Silicon Valley treats communities like interchangeable products, assuming that when one dies, another can simply be manufactured. This assumption—that shared context and history can be captured in metrics and deployed at scale—is fundamentally wrong. Robert Moses displaced 250,000 people believing they could rebuild equivalent communities elsewhere, but Jane Jacobs proved this catastrophically wrong.

Community isn't a collection of individuals but a living organism with its own immune system. The value lies in the unreproducible web of relationships between people, not the people themselves. When platforms migrate users or cities demolish neighborhoods, they promise communities will survive the move. These promises are always broken because you cannot mandate the ten thousand microtransactions of reciprocity that create genuine connection.

Online platforms have run this experiment repeatedly with consistent results. When LiveJournal died, its community scattered across Dreamwidth and Twitter, never to be reassembled. The specific conditions that created it—a particular moment in internet history—no longer exist. Whether it's Vine to TikTok or Twitter to Mastodon, the pattern is clear: the community was the product, and the platform was merely the container. When the container breaks, some of the product is lost forever.