Making sure we're all connected

The empty square and the People's Assembly both presume something the rest of the country has been quietly losing: ordinary people staying connected to other ordinary people, in webs that aren't held together by family obligation or workplace requirement. The connections that wouldn't happen by default — the ones that need a small, steady act of attention to maintain — are also the ones that make the rest of this work.

The practice

Each person keeps a list of about ten people, not family and not coworkers, who they check in with somewhere between once and four times a year. A phone call, a letter, a shared meal, a brief message — whatever the relationship supports. There's no registry and no verification. The list stays private; Square Party doesn't ask for it and doesn't want it.

The number is approximate — small enough to be maintainable, large enough to be redundant. It fits comfortably inside Dunbar's commonly-cited estimate that humans can sustain stable social relationships with roughly 150 others, with smaller concentric layers of closeness within that. Ten is a tractable subset of the broader sustainable circle.

Why bother

Over a population, the practice provides a layer of human-level redundancy that digital infrastructure can't substitute for. Three things motivate the framing:

Identities are getting easier to fake. AI-generated voices, faces, and behavior patterns are advancing at a pace where the assumption that "real people leave a recognizable digital trace" is becoming less reliable. Cryptographic and biometric defenses help, but every defense has failure modes, and the failure modes compound when systems interact.

Social infrastructure has been eroding for decades. Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone (2000) documented the long-term decline in American civic and social participation across club membership, religious community, fraternal organizations, parent associations, and informal social ties. The trend has continued; suburbanization, remote work, and the substitution of social-media interaction for local presence have all reduced the connective tissue of communities.

Coordination problems require trust. Voting is the canonical case — a system that depends on most participants being who they say they are, and on most votes representing actual considered preferences. As more of the apparatus of citizenship moves through digital channels, the trust requirements rise. The same logic applies to many coordination problems Square Party will face: how do you know that contributions to a representation-mapping project come from real people with real perspectives, rather than coordinated manipulation?

The work Square Party is trying to do — the assembly, the contribution workflow, eventually voting itself — sits on this human layer whether we say so or not. So we're saying so.

A program to help

Some people find this kind of network easy to maintain. Others find it hard, and the difficulty isn't always personal. Suburbanization, remote work, and the substitution of social media for local presence have all pulled at the connective tissue communities used to depend on. We'd like to develop tools and a small program to help people find these connections when they don't form on their own — a practice guide, a way to find others who want this, a light prompt to keep the list. The right shape for any of that is something we want to build with people who care about getting it right.

A note on civil service

Mandatory civil service is one structured policy implementation of this framing. Civil service is a mechanism by which people build the kind of bridging connections that otherwise wouldn't exist: you serve alongside people you didn't choose, from regions and demographic categories you might never otherwise encounter, and the working relationship outlasts the service period. If both ideas are developed, civil service is plausibly the most concrete public-policy lever available to create the conditions in which a population-level network practice can take hold.

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