Send me a meme if you care

I meant to watch one TED Talk about online civility and somehow ended upscrolling through strangers arguing about banana peels. “You must be an idiot if you think worms are actually sustainable,” said @bigggmike420. Another replied with a passive-aggressive smiley face and a 3-paragraph quote from Nietzsche. And somewhere in between, a bot tried to sell me supplements for gut health. This is what we call community now.

Jim Rawson’s video talked about three types of relationships in our networks. Bonding, bridging, and linking.

Bonding- is the family group chat you regret entering every Thanksgiving.
Bridging- is that girl from your book club you only kind of know but who Venmo’d you money for the cookies you brought to the last wine night.
Linking- is when you finally get a DM reply from someone with more than 10k followers and you feel, briefly, like the universe has acknowledged your existence.

These relationships, Rawson suggests, are the scaffolding of trust. They build social capital, a phrase that sounds like it belongs in a 2007 PowerPoint presentation on leadership but actually describes something sacred. The invisible web that keeps society from fully collapsing into Reddit threads and conspiracies.

Trust, once built around keeping secrets told during a sleepover, is now a high-risk investment. Social capital used to mean knowing your neighbor well enough to borrow sugar. Now it’s more like, I sent you in a meme, so don’t get made at me when I don’t show up to your birthday dinner.

Still, the relationships that somehow slipped through group chats and broken iMessage threads, briefly made it into the real world, and just as quickly retreated back online, do create tiny pockets of trust. Little digital sanctuaries. That friend who always replies “I’m proud of you” even when all you did was survive the day. The coworker who sends memes of two coworkers laughing and write “Us”. They are the currency of social capital, traded in emojis and unsent messages. And in my world, this jaded, overqualified, underpaid, and constantly deconstructing culture for a living, social capital isn’t some academic abstraction. It’s the thread that holds together communities in the absence of real community. It’s the reason I still believe in group texts and late-night FaceTimes.

So what does this mean for our grand future, where connection is content and likes are loyalty? Maybe it means we stop pretending sarcasm is violence and admit that irony is just a coping mechanism. Maybe it means we start treating online spaces not as platforms for performance but as the digital equivalents of park benches and bus stops. Because in the end, trust isn’t built by being right. It’s built by showing up and staying even after the discourse has moved on.