New civic institutions must be invented fresh, not copied from past models

Evidence

Our challenge now is to reinvent the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Boy Scouts or the settlement house or the playground or Hadassah or the United Mine Workers or the NAACP. What we create may well look nothing like the institutions Progressives invented a century ago, just as their inventions were not carbon copies of the earlier small-town folkways whose passing they mourned. We need to be as ready to experiment as the Progressives were. Willingness to err—and then correct our aim—is the price of success in social reform. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1446

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Closes the whole book’s argument with a genuine claim about how social reform succeeds; resists a pat summary.
• XREF: connects to: Sustained capitalist mutation requires new institutional forms, not merely destruction — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 156; Capitalism periodically renews itself through new organizational forms rather than fixed ones — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1647

Broader Connections

• Sustained capitalist mutation requires new institutional forms, not merely destruction #corroborates (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 156
• Capitalism periodically renews itself through new organizational forms rather than fixed ones #corroborates (0.75) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1647