The following commentary and subsequent essay support Episode 1, so please listen here if you'd like deeper context. Originally published in THL Knowledge Garden here.
Here's a cold hard truth no one in our ecosystem wants to address-- 90% of the infra projects and corporations in crypto see community as a commodity primed for extraction. Straight up. In the past 2 years, I've worked in one of the biggest crypto corporations (a foxy wallet many of us have used since our entry into this tech) and a well-funded, strong infra startup. The amount of energy I spent protecting communities from pure extraction plays by degens is stunning and, along with other factors, led to my exit from both orgs.
One exit was so sudden and violent that I wasn't able to say goodbye to the community I had built with my team from scratch. A small and vibrant community of talented web3 devs who we spent 5 months conducting weekly workshops with and who we saw IRL at events around the globe. Exited without a goodbye, a devastating outcome for a community builder like myself.
Which begs the question— if this is the norm in our ecosystem, why do we even bother with community building? On the tech side of this conversation, my answer is, "we shouldn't bother". On the impact ecosystem side, however, we see the opposite. Regenerative and self-sustaining communities rising and connecting around a collective mission. These communities aren't perfect (communities are always messy), but are the opposite of a commodity and their leaders treat them with care and compassion.
So what's the core difference? Alignment.
Corporations and startups have a responsibility to their investors. Period. CMOs view the "community" as the mechanism for conversion, and in 90% of crypto infra projects, that conversion is preparing the organization for TGE. Most of these infra projects are over-funded, have almost zero PMF and VCs expect their ROI on an accelerated and impractical timeline. So we end up with "community as exit liquidity" as the predominate building strategy across our ecosystem.
We can do better. We must. Technology without humanity is soulless machinery.
Why does the impact side seem to thrive with community building? The alignment is grounded in MISSION. Period. Humans come together for a mission, no matter the size or scope. We are wired to find like-minds who wish to create change or solve a problem. In the impact space, we are not driven by monetization, we are driven by change.
That, my dear readers, is the difference between the extraction model of community building and the impact model. Mission. And The Human Layer exists to explore such deep nuances in the humanity powering our emergent technology.
And for more on building resilient community...keep reading.
Here’s another hard truth—our ecosystems are sick. Not just from bad actors, but from structural vulnerabilities that allow those bad actors to freely arrive and thrive. In crypto, in impact, in pro-social movements around the world, we see the same pattern: communities form, energy and momentum grows, capital flows—and then? Exploitation, extraction, disillusionment. Crystal and I have both seen this play out again and again. History doesn't always repeat, but it does often rhyme.
What if we saw community not just as a network, but as a cultural and narrative immune system? A living, breathing defense mechanism designed to recognize threats, build resilience, and heal from harm. Because here’s the thing: a strong community doesn’t just absorb attacks, it adapts. It learns. It evolves.
I’ve watched (and built) communities that were far too open and trusting get hijacked by opportunists looking for exit liquidity or a quick power grab. I’ve also seen communities that were too insular and rigid collapse under the weight of their own dogmatic ideology. The healthiest ones? They operate like a well-functioning immune system—able to detect toxicity early, remove potential threats, and strengthen their core without losing their identity... or their humanity.
The key difference? Response, not reaction.
In crypto, too many communities react like a body with a compromised immune system—either they let everything in (leading to infiltration and burnout), or they overcorrect with hyper-defensive mechanisms (leading to stagnation and isolation). Neither is sustainable.
But in healthy, mission-driven outfits, where alignment runs deeper than hype cycles, communities build natural immunity over time. They learn to identify real builders from extractors, constructive critics from bad-faith actors. They create antibodies—processes, cultural norms, and shared values that reject the parasitic and nurture the regenerative.
The challenge? Immunity isn’t built overnight. Creating resilience (be it biological or technological) requires attention and intention over time. It requires pain. It requires tending to an evolving knowledge garden and collective memory—an intimate understanding of past wounds so they aren’t repeated.
Prompted essay based on Episode 1 and the cohost's customized Narrative Intelligence Platform.
The commodification of community has become the silent tragedy of our digital age. What once represented our deepest connections—the web of relationships that sustained us through uncertainty and collective challenge—has been transformed into a marketing channel, an engagement metric, a line item on quarterly reports.
We've watched this unfold over years in Web3, as corporations and protocols alike speak reverently of "community" while treating the humans within those spaces as assets to be leveraged rather than co-creators to be empowered.
This extraction reaches far beyond our industry. The weaponized algorithms that have fractured our social fabric have done so by commodifying our attention, our relationships, and our very sense of belonging. They've redirected the profound human need for connection into consumption patterns, transformed civic engagement into tribal warfare, and repackaged community participation as content production. We now find ourselves in digital spaces explicitly designed to harvest our engagement rather than nourish our humanity.
Yet amid this landscape of extraction, another model is emerging—one that recognizes community not as a commodity to be consumed but as infrastructure to be cultivated. This perspective doesn't view community as something that exists to serve technological or financial goals, but rather as the foundational layer upon which meaningful technology and sustainable economics must be built.
The extractive model of community is easy to spot once you've trained your eye to see it. It manifests in time-limited incentives designed to drive short-term engagement rather than long-term connection. It appears in community spaces where the value flows predominantly upward—from members to organizers, from users to platforms. It reveals itself in governance structures where community participation is largely performative, with real power remaining firmly in the hands of founders, investors, and core teams.
We've experienced this firsthand in crypto communities built around airdrops and token incentives, where "community building" functioned primarily as user acquisition and is culturally embraced as a being "degen". Once the incentives dried up, so did the participation. What remained wasn't a community but the husk of one—digital spaces devoid of the trust, reciprocity, and shared purpose that give community its power.
The regenerative model operates from a fundamentally different understanding of what community is and why it matters. Rather than extracting value from community members, it focuses on generating value with and for them. Rather than treating participation as a means to an end, it recognizes community formation as a worthwhile end in itself. Most importantly, it understands that true communities must be cultivated rather than manufactured—grown organically through authentic connection rather than assembled through mechanical incentives.
The distinction isn't merely ethical but practical. Extractive communities collapse when external pressures mount. Regenerative communities become stronger through adversity. As we face cascading systemic challenges—from climate instability to political polarization to economic uncertainty—this difference becomes not just meaningful but essential.
We stand at the precipice of what may be the greatest period of systemic transition in modern history. The institutions that have structured our collective life—from nation-states to financial systems to educational models—are showing signs of strain if not outright failure. The question isn't whether change is coming, but how we navigate it with minimal suffering and maximum wisdom.
In this context, community isn't a luxury but a necessity. It functions as a resilient infrastructure layer—one that can absorb shocks, distribute resources, and maintain essential functions when formal systems falter.
This isn't theoretical. We've seen it in action during natural disasters, when neighbors organize support before official responders arrive. We've seen it during economic crises, when mutual aid networks emerge to meet basic needs. We saw it during the pandemic, when grassroots coordination often outpaces institutional response.
What's changing is our ability to augment these natural community responses with thoughtfully designed digital infrastructure. DAOs, mutual credit systems, and decentralized coordination tools don't replace the fundamental human relationships at the heart of community resilience, but they can significantly extend their reach and effectiveness.
JournoDAO represents one small experiment in this direction—creating infrastructure for knowledge preservation and media production that doesn't rely on corporate platforms or traditional funding models. Our goal isn't simply to build a sustainable organization but to create patterns that can be replicated and adapted across contexts—templates for resilience in an age of uncertainty.
The irony of our technological moment is that while we're building radically new coordination systems, we're simultaneously rediscovering ancient wisdom about what makes communities function. The principles that governed tribal councils, agricultural cooperatives, and religious communities for millennia are being rediscovered and reimagined in the context of DAOs and digital networks.
Consider the practice of consensus-building. Indigenous communities worldwide developed sophisticated processes for making collective decisions that honored diverse perspectives while moving toward shared action. These weren't simple majority-rule systems but nuanced approaches that sought to integrate rather than merely aggregate individual viewpoints. Modern consent-based governance in DAOs reflects a similar understanding that sustainable collective action requires more than vote-counting.
Or consider the role of ritual and shared narrative in community cohesion. Traditional communities understood that regular gatherings, shared stories, and collective meaning-making weren't peripheral to community function but central to it. The most resilient DAOs are similarly discovering that community calls, ritualized recognition, and shared language create the cultural substrate without which formal governance mechanisms will inevitably fail.
The key insight is that technological innovation doesn't obviate the need for these fundamental social technologies—it creates new contexts for their expression. The communities that thrive aren't those that try to engineer around human nature, but those that create containers where our innate capacity for cooperation, meaning-making, and mutual care can flourish at scales previously impossible.
The greatest challenge in building regenerative digital communities lies in maintaining the proper relationship between technological and human systems. When technology dictates the terms of human interaction, community becomes brittle, extractive, and ultimately unsustainable. When human needs shape technological development, community becomes resilient, regenerative, and adaptable.
This doesn't mean rejecting technological efficiency or innovation. Rather, it means being intentional about what we optimize for. Systems optimized solely for growth, engagement, or financial return will inevitably sacrifice the human values that make community meaningful. Systems optimized for human flourishing, collective intelligence, and long-term resilience may grow more slowly, but they build foundations that can weather storms.
In practice, this means asking different questions during the design process. Instead of "How can we maximize participation?" we might ask "How can we deepen the quality of participation?" Instead of "How can we grow our community?" we might ask "How can we strengthen the connections within our community?" Instead of "How can we incentivize desired behaviors?" we might ask "How can we nurture intrinsic motivation aligned with collective wellbeing?"
The communities that navigate this balance successfully share certain characteristics: transparency about power dynamics, clear processes for resolving conflicts, genuine opportunities for meaningful contribution, and governance structures that evolve based on lived experience rather than abstract theory. Most importantly, they maintain a fierce commitment to treating community members as ends in themselves rather than means to other ends.
As we build these regenerative digital communities, we're not merely creating temporary groups organized around specific projects or interests. We're re-establishing the commons—the shared resources and relationships that exist outside the market and the state, governed by those who participate in them rather than those who own or regulate them.
The digital commons we create today—whether knowledge commons like Wikipedia, creative commons like open-source projects, or governance commons like mature DAOs—represent our best hope for preserving human agency and collective wisdom in an age of accelerating change. They embody the understanding that our most valuable resources aren't those that can be enclosed and privatized, but those that flourish when openly shared and collectively stewarded.
Community as infrastructure isn't a metaphor but a practical reality. In a world where traditional institutions are faltering and established systems are showing their fragility, the regenerative communities we build now may determine not just whether we survive the coming transitions, but whether we emerge from them with our humanity not just intact but deepened.
cstreet
