regardless of whether a household is made up of family members or roommates. Individualized microwaveable dinners and similar foodstuffs help support a more networked than communal household. Using policy to target microwaves would probably be too blunt of a response, given that they are frequently put to use in preparing collective meals. Instead, policy makers could tax individual-sized microwaveable meal and similar processed food items, using the funds to subsidize basic staples and fresh produce to incentivize cooking. Doing so would be a significant reversal of current American farm policy. Indeed, some 20 billion dollars in federal spending since 1995 has gone to subsidize the production of corn-based sweeteners and thickeners as well as the soy oils used in processed foods like TV dinners. In direct contrast to the USDA food pyramid, federal dollars go primarily to dairy and meat producers—partly via corn and soy subsidies while growers of other grains, nuts, and legumes; fresh fruits; and vegetables get a measly 13, 2, and 0.4 percent of the available subsidy dollars, respectively.4 EBT, or food stamp, dollars could count double for fresh produce and other staples but not for frozen dinners. Indeed, in many American states, food stamp dollars spent at farmers’ markets are matched one-to-one, permitting those getting welfare to pay half price.5 Expanding such policies would promote purchasing staples over processed foods more broadly.
On the other hand, reversing this subsidy pattern may do little for people who are short on time and money. People working multiple jobs or long hours to stay financially afloat can hardly be blamed for lacking the energy to cook a big meal at the end of the day. Policies directed toward shortening the work week, raising minimum wages, and working to keep housing costs low would have significant influence on the feasibility of domestic meal times. Ironically, conservative politicians tend to fervently oppose these policies, even though they would do quite a lot to promote family values. Some of those politicians, in any case, might be turned into allies if leftist advocates more often described such policies as enabling family life, rather than as only promoting social justice.
Citizens are also encouraged to buy frozen and other prepared foods by the diffuse distribution of large supermarkets, enforced by suburban building patterns. Buying fresh, and hence quickly spoiling, ingredients for preparing meals requires going to the grocery store at least once a week, if not more often. Insofar as that task is a chore made more onerous by several miles of traffic, competing for a parking space, and navigating a massive and crowded supermarket, consumers are likely to minimize how often they do it. Denser mixed-use development patterns would enable residents to more easily choose thick communitarian mealtime practices.
Other factors make frozen foods cheaper than they otherwise would be. The near complete dominance of frozen foods in school lunch programs subsidizes the industry’s economies of scale. Lobby groups such as the American Frozen Food Institute and the National Potato Council have fought tooth and nail against proposals to impose limits on salt levels and starchy vegetables in children’s lunches or requirements for an increase in fresh fruits and vegetables. Congress even went so far in 2011 as to debate whether the tomato paste in a slice of reheated frozen pizza could be classified as a serving of vegetables.6 Individual school districts are, moreover, highly restricted in their power to shape their food purchasing. The National School Lunch Program in the United States forces participating schools to shape their meal offerings around purchases of surplus agricultural commodities, typically dairy, certain meats, corn, and soy and in the form of frozen meals.7 Orders of ingredients, if schools want federal reimbursement, cannot simply be placed with local farmers but must use the USDA as an intermediary between them and large agribusiness conglomerates.
Many schools have experimented with shifting lunches away from frozen preprepared foods and toward cooking meals on-site. Indeed, some French school chefs already manage to create healthy options for around three dollars a meal by making sure nothing goes to waste.8 Nevertheless, it is difficult for many school boards to justify even slight increases to the single digit percentage of their budgets going to food service, much less the cost of repurchasing cooking equipment that no longer exists in their “kitchens,” unless current subsidies and school lunch regulations are changed. Many school districts, however, do have a Farm-to-School program in place, sourcing some of their food from nearby farms.9 Such programs could be expanded and subsidized by the National School Lunch Program. Doing so would help shift the food industry and economy-of-scale advantages away from frozen food producers and distributers as much as it would stimulate more communal agricultural economies.
Child-rearing techniques could more often impart communal skills, lessening the degree to which citizens’ development is shaped by the myth of rugged individualism. The insistence that children become “self-reliant” sleepers as infants via crying it out in a separate nursery helps maintain the Western cultural idealization of privacy and independence. The emphasis on making infants and toddlers more independent, ironically, parallels a loss of autonomy among older children. Many parents prohibit their children from walking to school alone or even from leaving the front yard, in contrast to previous generations of kids who might have only needed to show up by sundown. Children’s practice of autonomy is less often ensured by a thick community of nosy neighbors and attentive strangers, being more frequently exercised within communications, consumer-retail, and automobile networks. Large deficits in public trust and perceptions of “stranger danger” mean that many children’s play takes place mainly in the context of play dates or other highly structured, adult supervised activities, limiting their opportunities for unstructured exploration. Although structured activities offer parents an occasion to socialize and interact, they nevertheless tend to deprive children of the chance to collectively self-organize. In any case, play dates teach youth that one socializes through infrequent networked affairs, not through thick community.
The continuing cultural dominance of the nursery and the cry-it-out method over cosleeping arrangements stems in part from the momentum of outdated pediatric “wisdom.” Early pediatric science justified separate sleeping arrangements with the presumption that ideal human sleep patterns entail being totally undisturbed for as long as possible, an ideal upset by the presence of other human bodies.10 Such one-dimensional thinking about human sleep needs has been undermined by the recognition of the role of oxytocin and other hormones related to physical touch as well parental proximity in regulating infant breathing and heart rate. Despite advancements in thinking about infant development, however, archaic traditions can persist. This is likely old news to new mothers who have had to deal with older relatives that stubbornly hold onto antiquated ideas about infant care.
New purportedly scientific ideas about the “best practices” of infant care have emerged to shore up traditional cultural biases. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has adamantly discouraged any form of bedsharing among infants and parents due to a perceived connection of the practice to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS)—though they do encourage room sharing.11 As some sleep scholars have pointed out, existing studies are not as unequivocal as the academy presents, which suggests that AAP recommendations are as much rooted in Western cultural beliefs as in scientific data.12 Studies that might seem to demonstrate bedsharing to be hazardous frequently fail to disentangle the multitude of risk factors for SIDS, including smoking, alcohol, and drug use, parental fatigue, bedding material, socioeconomic class, and whether the baby is placed prone or supine. Moreover, they usually fail to explain why SIDS is almost unheard of in Japan and other Asian nations where cosleeping and bedsharing is the norm. The AAP’s blanket disapproval of cosleeping mainly serves to keep some parents in the dark regarding how to bedshare or cosleep safely and effectively.
Even if supplied with information about cosleeping less undergirded by twentieth-century Western cultural biases, many contemporary parents would have difficulty practicing it. Smaller barriers include altering sleeping environments to be safer for infants by using firmer bedding material, placing mattresses directly on the floor, or finding an appropriate cosleeping bassinet. Better guidance on the range of sleeping practices and appropriate technologies could be offered to consumers in stores that sell bedding. Parents who cosleep with their children, moreover, would have to think more creatively about when and where to meet their needs for private sexual intimacy. More broadly, alternative sleep schedules and practices are made more difficult by already established institutional rhythms and practices. Children from cosleeping households may struggle in Western daycare settings, where independent napping is more of an expectation. For nap time not to be a source of conflict and frustration for all parties involved, daycare workers would need training concerning cosleeping children, perhaps learning from Asian countries. Indeed, workers at Japanese daycares gently stroke and rhythmically tap the backs of babies and young children, even going so far as to lie down next to the child to provide body heat and physical contact to help them sleep without the presence of their parents. Although this practice might seem at first to be excessively labor intensive, and hence expensive, Japanese workers have learned to lessen their workload by getting the assistance of children too old for nap time.13
Moreover, stay-at-home parents may find cosleeping unappealing because they already must care for their children during most, if not all, of their waking hours. One can hardly blame them for wanting some modicum of time and space to themselves. Hence, targeting the structure to everyday life that renders stay-at-home parenting a full-time and largely solitary activity is likely a major precondition to more cosleeping. Policies to encourage walkable neighborhoods that promote webs of local ties and have higher densities of third places and other amenities could enable residents to more often parent side-by-side, reducing the overall workload of child rearing—or at least providing the pleasant distraction of adult company.
Inflexible work schedules also make alternative sleep arrangements challenging. It is unsurprising that parents will find the need to tend to children at night anxiety inducing if it is inevitably disruptive to their work lives. Although many developed nations, apart from the United States, mandate and publicly support parental leave, most people face a dichotomous choice regarding employment: work full time or not at all. The forty-hour (or thirty-five-hour) work week remains the near ubiquitous norm. Adjusting leave regulations to allow parents more flexibility in exactly how they partition their time seems like an obvious fix. Why not use public support to allow parents the ability to transition from their leave to a five- or six-hour workday for several years? The barrier to doing so is mainly cultural, though small businesses might find the staffing challenges particularly onerous in the absence of aid or additional incentives. It nevertheless remains entrenched in the thinking of people in affluent nations that work somehow cannot be accomplished without appearing busy for eight hours or more each day.
At the same time, research suggests that the perceived stressfulness of cosleeping has more to do with cultural expectations regarding sleep than with the practice itself.14 It is the degree to which parents imbue with anxiety any sign that their child has not yet learned to “self-soothe” that is correlated with sleep problems and stress. That is, high expectations for independent infant sleep is a bigger factor in sleep-disturbance-related stress than interrupted sleep per se. Culturally rooted anxieties about sleep render the physical jostling or noise of another person more bothersome than they otherwise would be. Indeed, sleep disturbances and related parental stresses are rarer among Japanese families with young children, despite high rates of cosleeping.15 The Western tendency to quickly pathologize any sleep pattern that deviates too strongly from the norm of eight uninterrupted hours introduces a counterproductive degree of fear, stress, and anxiety into infant sleep training.
The high valuation of control in Western cultures erects additional barriers to cosleeping. Constantly trying to actively “fix” sleep disturbances can quickly become exhausting and demoralizing for parents. Spending a long night tending to a fussy child, as a result, can feel like something the CIA would do to suspected terrorists. My point here is not to blame parents if they cannot make cosleeping “work.” That would be both moralistic and insensitive. Like anyone else, they are cognitive victims of their culture. Their cultural milieu has instilled in them psychological dispositions and thought processes regarding sleep practices that are incredibly difficult to overcome. Although more flexible work hours and more visible guidance concerning compatible techniques and technologies would certainly help parents cosleep more often, the necessary psychocultural changes are likely to be ploddingly slow.
Accommodating more communitarian childhoods after infancy would require making more room for unstructured play and communally accomplished autonomy. The cultural reproduction of “stranger danger” beliefs, however, stands in the way. Parental worries about dangerous streets and child abductions by strangers are often cited as reasons for keeping children locked up at home, despite research demonstrating that children are more likely taken or abused by people they already know. Moreover, the rate of injury from domestic hazards are often higher than from those found in the neighborhood. Many believe, contrary to available statistics, that children are safer traveling at seventy miles an hour in the backseat of their parents’ minivan than playing in a public park.16 Most tragic is the trebling of eleven-year-old British children suffering serious injury or death due to accidents with automobiles on the way to or from school, eleven being exactly the age the vast majority of them receive their first cell phone.17 Parents seeking a sense of security by giving their child a mobile phone can put him or her in greater danger rather than less.
Further stymying more thickly communitarian parenting arrangements is the cultural tendency to place responsibility for children’s well-being almost entirely on parents. The question of “Where were the parents?” is frequently the response to an injured, abducted, or dead child rather than a collective call for traffic-calmed streets and better supervised public spaces.18 Child safety has become an individual-parental responsibility rather than a collective good. Recall the cases in which parents have been arrested on neglect charges for letting their child play in a public park by themselves. Calls to law enforcement over free-range children obliges all parents to keep their kids on a short leash.
Growing perceptions of stranger danger, at any rate, have been partly manufactured by doom-and-gloom news reporting and media frenzies over disappeared and hurt children. As is the case with perceptions of crime more generally, the chasing of ratings through fear-oriented news stories exaggerates risks by amplifying viewers’ perceptions of the frequency of everyday hazards.19 As a result, parents come to believe that child abductions and fatal playground injuries are more common than they actually are. Direct legislation of reporting practices, at least in the United States, is often difficult, given the traditional hesitancy to regulate the media. In the same way that the “fairness doctrine” at one time forced U.S. radio and television stations to present two sides to every issue, however, the effect of “media panics” might be partly mitigated by requiring news outlets to also present statistics on the extremely low probability of any crime or injury affecting children. Such a rule, nevertheless, would do little to negate the effect of fictional television programs such as Law and Order, which also shape viewers’ perceptions of the reality of crime.
Because it may be infeasible in the short term to alter parental perceptions of risk, a more productive strategy might be to develop and publicly fund “adventure playgrounds” modeled after the Land in Wales.20 Municipalities could be enticed to replace much of the sterile, some might say unimaginative, playground equipment that was installed over the past decades in response to litigation fears with semisupervised play spaces full of hand-powered building tools, junk, and other “hazardous” things that delight children. Play workers would be trained to instigate play rather than regulate it, intervening if injury looks to be imminent or to provide first aid. Contrary to what one might expect, the accident rates for adventure playgrounds are often substantially less than those of traditional play spaces.21 Regardless, the mere presence of supervision is likely to get some citizens to relent and allow their children to meet and play with friends without parental surveillance.
Several policy changes would help eliminate some of the barriers to adventure playgrounds. To begin, despite their lower accident rates, required risk assessment paperwork can be burdensome; making changes to limit adventure playgrounds’ liability would be necessary to make room for the reasonable and unavoidable risk taking inherent in unstructured play. European playground safety standards, for instance, exempt adventure playgrounds from meeting their requirements.22 The need for adventure playgrounds to have staff suggests that financial barriers may be part of the reason that only a handful of adventure playgrounds exist in North America. Partisans for thick communities could look to fill the financial gap by seeking to tax privatized playgrounds in order to subsidize public alternatives. Targets might include the private indoor playgrounds whose profits partly depend on “stranger danger” worries, charging parents upward of seven dollars per hour per child for access to a sterile but completely secure play area.
The development of adventure playgrounds would likely have fairly limited effects without broader changes. Parental fears stem in part from their own poor integration into their local social environs. The fact that the idea of their children encountering fellow residents or strangers on city streets or in parks elicits such anxiety in many parents can be attributed to the fact that they have few established relationships with neighbors who can be their proxy eyes and ears. Parents face what philosopher Robert Kirkman has referred to as a “limits of agency.”23 Even if they wanted to raise their children in more communitarian ways, the barriers posed by the design and sociocultural makeup of many neighborhoods make doing so infeasible, or doable only at the sacrifice of other important values (e.g., perceived safety). At a minimum, time is necessary for communitarian interventions to begin to lessen the culture of aloofness that stands in the way. Carving out more room for relationally thick and geographically proximate spaces for youth to exercise their autonomy could gradually open other avenues for thickening communal relationships.
At the same time, there are certain risks to avoid when pursuing communitarian technologies like adventure playgrounds, namely nostalgia. For instance, free-play advocate Mike Lanza’s heart has been in the right place, from a communitarian perspective, when he has lamented the demise of neighborhoods that permitted children to collaboratively structure their own activities and build local social bonds; however, he has pinned the blame for such changes on the rise of “mom philosophy,” claiming that the term bully pathologizes the previously “normal” aggression of boys.24 As laudable as Lanza’s work promoting free play is, the gendered language through which he understands childhood leaves a lot to be desired. Given the growing recognition that twentieth-century ideas about “normal” masculinity have been used to justify sexual assault, discriminate against gay men, and constrain the emotional development of boys,25 communitarians would be better off not tying their advocacy of free play to idealizations of 1960s manhood. Such language inevitably excludes girls and demeans traditionally feminine forms of free play. One can yearn for and promote more free-range childhoods without reproducing the cultural ills of previous, more free-range generations.
Developing more thick communitarian societies would entail ensuring that people spend less time watching television or surfing the Internet in their air-conditioned dens and more time conversing on their front porches and hanging out in public places. Such practices, however, would likely be hardly affected by directly penalizing citizens for their television and air conditioner usage. Given typical deficits in quality public spaces and the nonexistence of front porches, gathering places, and even sidewalks in many North American neighborhoods, citizens cocoon because they have few other feasible options available to them. Hence, alterations to urban form, among other changes, would be necessary to nudge them toward public sociability.
Because television and other forms of mass media are likely to continue to dominate the everyday lives of citizens in affluent nations, short-term goals would probably need to be modest. One incremental change would be to encourage residents to do more of their TV viewing in public. In Europe, even the smallest towns will erect public viewing screens for popular soccer matches. Doing the same more often for sports in North America would get a greater portion of the population out of their homes. The staging of free public viewings at community theaters would be the best option where the weather is often prohibitively cold or inclement. Many municipalities, however, may not have the budget for such events. Franchise law, which is written to give cities the negotiating power to ensure that the provision of cable television to residents meets “community needs,”26 might be productively leveraged in such cases. Using the argument that cable television in private homes is in itself a direct threat to their community needs, municipalities could require that cable companies foot part of the bill for public viewing. Some cable companies might object that they would, in turn, lose some portion of current subscribers. Yet, on the other hand, they would likely be broadening the reach of their advertising and content. Cable companies would therefore have some grounds for negotiating larger payments from advertisers or changes to the license fees paid to content providers to make up for any decreased profits.
A similar approach could help make an escape from the summer heat more of a public good than a private one. Summer air conditioning uses up valuable nonrenewable resources, contributing to ecological harms such as climate change. According to some estimates, air conditioning constitutes up to one-third of peak summer energy usage, though this figure no doubt varies according to geography and culture.27 Europeans, for instance, are notably less reliant on air conditioning than Americans. Increased summer demand for A/C, moreover, requires the construction of larger or more numerous power plants as well as distribution system upgrades. Hence, there is already a strong environmental reason to financially penalize summer air-conditioning use via dynamic peak pricing of electricity, which charges higher rates at peak use hours, among other schemes.28 Advocates would better maximize the communitarian gain of such measures by ensuring that some portion of peak pricing revenues support the building of public cooling technologies, namely fountains and heavily shaded parks. Additionally, peak pricing penalties could be tiered, penalizing private homes and regional malls the most but community centers and “third places” the least.
What about cities and towns with mild summers and frigid winters? How could warmth be more of a public good? Exposure to the cold is often seen as a greater danger to the health and well-being of humans than warm temperatures, apart from heat waves. Increasing charges on electricity or gas used for home heating is likely to be both politically infeasible and opposed on humanitarian grounds. At the same time, few cities publicly provide outdoor warmth. As architectural scholar Norman Pressman noted, “[Urban] designs and realizations are similar whether in Oslo or Miami, Toronto or Phoenix, Reykjavik or Los Angeles.”29 The usual answer to cold weather is to construct expensive skywalks or underground passageways, connecting malls with other downtown buildings. The trouble with these systems is that, by segregating retail services for middle- to upper-class downtown workers and shoppers to private walkways, they contribute to a depopulating of outdoor sidewalks and undermining of street-level business.30 At best, their hermetically sealed walls are attractive for only a few months in any given year.
The “solution” provided by skywalks, underground shopping districts, and giant malls is a brute force response: an attempt to erase geographic and seasonal variance rather than working with it. The reasons for this are not really technical but political and cultural. Indeed, architectural research does exist concerning how to enhance the thermal livability of winter cities,31 which shows ways to supply public heating without the use of fossil fuels or expensive HVAC systems. Many attendees of wintertime sporting matches in open stadiums, for instance, have found themselves unzipping their jackets and loosening their scarves after an hour or two; shielding from the wind combined with the heat produced by human bodies can quickly create a surprisingly pleasant microclimate. Similar principles can be put to work on streets, sidewalks, and in winter parks by sheltering them from cold northerly (or southerly) winds. Moreover, large sun reflectors and required southern (or northern) orientation could produce bright and warm wintertime public spaces. The largest barrier to technologies of public warmth, therefore, is not technical or financial. Rather, ignorance and the absence of supportive regulation on the part of city planners and urban designers stymies their implementation.32 Public professionals need the proper training and the regulatory impetus to more often incorporate features such as wind breaks, solar orientation, thermal sinks, and outdoor arcades into public spaces.
Even with public spaces whose thermal properties might better entice residents out of their dens and family rooms, cell phones and other digital devices too frequently help produce outdoor areas uncongenial to public sociability. How might their usage be better regulated? One possibility would be to allow and encourage parks, pubs, and cafés to restrict cell phone use and Wi-Fi signals. In the same way that many restaurants used to have nonsmoking and smoking areas, locales might have separate areas for Wi-Fi and cell phone use. Public spaces could have designated booths for making cell phone calls instead of permitting them everywhere.
Rather than rely on workers to police the use of devices, such measures would have a more substantive effect if Wi-Fi and cell signal were electronically jammed in unapproved spaces. Municipalities and businesses in the United States, however, are prevented from experimenting with such systems by federal law. It is illegal to import, market, sell, or use any device that interferes with wireless signals. The reasoning provided for such regulation appears entirely based on worries about potential interference with calls to emergency services. France and Japan, in contrast, have permitted cell phone jamming devices under the condition that they do not affect emergency communication. Indeed, there is no inherent technical reason that jamming devices in public spaces could not be designed to allow emergency calls and paging functions for particularly pressing communication.33 Another barrier to changing regulations is the interpretation of access to the wireless communication spectrum as private property, which construes signal blocking as equivalent to stealing. This legal interpretation leaves little room for the consideration of the trade-offs between the private use of digital devices and public sociability as a collective good.
Finally, a greater amount of research and innovation could be directed toward developing more prosocial apps and devices. Such technologies would work by lessening the psychocognitive barriers to public sociability. Consider a device called the Coffee Connector. Meant to encourage mingling, it dispenses coffee only when two people both enter their names and interests into its screen.34 Similarly, apps such as Tinder already alert users to the existence of proximate others with similar interests, although they are much more directed at facilitating dating and semianonymous sex than social community. Nevertheless, one could imagine coffee shops and other hangouts having on-premise apps that include a public chat function where users could signal their interests and openness to conversation. Such apps, given that they are unlikely to provide huge financial returns, would probably need public subsidy to be written. Alternatively, pubs could have solo patrons input such information into a tablet and suggest possible discussion partners. Though somewhat artificial and contrived, such measures might be a big help for citizens who have become overly habituated to social privatism in public spaces.
Some devices may be almost wholly incompatible with the practice of thick community. Concealed-carry handguns represent a withdrawal from the possibility of collectively achieving security, and the provision of companion robots signifies a collective acknowledgment of defeat concerning finding human relationships for the chronically lonely. What could be done about the technologies that are being advanced to fill the vacuum left by declines in some of the seven dimensions of thick community?
Like other personal technologies, targeting concealed-carry handguns or companion robots directly would likely be the least efficacious strategy. The continued entrenchment of narrowly individualistic political worldviews makes it increasingly difficult to intervene in technological matters that have already been framed in terms of personal choice. Recent attempts to employ gun-control legislation in the United States have faltered in the face of heavy opposition by the National Rifle Association and firearm companies, who argue that citizens’ individual rights to personal security via firearms automatically trump all other concerns. Moreover, opponents to stricter regulations of companion robots would likely claim that restrictions would deprive the chronically lonely of choice or would “legislate morality.” The widespread tendency to view technologies as mere volition enhancers and ignore their political biases only further entrenches narrowly choice-oriented thinking on technological governance. Given this broader overarching barrier, the most productive avenue toward lessening the damage these technologies do to thick community would be to focus on developing communitarian alternatives: community policing, volunteer public houses, and better residential options for retirees.
Making policing more communitarian faces several barriers. Some of the challenges are budgetary. Similar to a Wal-Mart or a leisure center, highly centralized policing arrangements are much less expensive, allowing underfunded departments to cover more territory with fewer officers. With budgets already set for centralized policing, a transition to community policing often means officers being assigned to “beats” much too large for effective community engagement. The nonwalkability of diffuse suburban environments, moreover, keeps officers isolated within their cars as much as it does for average citizens. The sociotechnical momentum of suburbia thereby helps ensure the continued existence of highly centralized, insular police forces.
Cultural and organizational momentum create additional hurdles. The successful implementation of community policing by the New York Housing Authority from the 1950s until the 1970s was partly a result of officers being held accountable to civilian project managers as well as encouraged or enforced to meet with citizens.35 In fact, their offices were located in record rooms within project apartment buildings, rather than at a central precinct. Studies find, however, that traditional police department officials are highly resistant to the decentralizing of structure, the civilian oversight, and the public interactions entailed by community policing.36 In contrast, many departments appear to merely rhetorically embrace the philosophy of community policing; the structural changes needed to make it work are seldom made.
In fact, studies of officers, at least in the United States, frequently find that they denigrate community engagement and collaboration as not “real” police work.37 One potential cause of this attitude is the media-reinforced cultural archetype of the “warrior” cop getting in shootouts and arresting bad guys. It is further encouraged to the extent to which policing institutions incentivize arrests and fail to reward community policing tasks. As long as dominant police culture frames small talk with residents or attending community events as less worthy tasks, the embrace of community policing is unlikely to be substantial. The dominant frame of cop-as-warrior comes at the expense of cop-as-community-member. In any case, community policing is often denigrated by officers because they lack good community relations to start with, especially in extremely large, centralized police forces. A vicious circle persists wherein officers may turn to traditional tough guy cop culture in order to feel a sense of belonging, because overly large “beats,” squad car cocooning, and a lack of public oversight prevents them from achieving a feeling of togetherness with the citizens they ostensibly serve and protect.
Finally, there is a legitimate concern regarding which community community policing serves. Without ensuring the inclusion of marginal populations, such as youth and poor minorities, and the existence of concrete means of shaping policing practices, community policing can end up serving the interests of already advantaged community members. It risks amounting to policing through community rather than by it.38
Mitigating these barriers is no easy task. Police unions, as evidenced by their obstinacy in the face of recent protests over police brutality, are frequently political opponents of any measure that threatens the autonomy of policing institutions from civilian oversight. The most feasible strategy, given the obduracy of established policing sociotechnical systems, might be for municipalities to emulate the creation of New York City’s Housing Authority and develop parallel, civilian-managed policing institutions.39 Moreover, they could do so under the auspices of “freeing” traditional departments from walking “beats” or doing patrols, tasks that officers steeped in warrior cop culture are likely to think of as beneath them anyway.
Alternative institutions, however, are only likely to develop with substantial governmental support. The increasing visibility of incidents of excessive force, such as the shooting of John Crawford by police for holding a toy BB gun inside a Wal-Mart or an officer gunning down a teenager in Ferguson, Missouri, could be leveraged to open up federal funding for alternative policing institutions. The poor minority neighborhoods where such alternatives would be desirable, however, are often already served by regional police departments unlikely to appreciate the competition. In large metropolitan areas, the racial and class-based fears of suburbanites frequently translates into unwavering support for antagonistic, arrest-focused policing. If these barriers prove to be too difficult to overcome, state- or national-level policy would need to step in to permit neighborhoods suffering from officer-perpetrated human rights abuses to secede from their policing district and develop their own alternative institutions.
At least some of the suburbanites who turn to personal firearms or promote antagonistic policing to realize a sense of security are motivated by the fear of racially different others. They would be unlikely to buy into community policing while those fears persist. Antagonistic and disproportionate policing of racial minorities forms a vicious circle with the perception that they are dangerous, justifying further fear-based targeting. Such perceptions may not be feasibly lessened until poor minority neighborhoods are able to substantively implement community policing, breaking the cycle.
In the same way that discouraging personal handguns demands a reorganization of the provision of policing and security, stemming the potential tide of companion robots would require devising organizational solutions to the problem of loneliness. One of the main markets envisioned for companion robots is elderly citizens who either live alone or in institutionalized “old folks” homes. For the former, their children, if they have any, often live far away or are too busy to see them often. Furthermore, many of their close friends and other ties may have already passed away. Similarly, institutionalized seniors are frequently isolated, sometimes receiving few or no visitors and unlikely to get much social intimacy from overworked and underpaid staff. Indeed, studies typically find that nursing home residents spend the majority of their days alone in their rooms, doing little or nothing with their time.40
One solution for the problem of lonely seniors, at least for those with some mobility left, would be to reform urban environments to include more public spaces, to be more walkable, and to contain a larger number of well-supported third places. Such changes would no doubt take years, more likely decades, to implement. In the interim, older people are typically presented with two options: volunteering and senior living arrangements.
Contemporary seniors volunteer more than other age groups but suffer from loneliness at relatively higher rates.41 Such rates suggest that at least some of them either do not have good opportunities to volunteer or that barriers stand in the way of their participation. Indeed, studies find that factors like ageism, logistical difficulties, lack of confidence, and communication troubles discourage volunteering among seniors.42 Potential elderly volunteers are dispirited by cultural presumptions that old age implies lack of competency as much as by transportation difficulties and the expectation that they communicate via more recently developed media devices. What retired seniors may need most is a hangout and third place that has the second purpose of facilitating volunteering: a public house in the full sense of the term. One could imagine a publicly supported café or pub where a volunteer ombudsperson keeps office hours and connects retirees with those requesting help, perhaps taking responsibility to relay email and social networking messages in print or in person. Maintaining a physical location would be particularly apt given that those most receptive to volunteering are the recently retired.43 Such persons are already habituated to going somewhere for work every day and could easily develop the daily habit of visiting the volunteer public house, especially if they miss the embodied communality and small talk previously provided by their jobs.
Another popular option for lonely seniors is to move into dormitory-like retirement or independent living centers, which provide studios or one- to two-bedroom apartments alongside game rooms, cafeterias, and other amenities. This option, however, is only available to the fairly affluent. The typical cost of a one-bedroom apartment in centers run by Holiday Retirement, for instance, is around $2,500 per month, which exceeds the median wage in the United States and, therefore, probably most people’s retirement budgets.44
An alternative solution would be to induce adult children to more often house their aging parents. The barriers to this strategy are primarily legal and cultural. Municipalities and homeowners’ associations in the United States often ban or exert considerable regulatory pressure against granny flats or secondary suites: small apartments constructed over garages or in the basements of detached homes. The practice is allowed in no more than a few select neighborhoods in Minneapolis, and San Francisco only started permitting their use and construction a few years ago.45 Such laws, apart from greatly reducing the supply of affordable housing in suburban neighborhoods, deprive citizens of the option to house their elderly parents in ways that maintain the level of privacy to which they are accustomed. Banning secondary suites removes the middle option between living completely separately and becoming housemates. Eliminating such bans, however, may not do enough. Low-interest loans might be necessary to spur their development. One illustration of this is how the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation offers forgivable loans for the building of secondary suites for low-income seniors and the disabled on First Nations reserves.46
Although the prevalence of multigenerational homes is on the rise,47 they are far from common. Some of the resistance to secondary suites or more extended family households stems from decades of cultural changes that have led to the idealization of small households, whether composed of nuclear families, roommates, couples, or solo individuals. Similar to the forces that have motivated solo dwelling, the perceived infeasibility of multigenerational homes likely stems from a desire to avoid conflict. Barring physical barriers, it is much easier, though not financially, to live in one’s own home than to negotiate new arrangements of authority and responsibility with one’s aging parents. Certainly some members of extended households have, at one time or another, felt oppressed by an elderly patriarch or overly patronized by their own children. Giving up on extended families because of such occurrences, however, is like abandoning marriage and family life because many people have not yet learned to be good parents and spouses. Nevertheless, ending the vicious cycle between familial fragmentation and weak conflict negotiation skills is not something done by housing policy. Indeed, it would take some combination of changes, from democratic schooling and community-owned infrastructure to adventure playgrounds and more communal domestic environments, for a greater number of citizens to find multigenerational living both desirable and feasible.
Institutionalized seniors, on the other hand, could more often have their needs for social contact and belonging met if daycares and nursing homes were colocated. Given that both services suffer from ever increasingly tight budgets, colocation can save costs at the same time that it leverages seniors’ needs for meaningful social contact into caring for and educating young people. Such an arrangement would even help develop more communitarian adults. Indeed, one study of a shared-site child and adult daycare center found that intergenerational play increased children’s social acceptance of and empathy for the elderly. The benefits to the participating seniors were similarly immeasurable. One summarized her sentiments saying, “The children need to be here … I do not feel sad here.”48 Moreover, given all the research demonstrating the significant health advantages resulting from social belonging and community,49 nursing home residents who interact with children would likely require far fewer medical interventions. Indeed, colocating nursing homes and daycares might be considered a form of preventive care.
Despite their clear advantages for social well-being and potential to lower the costs of senior and child care, colocated facilities remain rare. In certain areas, the barriers are legal. In fact, California law prohibits placing daycare and senior care in the same building.50 Some centers, however, have been able to skirt this rule by constructing two separate buildings connected by a breezeway. Other significant barriers stem from entrenched patterns of thought and ignorance. The dominant structure of public schooling in most technological societies frames same-age peer groups as the norm.51 Having spent decades cultivating friendships only with those within a few years of themselves, many citizens are unlikely to think of intergenerational social ties as attractive or perhaps even possible. Hence, it makes sense that state legislators would unthinkingly prohibit intergenerational care facilities and that those designing care centers would only seldom consider mixing age groups. It may take bold action by state and national governments to shift thinking about daycares and nursing homes. If even a mere fraction of the millions of public R&D dollars going to companion robotics research were redirected toward experimenting with and establishing intergenerational care facilities, such approaches could garner greater recognition and legitimacy.
Finally, artifacts could be more compatible with communities of repair and tinkering. Consider the vibrant, albeit networked, communities of practice forming around open source and free software. Similarly, maker spaces have gained considerable popularity. In such spaces, hobbyists and budding tech entrepreneurs tinker and design, often simultaneously hosting DIY Bio meetings where enthusiasts play around with DNA and biological organisms. Limiting the potential of these groups is the fact that they tend to require a level of expertise, income, and time out of reach for the average person. Indeed, designer/activist Aral Balkan refers to open source software as a “sandbox for enthusiasts,” going so far as to argue that the idea that the open source movement can empower the average consumer is based on a misguided “trickle-down” theory of technology.52 It presumes, without evidence, that expert enthusiasts building technology for other enthusiasts will somehow trickle down to produce substantial benefits for laypeople. Maker spaces and DIY Bio labs seem hardly different. Skimming their webpages one typically finds membership rolls composed of people with college degrees in science or engineering and occasionally fine arts. Finally, many, if not most, of these spaces charge upward of a hundred dollars per month for a membership. How could a greater diversity of people have the opportunity to work alongside neighbors and others in repairing, tinkering, and building?
Tool libraries could be part of the solution, though their current reach remains limited. As one review of Oregon’s tool libraries notes, they are typically open a couple days each week and are not publicly funded.53 A straightforward fix would be to more significantly integrate tool libraries into the public library system. Given that the existence of contemporary information networks somewhat obviates the need for physical books, libraries would better capitalize on their strengths by focusing on providing public access to material things that cannot be easily digitized. Doing so would enable tool libraries to serve a wider range of communities as well as open up possibilities for funding full-time tool library workers and providing free classes. This latter possibility is necessary because the barrier to more citizens working together to build, repair, and maintain their technologies is not merely a lack of tools, but access to the kind of experience that one cannot get from a YouTube video. Publicly funded, full-time tool librarians could shift the Fixer movement from a hobbyist group of affluent whites into an everyday practice across races and classes.
As helpful as such changes might be, however, these efforts do not address a core barrier: technologies that are difficult or expensive to repair and modify. The fact that companies such as Apple face no repercussions for using nonstandard screws or epoxy to seal their devices shut lets firms technologically prohibit people from engaging with the inner workings of their gadgets. It would probably take sizable incentives or tax penalties to convince firms to make their products more easily repairable, given that it undermines their revenues from repair services and sales.
Nevertheless, they might be more indirectly incentivized to do so. So-called take back laws require companies to recover their products from customers when no longer wanted or usable, thus placing the responsibility on firms to ensure proper disposal of consumer goods.54 Apart from the clear environmental benefits resulting from companies being encouraged to design products so that they are easier to remanufacture, recycle, or dispose of safely, such laws could result in devices that are more straightforward for users to disassemble and modify. As economics analysts have pointed out, however, take back laws only do this when other firms are not allowed to intervene and compete for broken or obsolete products.55 For instance, a company that makes money by purchasing old electronic devices directly from consumers and melting them down for their valuable heavy metals would enjoy all the increased profits resulting from easier to disassemble devices while leaving the original manufacturer to cover the increased costs. Such an arrangement would result in original manufacturers having a much weaker incentive toward improved recyclability and reparability, doing less to discourage consumers from parting with their still repairable technologies.
Wherever dominant firms cannot be easily steered or incentivized, governments could redirect public research and development funds toward designing more easily repairable technologies. Indeed, technology policy analysts Edward Woodhouse and Daniel Sarewitz suggested this strategy as a way to ensure that R&D more often serves the needs of the poor.56 Going one step further would be to require that resulting designs be placed in the public domain. This would contrast the current paradigm of public research funding, wherein public dollars are used to develop products that private companies quickly patent and restrict to maximize their profits. In any case, the resulting knowledge and designs could be handed over to new kinds of firms, perhaps even cooperatives, whose focus would be on making a small but reasonable profit producing reliable, affordable, and open technologies.
Lessening the community thinning effects of many techniques and gadgets would entail not only directly discouraging their use but supporting more vibrant communitarian alternatives. Though TV licensing fees and dynamic peak pricing would be helpful, public viewings and public technologies for warmth and cooling may be more effective at peeling users away from their televisions and air-conditioning units. If parents are to more often experiment with cosleeping and other alternatives to crying it out, they would need more flexible work arrangements—not just less culturally biased pediatric advice.
Efforts to alter contemporary techniques and artifacts face broader and more tenacious cultural barriers than those to reform organizations or infrastructures. Techniques can persist long after their more formal or institutionalized support networks have disappeared. Even if the American Academy of Pediatrics were to reverse its position on cosleeping, ideas about independence and risk would continue for years, if not decades. Moreover, many members of technological societies are likely to continue thinking of techniques and technologies as matters of personal choice, especially in highly individualistic countries like the United States. Technological liberalism will probably remain a dominant political-cultural ideology for the foreseeable future.57 The idea that technology writ large can provide a neutral foundation from which individuals pursue their own ideas of the good life will continue blinding many citizens to how technological systems and practices render some ways of living more difficult than others. A person looking to enjoy thick community has few options and little agency as an individual. In contrast, buying a smartphone or registering for a Facebook account is dead easy. Insofar as technological liberalism prevents more citizens from recognizing how their lives are subtly constrained by their sociotechnical contexts, as if by legislation, their ability to collectively do anything about it will remain highly restrained.
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The purpose of chapters 7–9 has been to illustrate how status quo technological arrangements are nothing natural but are the product of a constellation of cultural, regulatory, economic, and other social factors. The fact that many members of technological civilization currently live in diffuse suburbs, keep their children sequestered in their homes, meet their material needs through individuated exchanges on retail and infrastructural networks, and turn to private alternatives to community engagement is not really the result of anything resembling free individual choice. People’s decisions are shaped to a significant extent by sociotechnical forces lying largely outside their control and frequently unbeknownst to them. A vast array of public subsidies and invisible support ensure the momentum of suburbia, regional malls, automobility, and the oligopoly of giant retail corporations, including overlooked sources like the near mandatory provision of free parking, inadequate labor laws, and the failure to incorporate commuting and utility costs in mortgage calculations. In the language of STS, these technologies—as well as their momentum and obduracy—have been socially constructed.
I have made several recommendations for lessening, leveraging, or skirting these barriers. It is important to keep in mind that no single intervention into the sociotechnical systems shaping everyday life is likely to significantly foster thick community on its own. Just as people did not become networked individuals immediately after incorporating a few networked technologies into their lives, but did so rather over the course of decades of incremental but widespread sociotechnical changes, walkable and mixed-use neighborhoods or community-scale energy systems are unlikely to produce thick communitarian societies on their own or very quickly. Community is a vector phenomenon, a product of a constellation of factors. Any single change is best framed as a small nudge toward thick community or perhaps even merely a catalyst for other nudges. Like a chemical reaction, various sociotechnical ingredients of thick community probably need to be present in sufficient amounts, along with enough added energy, for social evolution toward more communitarian ways of life to occur. The expectation that altering a single variable should have dramatic effects can itself be a barrier to improved thought and action. It works under the misguided assumption that social life is a simple, linear, and almost mechanistic phenomenon, rather than intricate, nonlinear, and probabilistic.
Broader economic factors likewise stymie the development of alternative and more communitarian technologies. Automobility, sprawling suburbs, distant retailing, large-scale energy infrastructures, and other technologies of networked individualism have emerged and persisted in an age characterized by a glut of inexpensive fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources, and distinguished by widespread toleration of ecological disruption. When the environmental scholars who think and write incisively on the ever-pressing need for more sustainable, no-growth economies describe more desirable futures, they typically contain many of the communitarian features that I have discussed.58 The processes that prevent social evolution toward more sustainable ways of living likely hinder movement toward thick communitarian societies as well.
Although economic localism and alternatives to consumerism are greatly more efficient from a resource standpoint, they are less likely to be realized insofar as broader economic policy fails to take growing resource scarcity and potentially catastrophic changes to climate and environment seriously enough. Although incremental steps toward thicker communities could no doubt be made in the short term, more substantive changes may require shifting away from growth-oriented economies. Apart from the numerous barriers erected by those who currently benefit from an economic paradigm rooted in a belief in endless growth, at least some citizens would be likely to equate the end of consumer society with the demise of civilization itself. Fewer people have as much experience with economic dependence on friends, family, and neighbors as in previous decades and centuries. Many would probably find the prospect of losing the appearance of self-sufficiency enabled by large-scale consumer markets to be frightening. Nevertheless, the central claim of groups like the Transition Town Movement, who aim for a smoother transition to a post-peak oil and climate change world, has been that it is far better to adapt sociotechnical systems to that potential future now, while some major resources can still be mobilized to transitioning, rather than wait until technological societies are teetering at the edge of collapse.
Regardless, as helpful as my illustration of barriers and potential solutions might be to advocates of thick community, any set of proposals is likely to be incomplete in the face of the uncertainties and complexities of reality. What is most needed, if citizens are to realize thick communitarian technological societies, is an enhanced ability to learn from sociotechnical change, prevent foreseeable harms to communal ways of life, and more broadly pursue the intelligent and democratic steering of technological innovation.