Communities are not fungible, but they are also not permanent.

Because humans are mobile, the community changes as people, institutions, infrastructure, and industries come and go over time.

Even if a substantial fraction of the population never leaves the geographic boundaries that contain the community they were born in, their web of relationships constantly changes as old neighbors leave and new neighbors arrive, the prevailing economy improves or worsens, and waves of technological revolution like the transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles washes over them.

Furthermore the community in which we live is only one of many communities we inhabit, such as school chums, work colleagues, church congregations and political movements, all of which are subject to the same phenomenon of perpetual change.

If every aspect of the community is impermanent, the community itself cannot be permanent, and I see no argument, let alone any technology other than encasing the community in lucite, capable of preserving it indefinitely.

>Communities are not fungible, but they are also not permanent.

The same is true of individual humans. And yet, that is not a great argument for killing them.

Like many technical people, my personality naturally gravitates towards introverted behavior. I am very comfortable being alone for long periods of time, and in spending my day writing code or fixing bugs with just me and my computer.

But I also enjoy interacting with other people. It just takes the right 'community' to draw me out of my shell. There have been periods of my life when I was outgoing, because I was in the right environment (college, certain jobs, sports, etc.). Other periods allowed me to retreat into my own isolated world.

There just isn't a magic formula that produces the right kind of community that we want on demand.

Nowhere in the article does it say that communities can't change. Communities are living, breathing organisms.

An unchanging community is a dead community, period.

Attempts to "preserve" a community, both online and offline, tend to end up preserving unhealthy power dynamics within the community as well, which would have been slowly replaced with something else if you had just let the community evolve (or disappear) naturally.

Often, members of the community who benefit from the status quo are the ones who cry the loudest for such preservation.