Who is 'we'?

Rebuilding Trust in the Age of Algorithmic Activism

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It’s a phrase we hear all the time—“This will be good for the community.” It’s said in board meetings and Facebook comments, printed on campaign mailers and whispered at church potlucks. But I’ve noticed lately that the word community is doing a lot of heavy lifting in those conversations. It gestures toward a collective we all supposedly understand. But when you look closer, the referent often dissolves. Who is this community we’re talking about? Who defines what’s good for it?

We assume some shared sense of “us,” but that assumption often masks a deeper confusion—both about who we are and about how we know what we know.

Fragmented Authority and Inflated Awareness

This is something I’ve felt especially sharply in the age of social media, where platforms blur the line between observer and spokesperson. I’ll scroll through LinkedIn and see people speaking with authority about what should happen in a city or a school district, often in places they don’t live and with credentials they’ve never claimed. And I don’t mean that dismissively—sometimes they’re right. But what strikes me is the ease with which we all now slide into the role of representative.

The very structure of these platforms invites it. You’re encouraged to comment on everything, react quickly, post publicly. And that habitual engagement creates a kind of inflated awareness. Because when we see more, we feel we understand more. When we understand more (or think we do), we feel entitled to speak as if we represent something larger.

But we don’t always. At least, not in the way we think.

This isn’t just about individuals, either. The traditional sources of moral and communal authority—pastors, civic leaders, elected officials, long-tenured local business owners—once held a kind of slow-earned influence. It was rooted in presence, in repetition, in embedded trust. Today, that influence has been diffused, displaced, sometimes discarded. In its place, we often elevate people whose credibility is based on attention, volume, or aesthetic. If someone can perform influence—can “go viral,” can gather likes and shares—we tend to treat them as influential. But that’s not always the same thing.

What we’re left with is a sense that everyone can speak for the community, even as the actual conditions of community—mutual trust, thick belonging, shared rhythms—erode beneath our feet.

Temporary Coalitions, Permanent Confusion

I've watched this dynamic play out in local issues. A controversial school decision, a zoning fight, a new development—it’s like lighting a match. People rally online, a Facebook group gains momentum, signs go up in yards. For a brief moment, it feels like a wave is rising. And sometimes it is. But often, when the issue resolves—or is delayed or fades—the wave disappears. The urgency passes, and people return to their separate orbits.

This is what social media does best: it catalyzes moments of outrage, then collapses back into noise. It offers temporary coalitions, not lasting communities.

The danger is not just that these coalitions are short-lived. It’s that they can convince us we’ve done the work of community when really, we’ve only glimpsed its outline. When we mistake an algorithmically-assembled flash mob for a shared civic life, we’re liable to overestimate both our authority and our alignment.

The Deeper Philosophical Tension

Underneath all of this is a deeper philosophical problem—what we think “good” even means.

When someone says something is “good for the community,” they’re making a claim not just about outcomes, but about values. They’re pointing to some vision of the good life and saying: this helps us get there.

But that’s exactly where we’ve become conflicted. Our culture, for all its public appeals to “the common good,” has largely embraced a kind of technical libertarianism: everyone defines the good life for themselves. The moral consensus has thinned out. The shared stories that once bound a community—whether religious, civic, or familial—have become contested, compartmentalized, or abandoned.

So we’re left in a strange place: we speak in the language of shared moral vision (“good for the community”) while living in a framework that insists such shared visions are either dangerous or impossible. It’s an unstable contradiction.

C.S. Lewis, writing in The Abolition of Man, warned about this very thing. He saw that the loss of shared moral formation—what he called “men without chests”—would produce people with strong feelings and sharp intellects, but no cultivated sense of virtue to guide them. And perhaps even more relevant today, he foresaw the rise of a managerial class who would claim to be value-neutral, but would inevitably impose their preferences under the guise of efficiency, safety, or progress.

It’s not hard to see that dynamic at play now. In place of a shared pursuit of the good, we have personalized algorithms, polarized coalitions, and technocratic justifications. And yet we still want to claim moral clarity. We want to say: this is good for the community—without being able to say who the community is, or how we know what good looks like.

So What Do We Do?

If this sounds bleak, it’s not meant to be. But it is meant to be clarifying. We can’t fix the whole ecosystem. But we can choose to act differently within it. We can resist the temptation to speak for everyone, and instead commit to speaking with someone. We can step back from performance and step toward presence.

Here are a few ways to start:

1. Trade influence for embeddedness.

Find one local place where your presence—not your opinion—matters. Maybe it’s a neighborhood group, a school, a civic meeting, a church. Show up. Keep showing up. That’s where real authority begins.

2. Interrogate the “we.”

The next time you hear “we as a community,” ask yourself: who’s included in that we? Who’s left out? What kinds of people or perspectives are missing? Asking the question doesn’t undermine the community—it honors it.

3. Recover shared goods.

Not everything is subjective. We can still point to goods that are broadly, deeply beneficial: beauty, hospitality, safety, stewardship, truthfulness. Instead of defaulting to “this is my opinion,” try rooting your claims in goods that others can recognize—even if they don’t always agree on the details.

The community isn’t a monolith, and it isn’t a myth. But it’s also not something we can summon by assertion. It’s something we practice into being—slowly, quietly, with others. And that might be the most countercultural kind of influence we can offer.