The Gathering That Never Gathers

There is an ancient Hebrew concept — qahal — that describes something most modern organizations have forgotten how to do. Qahal doesn’t merely mean “community.” It means the act of assembling with shared purpose, the physical and covenantal gathering of people who bear mutual obligation to one another. The Greek translation, ekklesia, carried the same weight: a called-out assembly, not a passive audience. This is the foundation Western civilization built its institutions on — and it is precisely what social media has hollowed out.

The counterintuitive truth that corporate leaders need to confront is this: the more connected your stakeholders are on social media, the less community they actually experience. And that erosion is costing your organization in ways that don’t show up on a balance sheet until the damage is irreversible.

The Anti-Community Machine

Social media platforms are engineered for engagement, not for gathering. This distinction matters enormously. Engagement is a metric that rewards provocation, novelty, and outrage. Gathering — qahal — requires patience, shared obligation, and the willingness to be present with people you did not choose.

The algorithmic architecture of every major platform optimizes for one thing: time on screen. The mechanism for achieving this is well-documented. Content that triggers emotional reactivity — fear, anger, moral indignation — generates more interaction than content that builds understanding. The platforms do not distinguish between a comment that builds trust and one that destroys it. Both count the same.

This creates what researchers at the MIT Media Lab have called “assortative fragmentation” — people self-sort into ideological clusters where they perform agreement rather than practice relationship. The result is a paradox: platforms designed to connect billions of people have produced the most isolated generation in recorded history. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s 2023 advisory on the epidemic of loneliness was not an overstatement. It was an understatement.

From a Hebraic perspective, what social media has destroyed is the concept of shalom — not merely “peace” as English flattens it, but wholeness, completeness, the proper ordering of relationships. Shalom requires covenant, and covenant requires showing up even when it is inconvenient. Algorithms cannot produce this. They can only simulate it.

The Corporate Fallout

For corporations, the consequences are concrete and measurable. The anti-community environment that social media fosters damages organizations along three vectors that most leadership teams underestimate.

First, internal culture erodes. Employees who spend significant time in algorithmically curated environments develop habits of mind that are hostile to collaboration: binary thinking, performative outrage, and the expectation of instant validation. These habits do not stay on the phone. They migrate into Slack channels, team meetings, and organizational politics. Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report found that employee engagement hit a 10-year low, with “lack of connection to organizational mission” cited as the primary driver. Social media did not cause all of this, but it trained people’s neural pathways to expect content, not relationship.

Second, customer loyalty becomes performative rather than substantive. Brands that rely on social media for community building discover — usually too late — that they have built audiences, not communities. An audience watches. A community participates. When a brand faces a crisis, an audience scatters. A community shows up. The companies that weathered public controversies in recent years were not the ones with the largest social followings. They were the ones that had invested in relational infrastructure outside the platforms.

Third, stakeholder trust degrades in an environment where every corporate communication competes with algorithmically amplified cynicism. A thoughtful corporate initiative gets flattened into a screenshot, stripped of context, and fed to an outrage cycle. The asymmetry is brutal: it takes months to build institutional credibility and seconds for a decontextualized post to undermine it.

Why the Obvious Solutions Fail

The instinct most corporations follow — “let’s build our community on social media but do it better” — misunderstands the problem at a structural level. You cannot build qahal on infrastructure designed to prevent it. The platform’s economic incentives are fundamentally misaligned with your organizational interests.

Posting more “authentic” content does not fix this. Running engagement campaigns does not fix this. Hiring a social media manager with better instincts does not fix this. These are optimizations within a broken paradigm. They are the equivalent of rearranging deck chairs on a ship that is not sinking — it was never going to your destination in the first place.

The counterintuitive move — the one that actually works — is to stop treating social media as a community tool and start treating it as what it is: a broadcast channel. Use it for awareness. Use it for distribution. But build your actual community somewhere the algorithm cannot reach.

Building Real Community Through Technology

This is where technology becomes a solution rather than the problem — but only if deployed with the right architectural philosophy. The Hebrew concept of tikkun (repair) applies here. The goal is not to reject technology but to redirect it toward its proper function: facilitating genuine human connection rather than simulating it.

The technology solutions that actually build community share three characteristics that social media platforms structurally cannot provide.

Owned infrastructure. Your community must live on technology you control. This means purpose-built platforms, custom applications, or configured enterprise solutions where the data, the rules of engagement, and the member experience belong to your organization — not to a third-party platform that will change its algorithm next quarter. Cloud-hosted solutions provide the scalability without surrendering sovereignty.

Covenantal design. Effective community technology must be built around mutual obligation, not passive consumption. This means features like structured onboarding, member directories with real context, contribution tracking, and governance tools that give community members genuine agency. The technology should make it harder to lurk and easier to participate — the opposite of what social media incentivizes.

Data-informed relationship management. The same AI and analytics capabilities that social platforms use to maximize engagement can be redirected toward strengthening actual relationships. Predictive models can identify members at risk of disengagement before they leave. Natural language processing can surface sentiment patterns that indicate community health. Business intelligence dashboards can give leadership real-time visibility into whether their community is deepening or just expanding.

The DeSoto Approach: Technology Counsel for Community Architecture

At DeSoto Consulting, we have spent over two decades building technology infrastructure for organizations that cannot afford to get this wrong — law firms where client trust is existential, accounting practices where confidentiality is non-negotiable, sovereign Tribal Nations where community is not a marketing concept but a governing reality.

What we have learned is that community technology is not a product category. It is an architectural discipline. The right solution depends on your stakeholder ecosystem, your organizational culture, your regulatory environment, and your long-term strategic posture. There is no off-the-shelf answer, and anyone selling you one is optimizing for their revenue, not your community.

Our approach integrates cybersecurity-first design — because a community platform without robust security is a liability, not an asset — with AI-driven analytics that measure relational depth rather than vanity metrics, cloud infrastructure that scales with your community’s growth without vendor lock-in, and data governance frameworks that protect member privacy while generating actionable insight.

We build community technology the same way we build everything: the old-fashioned way, with the best of today’s tools. That means starting with your actual relationships, understanding what your people need to gather with purpose, and then engineering the technology to serve that gathering — not the other way around.

The Path Forward

The organizations that will thrive in the next decade are not the ones with the largest social media followings. They are the ones that recognized early that followers are not community, engagement is not relationship, and virality is not trust.

The Hebrew scriptures record that when Nehemiah set out to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, he did not start with the construction. He started by walking the perimeter at night, alone, assessing the actual damage before proposing solutions. This is the posture every corporate leader needs to adopt toward their community strategy: stop performing digital activity and start assessing what has actually been lost.

Then build. Not on rented land. Not on someone else’s algorithm. Build on your own infrastructure, with your own data, serving your own people’s actual need to gather with purpose.

That is what technology is for. Not to replace community, but to restore it.