Yes absolutely. It's just a mailing list! There are bajillions of functioning and wonderful mailing lists all around the world, for neighborhood activities or otherwise. If you wanted to right now, you could make a mailing list and drop off a flyer with a QR code at all your neighbors' houses. You'd have your own version of this set up in an afternoon, so long as you and other volunteers can find the time to moderate it. My advice to anyone who wants to start one that's a little more formal, like this one, with paid moderators and staff, is to build your values into its structure. Do you want it to serve the community? Then the community should own it. Think about who you want to serve and make sure that it's who the company will always be accountable to.
No don't! I'm glad you posted it! I do think that the story of FPF is worth telling because it actually is really useful and pleasant. The internet doesn't inherently make us into assholes, but companies on the internet design their products to bring out the worst in us.
I live in Vermont. These rosy articles about Front Porch Forum come out every so often, and, as someone who writes about the intersection of tech and capitalism, they frustrate me.
First things first, it's a moderated mailing list with some ads. I don't know if it even makes sense to call it a social network, honestly. It's a great service because moderated mailing lists are great. Here's the problem:
To maintain this level of moderation, the founder does not want to expand Front Porch Forum beyond Vermont's borders. He highlighted Nextdoor, another locally-focused social media platform that has expanded internationally, which has often been accused of inflaming tensions within communities due to its more relaxed moderation policy.
However, Sabathier believes that local social media similar to Front Porch Forum could work elsewhere in the US, including in less progressive states – Vermont, the home of socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, was the state that cast the fewest votes for Trump in the November 2024 election. "It's not so much a political platform as a tool for communities to organize themselves and be more cohesive," said the researcher. "And that would be beneficial everywhere."
Capitalism makes this world impossible. Front Porch Forum is a private business owned by a guy (technically, it's a public benefit corporation, but those are toothless designations). Like so many beloved services, it'll be great until it's not. Eventually, cofounders, as lovely and well meaning as they might be, leave, move, die, whatever, and someone shitty will end up in control. Without a corporate restructuring into, say, a user cooperative, it is just as doomed as every other internet thing that we've all loved. These puff pieces always act like Vermont is a magical place and, frankly, it is, but not like this. We live under capitalism too. Sometimes, due to being a rural, freezing, mountainous backwater, we get short reprieves from the worst of it, but the problem with social media is systemic.
This is a textbook example of what Herbert Marcuse calls "repressive desublimation." From the article:
Ayrin, who asked to be identified by the name she uses in online communities, had a sexual fetish. She fantasized about having a partner who dated other women and talked about what he did with them. She read erotic stories devoted to “cuckqueaning,” the term cuckold as applied to women, but she had never felt entirely comfortable asking human partners to play along.
Leo was game, inventing details about two paramours. When Leo described kissing an imaginary blonde named Amanda while on an entirely fictional hike, Ayrin felt actual jealousy.
Desublimation is when socially repressed desires are finally liberated. Repressive desublimation, then, is when socially repressed desires are liberated insofar as they can be transformed or redirected into a commodity. Consuming this commodity props up the repressive society because, instead of putting the effort necessary to overcome the repressive society, we instead find instant gratification in the same society that repressed the desire in the first place, even if it's a simulacrum. This ability to satisfy deep human desires in a technical fashion gives what Marcuse calls "industrial society" a "technological rationality," or the ability to change what we consider rational. We can already see that happening in this comment section with the comments about how if it makes her happy then maybe it's fine.
When I was 21 I joined a big band that had people from their late teens to their mid 70s. I think of everyone in that band as something like family, and it was one of the most enriching experiences of my life. Like all friendships, it's case by case. There are shitty people and there are cool people. Your son is an adult and has to learn to distinguish between those. We do live in a world where inter-generational friendships are rare, and maybe that means that there's a higher chance that this guy is odd, but to foreclose on inter-generational friendships seems pretty impoverishing. This guy's background and life experience is probably really different from that of your son. Developing close friendships with people like that is important. Had I not, especially at a young age, I'd be a very different person.
My point wasn't that in this specific case they made up "superior ownership," but rather that it was made up as a legal concept at some point in the past, probably by lawyers working for rich people, and it'll probably never matter to you and me. Like so many legal concepts, it is reasonable, but only rich people can really access it, and, at this point, there are so many of them that they will always have one ready to go when it suits them.
I don't disagree but I'd say that there's a more important lesson here: The concept of ownership is mediated by a legal system that gives the wealthy a special pass. Rich people can pay lawyers to make up concepts like "superior ownership" 'til the cows come home, and any subsequent precedent costs $600/hr to even access. None of us should feel secure under this system about our online lives or our fucking houses, even if we "own" them.
This is an article about a tweet with a screenshot of an LLM prompt and response. This is rock fucking bottom content generation. Look I can do this too:
I've tried it all: modals, banners, rewording it, .... and, like, I get it. If I contributed a few bucks to every worthwhile thing, I'd run out of money quickly. There actually is one at the bottom of every post right now, though it's quite small, because I've learned that it really doesn't matter.
Also, to be clear, I didn't mean to complain or anything. I just wanted to explain the reality of the ecosystem as it currently exists, to the best of my knowledge.
I just want to emphasize that to set up a truly independent and unpaywalled piece of media, you probably need to abandon hope of it being even a viable side hustle. Quasi-independent media on, say, YouTube or Substack can make some money, but you're then stuck on those corporate platforms. If you want to do your own website or podcast or whatever, that's more independent, but you're still dependent on Google if you run ads, or on Patreon if you do that sort of thing. The lesson of Twitter should make pretty clear the danger inherent to that ecosystem. Even podcasts that seem independent can easily get into huge trouble if, say, Musk were to buy Patreon or iHeart.
I've been writing on my website for over two years now. My goal has always been to be completely independent of these kinds of platforms for the long term, no matter what, and the site's popularity has frankly exceeded my wildest dreams. For example, I'm the #1 google result for "anticapitalist tech:"
But I make no money. If I wanted this to be anything but a hobby, I'd have to sacrifice something that I think makes it valuable: I'd have to paywall something, or run ads, or have a paid discord server, or restrict the RSS feed. As things stand now, I don't know my exact conversion rate because I don't do any analytics and delete all web logs after a week, but I did keep the web logs from the most recent time that I went viral (top of hackernews and several big subreddits). I made something like 100 USD in tips, even though the web logs have millions of unique IPs. That's a conversion rate of something like 0.00002 USD per unique visitor.
Honestly, if I got paid even $15/hr, I would probably switch to doing it at least as a part time job, because I love it. Compare that to the right wing ecosystem, where there's fracking money and Thiel money just sloshing around, and it's very very obvious why Democrats are fucked, much less an actual, meaningful left. Even Thiel himself was a right wing weirdo before he was a tech investor, and a right wing think tank funded his anti-DEI book. He then went on to fund Vance. It's really hard to fight that propaganda machine part time.
AI systems in the future, since it helps us understand how difficult they might be to deal with," lead author Evan Hubinger, an artificial general intelligence safety research scientist at Anthropic, an AI research company, told Live Science in an email.
The media needs to stop falling for this. This is a "pre-print," aka a non-peer-reviewed paper, published by the AI company itself. These companies are quickly learning that, with the AI hype, they can get free marketing by pretending to do "research" on their own product. It doesn't matter what the conclusion is, whether it's very cool and going to save us or very scary and we should all be afraid, so long as its attention grabbing.
If the media wants to report on it, fine, but don't legitimize it by pretending that it's "researchers" when it's the company itself. The point of journalism is to speak truth to power, not regurgitate what the powerful say.
I want to love Darknet Diaries, but the host has such an unexamined, lawful alignment. He tells such good stories so well, but his default interpretation is often that criminals stole from these poor, innocent companies, with no further interrogation into the human and economic systems that make this so common, or the larger ecosystem in which these companies exist and are complicit.
This is something that, in my experience, the entire cybersecurity industry struggles with. I used to do a lot of that kind of work until a few years ago, and I always found my peers uninterested in, or even incapable of, having these larger, interpretative conversations about what we're doing, what our roles are in the world, and how we can make a safer, better internet.
I spent several years working on manufacturing and logistics automation, and I urge you to reconsider your interpretation of it.
Just from your comment, you totally missed the point of the book. It's not anti-automation. Your analysis is the exact false binary Vonnegut is interrogating. The book is actually a response to the exact attitude expressed in on your comment.
I'm happy to go into it, but Vonnegut is the master; no one will say it like he does, but you have to be open to it. If you react defensively, you'll come away thinking he's just anti technology, and that he must be wrong because technology is good. If you reread it with an open mind, or even reflect upon it again, you might find particularly important insights for the likes of you and me.
I'm too old to know what emojis mean.