The Missing Middle: Why America's Communities Are Disappearing—And How AI Might Save Them
The Missing Middle: Why America's Communities Are Fading—And How AI Could Help Bring Them Back
A quiet observation from a mathematician highlights a deeper crisis in American life. The fix might involve artificial intelligence—but only if we choose wisely.
The story starts not in a lecture hall but in an inbox. Terence Tao, the UCLA mathematician and Fields Medal winner, posted online about collaborative math projects. Within a single day, his inbox overflowed with responses. Retired professors, hobbyist researchers, small groups of citizen scientists—all eager to contribute. None of these groups had more than a few dozen members, yet each was tackling problems that mattered deeply to them.
It was more than a flood of emails. Tao had stumbled onto something rare in today’s America: vibrant, small communities, the kind that sit between lone individuals and giant institutions.
As Tao thought about it, the pattern became hard to ignore. He framed society as a system operating on four scales: individuals, small groups, large organizations, and vast networks like the global economy. His conclusion was unsettling. Technology and markets had tilted the playing field. Individuals gained a bit of power, corporations and governments gained a lot, but small groups—the backbone of civic life—were left gasping for air.
The Hollow Middle
You don’t need to dig deep into statistics to see the decline, though the numbers are damning. Bowling leagues have shrunk by more than 60 percent since 1970. Parent-teacher associations lost half their members. Union participation tumbled from 27 percent of workers to barely 10 percent. Church congregations, civic clubs, professional associations—the trend is the same almost everywhere.
What grew instead? Platforms and powerhouses. A few tech companies now control how most of us communicate. Mega-corporations dominate entire industries. Political movements rally around celebrity figures, not neighborhood chapters. Economists call this a “superstar market”: a winner-take-all world where tiny advantages balloon into crushing dominance.
For ordinary people, the trade-off is cruel. Join a small group, and you’ll find connection and influence but little economic clout. Work with a massive organization, and you’ll get resources and reach but almost no say in the direction it takes. Unless you’re wealthy or unusually famous, Tao warns, your voice barely registers.
That imbalance fuels today’s epidemic of disconnection. Loneliness, distrust, and cynicism spread when people feel invisible to the very systems steering their lives.
Why It’s Harder Than Ever to Organize
This hollowing out of America’s “middle layer” didn’t just happen. A host of forces made it nearly impossible for small organizations to thrive.
Real estate prices drove up the cost of meeting spaces. Regulations grew so complex that volunteers struggled to comply. Liability laws turned informal gatherings into legal risks. With both parents working, families had less time for civic life. And then came social media, offering cheap but shallow substitutes for in-person connection.
The digital economy made things even tougher. Network effects reward scale. Big data gets more valuable the more it accumulates. Compliance, payment processing, content moderation—all carry fixed costs that only large organizations can absorb. As one analysis of Tao’s thesis puts it, “small groups create the value, but large intermediaries capture the profit.”
Could AI Be the Lifeline?
Enter artificial intelligence. Done right, it could hand small groups the tools to punch far above their weight. Done wrong, it could entrench the very monopolies that suffocate them.
The hopeful scenario isn’t hard to imagine. Picture a neighborhood group with an AI handling bookkeeping, grant applications, and even scheduling. Or a community garden co-op that uses AI to manage supplies, translate messages into multiple languages, and recruit new members smoothly. Think about a mutual aid network where an AI matches people who need help with neighbors ready to provide it.
The technology already exists. What’s missing is the infrastructure to make it affordable and accessible to ordinary communities instead of only corporations and governments.
The darker vision is equally real. If AI tools stay expensive and centralized, only large organizations will benefit. If small groups depend on closed, proprietary platforms, they risk repeating the same pattern of capture and decline. And if algorithms optimize for engagement rather than real connection, we may end up with what one researcher calls “synthetic community”—fast food for the soul.
Decisions That Will Shape the Future
The difference between those two futures depends on choices being made right now.
Access and cost matter most. Will small groups be able to use powerful AI cheaply on their own infrastructure, or will everything funnel through costly corporate systems? Interoperability is another big one. If AI platforms can talk to one another, small groups could coordinate across networks without losing their independence.
Data control is on the line too. Communities should be able to train AI on their own information without handing it all to giant firms. Legal frameworks will also matter—if compliance rules are too burdensome, only big organizations will survive. Finally, there’s the question of governance. Will AI empower broad participation, or concentrate decision-making in the hands of a few tech-savvy leaders?
Policy at a Crossroads
Some governments and cities are already experimenting. Barcelona has launched “technological sovereignty” projects to give local groups control of their digital tools. Several U.S. cities have built community-owned broadband networks. In Europe, new laws aim to prevent platform lock-in by requiring interoperability.
Still, small pilots won’t be enough. Policy thinkers have suggested a range of bigger moves: treat community digital infrastructure as a public utility, simplify legal compliance for small groups using AI, mandate data portability, and reform procurement rules so local organizations can actually compete for public contracts.
Most of all, governments need to start recognizing the importance of the middle layer itself. A healthy democracy requires vibrant institutions at every scale—not just individuals and mega-players.
Why It Matters
This isn’t an abstract debate. The consequences are already all around us. Polarization festers when people stop meeting across differences. Social isolation has grown into a public health crisis. Rates of anxiety and depression in young people are at record highs. Trust in institutions is collapsing.
Robert Putnam’s famous book Bowling Alone showed how groups like unions, churches, and neighborhood clubs once served as “schools of democracy.” They taught people how to cooperate, compromise, and share power. Their decline has left American politics tribal, brittle, and zero-sum.
That’s the real question hanging over AI. Will it widen these cracks or help repair them? Tao believes the window is still open, but not for long. The infrastructure decisions we make in the next few years will set the stage for decades.
He offers a hopeful model: small groups, working side by side on meaningful challenges, supported—not swallowed—by smart tools. That’s a future where technology amplifies human agency instead of replacing it.
And maybe that’s the most important reminder. The great breakthroughs in life, like the most elegant mathematical proofs, don’t usually come from lone geniuses or faceless bureaucracies. They spring from people, gathered in small groups, doing work they care about together.
The communities Tao found in his inbox haven’t solved any famous theorems yet. But they’ve shown us something more valuable: proof that the “missing middle” can still exist, if we choose to nurture it.