The Neighborhood as Nation: How We Traded Local Sovereignty for Global Connection

We've forgotten democracy.

In 1837, the citizens of Dedham, Massachusetts, gathered for their annual town meeting as they had for two hundred years. The proceedings that day included a four hour debate about whether to spend seventeen dollars repairing the schoolhouse roof. Four hours. Seventeen dollars.

Every citizen who would walk past that schoolhouse, whose children would sit under that roof, whose taxes would pay for those shingles, had the right to speak. More importantly, they had to look into the eyes of neighbors they would see at the general store, at church, at harvest time, and defend their position.

When Josiah Thompson argued against the repair and Sarah Mills argued for it, they both knew they would share a pew come Sunday. Democracy wasn’t something that happened to them; it was something they did, together, with people they couldn’t escape.

We find this quaint now, inefficient, even absurd. Four hours for seventeen dollars? We have algorithms that could optimize this decision in milliseconds, expert panels that could determine best practices, federal standards that could eliminate the need for any local decision at all.

And so we did exactly that.

We traded the messy, personal, inescapable democracy of the neighborhood for the clean, abstract, optional democracy of the screen. We can now argue with strangers about national policy while avoiding eye contact with the person next door. We’ve gained the world and lost the block, and in that trade, we’ve forgotten what democracy actually is.

The dismantling was deliberate, though sold as progress. Neighborhood schools gave way to consolidated districts because efficiency experts calculated the per-pupil savings. They didn’t calculate the cost of parents no longer knowing their children’s teachers, of communities losing their gathering places, of decisions being made by distant bureaucrats rather than present neighbors.

The corner store gave way to the supermarket, then the big box store, then the delivery truck. Each iteration promised lower prices and greater selection, but with each iteration, another site of necessary encounter disappeared. You don’t have to face anyone at the self-checkout.

You don’t have to explain yourself to the algorithm.