Open Letter To New_Public and Eli Pariser
Hello, people!
I am an alter kacker (Yiddish, translates roughly to “old fart”, only less sanitary) who is very likely a crackpot (my wife, on occasion, leans to this characterization).
I just listened to Eli Pariser on On The Media (not sure how I missed it the first time it aired) and felt that there was significant overlap between what he said and what I just got finished saying here: https://asorrybowl.blog/seizethemeansofcommunity ... that I wended my way to your website (via Civic Signals... you changed your name, you sneaky devils!) and eagerly clicked on your Community link, hoping to find some sort of forum where I might encounter other interested citizens looking to conduct a conversation on how to form robust, diverse, egalitarian civic spaces online...but all I got was an invitation to sign up for a newsletter (which I did, BTW).
Don't get me wrong: I think newsletters are (or, at least, can be) great. It's just that, as far as “community” goes they're a little...one-sided (I believe the Talmud says they are “asymmetric” [^1])
[^1]: No it doesn't. That was a joke.
So I guess I'm asking: Do you know where I can go to actually commune with people concerned about these matters? Because, as edifying as it is to listen to people tell me about how I ought to engage in community, and about the sort of community it would be good to engage in, there comes a time when a fella just wants to get on with the business of building the kind of community that will see us into the future. (Ask Astra Taylor: Isn't that what David Graeber would have advised?)
So: If not at your site, do you folks have any suggestions where I could start trying to do this?
P.S. I ended up spending enough time composing this missive that I went ahead and made it an open letter, posted on my blog.
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