I don't really know what I want to say, and so far I've written about four thousand words trying to get my thoughts out and none of them feel right. So, I will state the basics and nothing more.

This is a manifesto. To be honest, in writing this I thought to myself: what does manifesto even mean? I often think of the words that we parrot countless times without ever asking ourselves if the person across from us even knows what we’re really trying to say. This is probably spurred on by the constant usage of corporate buzzwords in our lives. A school shooting happens? Look at those resilient young people; we'd naught dare speak the words “traumatized children”. What does "AI" even mean for any individual product? It means nothing! It just makes somebody money—at least that’s what corporate thinks. Working in an office, one hears this nonsense all the time. As an act of rebellion, I just look up definitions. So, let's be sure we're all on the same page. Manifesto: "a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer" (Source: Merriam Webster, accessed JAN 2026).

This is a manifesto—a declaration of my views, publicly—of community. I've thought a lot about the concept of community as of recent. I've determined I've got a lot of things to say about it, so much so that I'll probably not cover everything I have to say in this manifesto. I'll post it, and then I'll go: damn! I forgot to mention...!

As you can probably tell, this is also a stream of consciousness. What better way to declare my views publicly than to slap them down and ship them off to the world-wide web?

Since it's already been done once, let's define community. Merriam Webster gives three main definitions: (1) "a unified body of individuals", (2) "a state or feeling of caring about and wanting to interact with others in a group", and (3) "society at large" (accessed JAN 2026). In my own words: community is a state of connection through some shared trait, of which there are countless options, not to mention the fact we are all in the community that is humanity itself. It is one of those vague buzzwords we use so much that it seems to lose whatever denotative meaning it ever had. This manifesto is not going to help definitively define it either. In fact, I'm going to make it worse. Probably.

Humanity's impetus began when we were pockets of hunter-gatherer tribes-people. Technology was rocks and sticks, and all we had was each other. When one human was sick, the rest of the tribe could still gather food, protect their habitat, and nurse the sick back to health. No human could possibly be able to supply, by themselves, the resources needed to survive. In the more modern eras, we now believe in the dream of a lone wolf, but if a lonely soul broke their leg falling down a cliff side, they would have no one to carry them home.

As history marched ever onward, civilizations and great works were created. No more did humans rely on primitive technology made from found objects. We learned to create things, and make art, and discover feats and truth of science. Even then, we were able to accomplish so much so quickly because of the combined efforts of the grand community: humankind. For every stereotype of a brilliant scientist, toiling away at a table with flasks and thingamajigs, there are the shopkeepers who supply the tools, food, and goods to them. There are the delivery people and the farmers and the craftsmen and the artisans and the architects. Think!—how many people have touched our lives through the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the homes we live in, or even through the technology we use to read and write these words? To think, a giant collective of human beings had to agree upon the modern conventions of the languages we use!

Yet, that’s a bit of a romantic way to think of community. I don't know anyone's names or if they like what they do as work. It's a way of thinking about connection through the means of labor and survival. It only evokes that last definition: "society at large".

At any given time, we are members of several communities all at once: "a unified body of individuals". An age range or group is one type, as is your country, your town, your state, your continent, your street, your building... Your family is one that extends far into the past. You have your peers in school, but you don't really like all of them—except you do get along well with the few that all play card games at lunchtime. You have your colleagues at the office, but you like the ones best that are apart of your LGBTQ+ affinity group. You know the owner, the bartenders, and all the regular’s names at the local bar. You go to knitting club on Saturday afternoons and enjoy the company of everyone there. You feel most comfortable around members of your own race or sex, because they all innately seem to understand something that others don't. However, the members of the local union never understand why you're so into speed-running video games: "I just don't get it?"

The concept of community is vast. I could continue to wax poetic all day about it, couldn't I? (Yes!)

Speaking of poetry, there’s a technique that’s quite apt for this conversation about community that is also utilized in creative writing. It is simple:

To write about humanity, write about a single man.

I sit here and I think about myself. I don't know who I am. I don't know where to go. I think about when I'm older—what will be left for me? I am not religious: I don't want to go to church on Sundays just to have a community of charitable folk that I can call on and who I know have it in their hearts to answer. The library always has activities for the elderly, I guess, if those are still funded by the time I'm aged. I think about institutions as monoliths. I think about how inside those institutions there’s human beings. I think about how libraries can burn and crumble, but there will always be librarians, even if they’re not called librarians anymore. They might just be called human beings now, in this hypothetical future.

I think to myself when I listen to my therapist speak. Sometimes, I don't always think about what they're saying, but it is nonetheless helpful for me to have someone to either talk to or listen to. I think about my support group. They're a good community for me, always there when I need to get advice from people in the same situation as I am. They talk about the pros and cons of Generative AI: chat-bots masquerading as therapists. They, for the most part, agree on how dangerous and unhelpful they are in the long term. I think, sitting in front of my computer, about how simple it is for a broke person to talk to a facsimile of a trained, thinking, feeling therapist. The chatbot would not send me the lyrics to a song they'd want me to read because it helped them process a situation similar to mine. The large-language model would not think to associate my symptoms with mold—have you checked out this website? It might help you when talking to your doctor. I know how it is; I've had these since I was 13. The generative text was never 13. It was just born.

I think about when I was younger than 13. I used to play Roblox, back when it was about games and not about the damn "metaverse" and child abuse and whatever the hell is going on currently. I had two close friends. Each morning during summer vacation, we'd log into our favorite game to roleplay and watch the same show on TV together. I miss those days, my memory clouded with the filter of nostalgia and warm colors. Where do the children go now?

Why is every website the same; why is it all social media? Why is everything trying to be everything: the only thing you’ll ever need? Why does LinkedIn and YouTube have games? Why can't we decorate our pages and express ourselves? Why are politicians and furry artists on the same damn platform? Why—?

I don't hate the internet or internet communities and I never will. I tend to quickly stop thinking about the whys and the nostalgic longing because I know the answer to “why”. The answer is always the same: these people aren't in your communities. They're in the community of money, power, blah blah... Infinite growth. I live on the borderline of a hoarding archivist and a performance artist who knows that everything is in some way ephemeral. I remember enough to know that things could be better. I know that people want them to be better. And then, at the end, I know that there's just too many variables at play for things to simply become better like that.

I don't believe the stereotypical billionaire Tech CEO belongs to any community but that of the lonely tyrant who has it all. They know nothing of the average person they pass on the street. They don't even use the streets anymore. A corporate capitalist institution is inhuman but made of thousands of individual humans, yet it feels like the prototypical modern Tech CEO is the institution made into a human body.

People often scoff at the discussion of adding Arts to STEM: STEAM! How pathetic, the thought of art as equal to these useful, noble skills. To this, I say: what is the point of the pursuit of Science, the creation of Technology, the act of Engineering, and the precision of Mathematics?

I once had the opportunity to study a medical cadaver as an art student. It was a collaboration between the med school and our figure-drawing cohort. We oft repaid for the privilege of studying and learning from the cadaver(s) by painting the medical halls full of murals of medical diagrams and other such medical-y symbols. It was a beautiful thing, to study the cadaver, and we actively discussed the body amongst ourselves and with the medical students who were chaperoning us, all while sketching the preserved muscles and fibers. We talked about how beneficial it was to study on real bodies and how we wouldn't want to be the first real human our surgeon worked on due to the proliferation of simulations. We talked about burnout in medical school, and how what support that was offered was insufficient and useless. We listened to someone talk about when they were a child, they felt very secure meeting with their doctor because the doctor had knelt down and began to draw in order to help talk to the young child.

An element of humanity can always do some good, especially if the profession touches other humans through their products and services. There are plenty of people every day complaining about how they feel like just a number, whether it be for government assistance, going to the doctor or dentist, doing their daily errands, or working at their own job. And again, of course, the answer is not so simple as “be kinder”. There are plenty of compounding issues (money, inaccessibility, health, stress...), but they all feel like they stem from losing that element of humanity. So often do institutions forget that every statistic and number is a unique human.

Generative AI seems to seek to be the cure (and not a very effective one at that) to a symptom of the disease, and that leads to just more problems because the source is ignored completely. Chat-bots masquerading as therapists, doctors, teachers, and other trained professionals creates more work for the humans to deal with and does not acknowledge the necessary power of a human's touch. Anyone can regurgitate information and respond to a question with a correct-sounding answer. The lack of access and shortage of humans willing and able to do a job does not mean the answer to those issues is inhuman, easy access. Easy is not always better. For all of humanity's flaws and horrors, the answer is not inhumanity either.

Sometimes it is just so helpful to talk aloud to someone else. Sometimes the person doesn't even have to be listening, but speaking your thoughts (or even journaling) can help with the process. Sometimes another person's perspective is helpful and powerful.

I think of the act of learning. There is a lot of potential and value lost when you cannot talk and learn with someone else. You could learn about any topic by yourself through reading online resources, but if you never talk with anyone else, how would you ever know if you were misunderstanding the info? If you were wrong? How much harder is it to solve a problem when you have no one else to help you with it? How much harder would it be to solve problems if there were no online forums full of people asking the same questions, and others answering back with the solutions? How much harder would it be to be creative if we could not be inspired by each other?

How do we know what normal is? I've thought about this a lot. There are times when I feel like I'm becoming an unwilling voyeur who is a little too curious and willing to look inside other people's homes and intimate spaces, as if I am possessed by the soul of an unethical anthropologist. Every person lives with a preconception of what it is to be normal, transformed by the books and television and movies they watch, and the life they've lived since they had the ability to retain memories. How does one know what a healthy relationship is if they've never had any sort of relationship? How does one know what a home should look and feel like? How does one know how to take care of a bed if they've never been taught, or shown an example, or invited people into their bedroom to have their guest comment on it, or it never even crossed their mind to seek out the knowledge? It is a deeper feeling than that of the neologism sonder, which still, to me, does not speak of the breadth of what I am feeling when I look at another human being.

People oft speak of "shoulds" in life. A person of a certain age should know this.

You should be able to do this. It should be everyone's prerogative to do THIS. If you're a good person, you should do that.

Social media at it stands today is made up of people talking at the world. Each post or video is presented to the audience of anywhere between a few individuals to millions upon millions, and any response made to the original material is presented as secondary. I scroll tumblr, for example, and original posts art presented to me first, and any corrections or rebuttals require me to scroll down, physically situating itself as secondary to that of what came first. Unless, of course, a person screenshots another's post to then share and comment on—but then the element of conversation is removed and it becomes a PSA, like a flyer stapled upon the doors of neighbors: do not listen to this drivel; it is false! It becomes a war between enemies. Visibility is currency. Speaking is a powerful weapon and doing it enters you into the arena. The currency is not worth much to most.

The same is true of Twitter and any other micro-blogging platform, and YouTube, and Facebook, and Instagram, and so on and so forth. We are either a lecturer or a listener. To join the conversation is to be naked, vulnerable. One person says "we should", and to respond is to join the conversation—and what a conversation is feels more akin to a constant debate.

Community is fractured on the most-used websites on the internet. The September that never ended continues to never end, marching forever, truly eternal. Perhaps this is the tragedy of the commons of the digital era. But, yet, again: the solution is not to decry whatever social media is and say it never should have been wrought upon the world. There is a deeper source beyond that of the digital era.

I don't wish to solve the ills of the entire world because I am just one person and, to be quite frank, I am a very tired person. I like to write and talk to others, and sometimes those other people are my friends. When I am at my most ill, I think of others. When I am at my most tired, I think of how much other people make things easier. When I am sad, I am comforted by the community of people I have who understand me. When I am happy, active, and able, I like to make others smile. As much as I like to learn, I also love to teach (the best way to learn is to teach!), and there's not much use in teaching if there's no one around to listen.

Community is somewhere nestled in-between that of the basic needs of survival and the reasons for wanting to survive. It is a keystone of our species. I shall end similarly to how I began: suddenly, uncoordinated, and filled with a story to tell.

I think often of the first person to ever really inspire me and who has haunted me throughout my entire life. They were disabled in a way where they were functionally bedridden and mute. They were always going to be dependent on others, and they never got to be dependent on the people they purposefully chose, because their family lived by the mantra of "my house, my rules"—which in many instances was entirely fair and reasonable, but seems to fall apart ethically when you're disabled, as exemplified by their particular situation. Rumor has it is that they died by passive suicide: living life as they wanted to, not by the constraints of the devices keeping them alive. But, before that moment, they lived the same life as any of us, disabled or otherwise. They got money working online freelance doing graphic design. They played in virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life (how apt). Typing on a keyboard, they spoke to others in the same manner I am speaking to you now. They had a friend, who happened to live nearby, in glorious spite of the infinitesimal reach of the internet. They would never met. It was never their house. The rules were never in their favor. Still, they met online, and they had a real community, no different than any other.

Thus I refuse to believe in any notions that such-and-such was a mistake or this-and-that is purely harmful, for nothing is so simple. I refuse to live my life sounding like a ignorant fool lambasting the younger generations for what I do not yet understand, stubborn to the concept of listening just a little harder to what those that come after me are trying to say. I instead try to remember when I was an unheard youth, lonely and lost in the vast unknown world.

I want to hold this world and never let it go
I want the sun to always rise on the kids next door
Whether I go or stay, that question still abides
Posed by rainbows in the river spray
What answer do you give
A world that asks so bitterly to live?

—from The World’s Gone Beautiful, Malvina Reynolds

i’ll miss crossing guards ushering the grown folks too, like ducklings
and the lifeguards at the community pool and
men who yelled out the window that they’d fix the dent in my car,
right now! it’d just take a second—

—from eschatology, Eve L. Ewing