I grew up playing card games, specifically Spades. As the oldest grandchild and the first kid of my generation, I often had the good fortune—thanks to my parents hosting these games—of subbing in for uncles and aunts taking smoke breaks during the ’80s. I cherished these opportunities to sit at the “big kid” table. Like many kids (read: Aries), I felt like a miniature adult at 6 or 7 years old, eschewing the things normal kids liked (note: I was wrong).

Monopoly takes too long to play nowadays, but it was always an opportunity to riff on the rules. Uno’s social media managers ignited a firestorm years ago when they tweeted that people playing with house rules on stacking Draw cards were incorrect. From a game development perspective, you can understand this, but it doesn’t seem nearly as fun when you manage to dig out of a hole like that and win anyway.

Society is full of house rules, too. On some level, being able to craft exceptions to the rules is how we’re able to live amongst each other. Letting someone go ahead of you in line when they have one item and you have a full cart, the parking meter attendant who turns a blind eye as you reach your car just as they’re preparing a ticket, or the time when my car was about to be towed during a rare street sweeping in Portland and I managed to save it because the tow truck driver told me, “It’s your car, I’ll drop it, just get in and drive away.” He knew that if his bosses showed up a few minutes later, there’d be no chance I’d be afforded such grace (and avoid the annoyance of retrieving my car from the impound).

Tech tools’ insistence on grabbing our attention violates a series of house rules, disrupting our everyday lives. There was once a relatively uninterrupted understanding among neighbors, which is now harder to map due to pervasive outside noise. As I contemplate my own complicity by not abandoning my dormant Twitter account, the only thing that stops me from posting more often is that almost nobody replies anymore. It used to be a useful tool for connection, but these days, it’s a substitute for connection in the grimmest ways. When people aren’t being heard, it’s a place to shout into a void, hoping for a ping back.

For a while, the disruption of social media enabled companies that had offshored their customer service to use social media to respond to their most dogged complainers because the negative press wasn’t worth going viral over. They’ve done a better job of staffing these remote agents than they ever did over the phone, though Instagram and other channels have replaced Twitter since its demise.

What responsibility do far-flung businesses have to the communities where they operate? It used to be that local businesses in the US would sponsor little league teams, donate money to schools, or find other ways to contribute visibly. These days, a sliver of this still exists, but it’s largely in the form of companies badgering their customers to donate money on behalf of the company to large charities instead of to local concerns. Youth sports have been completely turned into massive for-profit businesses; the days of quaint little leagues are long gone.

If you’re terminally online, you’ll see conversations between people who prefer cities and biking to suburbanites and rural folks who insist that parking and cars are the most important facets of any community development. I don’t know if regular people are having these discussions, but I do wonder what the future holds for generations coming up behind the people in the workforce right now. Boomers, Gen X, and Millennials have at least some distant memories of living in a society where trust and knowing your neighbors were important. Rural areas and small towns still have some of this, a bit out of necessity.

What happens when things that used to seem normal become distant? Nextdoor has replaced the neighbor check-in, and many apps now exist where you can monetize every aspect of your existence, including renting out your pool, a room in your house, or even your vehicle. Every time I see a delivery driver in an unmarked car dropping off goods to someones house, but in the middle of the street because there’s nowhere to park, I wonder about how we’re supposed to content with what’s legitimately called disruption? Policy cannot keep up with these new house rules, and none of the laws on the books were written to imagine the world we’re now contending with.

As we contend with this disruptive landscape, it’s important for us to solve the problems we can when possible. People love a good story and long-range plans deliver that, but we need to reimagine strategic models that work to patch disruption as quickly as it’s wrought onto society. We’re not going to solve these problems in one fell swoop, but rather, through lots of attempts across different communities trying different tactics and sharing them. Civic life is being upended and, unlike house rules designed to make a game more fun or competitive, we’re all rapidly becoming losers in an unwinnable game being layered onto our lives.