Feels that if anything, the author is describing computational abstractions, not data structures per se. They mention the term in the text, but then continue to say "data structure" while talking about everything except data structures. For example:

"a local cafe is no longer a community hangout but a data structure containing a menu, a list of reservation options, and a hundred 5-star ratings"

This description is focusing on the "not data structure" parts like what is there, what it means, and what can be done with it; the data structure part would be, how it's arranged and what the impact of that is.

It's still clear what the author means, and they are using the relevant terminology, just the irony is in details being named opposite to what they should be.

It's a general-audience essay, not one targeted towards the HN community. So unfortunately there's little opportunity to delve any deeper into what specific data structures are involved in holding the data and the difference that might make. There are data structures underneath in the excerpt you pulled out and they're so common in code that we don't even notice it. (Even something as simple as this: certain data structures are better for finding recent / first items and others are better for finding "top" / largest items. That has implications that ripple upward and can skew what users are shown.) It would be nice to consider the differences in how different data structures store data and their broader implications.

Sorry, my comment was harsher than it needed to be. I've struggled with belonging where most people seem to fit in, but on the other hand I've benefited greatly, I think, from the processes that make me a taxable citizen rather than a member of a community.

What we're hoping for (and is the theme of the piece) is that we are and can and should be both and more -- taxable citizens, members of illegible communities, and many more things. It's a both-and perspective -- life is and should be composed of many overlapping systems.

That sounds like a database, how is that not a data structure? And to that data structure the cafe is just a bunch of values, which he listed. That is how you see things like a data structure would.

Definition of data structure: "More precisely, a data structure is a collection of data values, the relationships among them, and the functions or operations that can be applied to the data".

Maybe you would want more generic data structures, but it is used accurately here.