Community

Not long ago, I had the audacity to make a joke in a group chat. The consequences were terrible. Luckily, I managed to resolve the misunderstanding with the person involved and put an end to this human-rights-violating terrorist act of miscommunication.

The conflict was resolved, but the mandatory sermon about good behaviour and community guidelines followed anyway, delivered by someone whose relationship with performative activism seemed more relevant than any actual administrative role in the group chat.

I recognise this type of activism because I used to practise it myself. For a long time, I confused political correctness with political understanding. Eventually, I realised that trying to say the right things had often turned me into a people-pleaser rather than a more politically aware person. Leaving that era behind does not mean escaping the consequences of my words. But when I was reminded that words matter and that perhaps I should only contribute something uplifting, one word stayed with me: community.

I take this word seriously. I was born and raised in Bolivia, and my parents grew up in extreme poverty in small villages. My father spent his childhood in Macha, Potosí, a place associated with one of Bolivia’s most striking Indigenous traditions: the Tinku.

In Quechua, tinku means “encounter”. In Macha, the celebration brings communities together around the agricultural cycle, music, dance, exchange and ritual combat. It is not simply a gathering devoted to harmony. Celebration and conflict can coexist within the same social and cultural event.

I am not suggesting that this tradition can be reduced to violence, or that it represents every Bolivian community. I am saying that it challenges the idea that togetherness must always look peaceful, pleasant or uplifting.

As a Bolivian woman with Indigenous heritage, I have spent much of my life negotiating the relationship between dance, conflict and the body. Where my father comes from, physical confrontation is part of a specific cultural practice; in my own embodied experience, I have often struggled to separate movement from the possibility of conflict. It might sound strange to associate dancing not only with joy, but also with struggle. Yet this contradiction is part of my experience, and it makes the word community more complicated for me than a set of guidelines about good behaviour.

Perhaps this is where words become treacherous: we inherit their meanings, attach our own experiences to them, and then mistake those meanings for universal truths. I have often encountered community in European and online contexts as an almost exclusively positive concept. Conflict, disagreement and discomfort seem to threaten the ideal, rather than being understood as possible parts of collective life.

Now imagine a former ballerina who develops a fitness business based on exercises designed to help women build bodies like hers. She calls her audience a community, shares knowledge, cultivates engagement and encourages long-term subscriptions. It all sounds empowering.

To me, it also sounds like marketing. She knows how to build customer loyalty, and good for her. I have nothing against a CEO girlie. Get those euros into your bank account! But let us not confuse a successful business strategy with a particular form of collective life. Selling the promise of belonging is not the same as building the relationships that make belonging meaningful.

This distinction extends far beyond fitness. Publishing, dance, film and activism can all use the language of community to attract attention, cultivate loyalty or establish moral authority. Money is part of the picture, but it is not the only criterion: real communities need resources, and commercial relationships can still produce meaningful connections. The question is what the word community is doing in each case. Does it describe an actual network of relationships, shared responsibilities and collective goals? Or does it make a commercial or social arrangement appear more virtuous than it is?

Communities are complex forms of organisation. They involve different roles, leadership, negotiations, obligations and, sometimes, hierarchies. They require work. They can offer care and belonging while also producing conflict, exclusion and unequal power. None of these contradictions automatically makes them unreal.

Which brings me back to the group chat. What troubled me was not the existence of guidelines or the possibility that my joke had caused harm. It was the ease with which the word community seemed to authorise a moral sermon, as though sharing a digital space necessarily meant agreeing on one way of speaking, behaving and relating to one another.

Perhaps a group chat can become a community. But calling it one does not, by itself, make it so.

The word community can describe a lived relationship, claim moral authority or function as a marketing strategy. These uses are not interchangeable, even when they share the same vocabulary.

The word can become so rhetorically convenient that it conceals the nature of the relationship it is supposed to describe. And community is only one of many words whose reassuring meanings deserve a closer look. There are plenty more waiting to betray us.