Well, I suppose I should admit to myself that this newsletter may never return to a regular publishing schedule, a fact that saddens me. Instead, it's a place where I come to tell you about important things.
The last time was at the very outset of the pandemic. I had hoped to provide updates through the newsletter. Instead, the
COVID Tracking Project happened. Oddly, that
newsletter edition laid out the terrain that CTP would research for the subsequent 16 months. So I fulfilled my promise in a roundabout way.
This time, I write to you with more personal news. I've taken a job at San Francisco's big NPR station, KQED, as the co-host of
a long-running show called Forum. I'll be on the air every morning at 9am, which frankly, is terrifying and exciting. I hope, of course, that you tune in sometimes, like/rate/subscribe to the podcast, etc. I think it will be worth your time (at least on 1.5x speed).
But since you've been with me for years, I want to tell you about a few other reasons why I took this job aside from the thrill of live radio. One, I get to read again. On Tuesday, I've got Kim Stanley Robinson and Annalee Newitz together on the show. This means that it is my actual job to read their books. Like, that's quite a deal. Two, I get to scan for news broadly again. That's what I always loved about 5it. I could build obsessions with the newsletter and y'all would help deepen and inform a nascent fascination. I hope that happens again with the show and occasional newsletters.
But here's the big reason that I wanted to do this job. Forum, at its heart, is a community-building show that's about the Bay and California people hearing each other. This is an actual collective experience, not an individual, customized experience that social media companies have made look like a collective experience. For now, Forum fulfills that mission primarily over the airwaves with callers and commenters. However, it does not have to be that way!
This is all embryonic, but ... Forum's digital presence should and could be *a generative community*. Maybe it starts as a Slack. Perhaps we build our own open source tools for making local internet. Let your imagination run wild and it isn't too crazy to imagine that we could be the first node in a National Public Internet, which eventually scales city-by-city with tools and community practices that get built out of the Bay and made available to all NPR affiliates.
I know this sounds a little wild, too ambitious, and likely to fail. Maybe! But the very story of public radio is about how a generation of people looked out at the commercial media of their time and said: THIS SUCKS, WE CAN BUILD SOMETHING BETTER. And this happened within living memory. Now, look at the local internet offerings out there now. Things were better in 2005 (or even in the BBS days!) than they are now. Local internet can't scale like a balloon, the way tech investors like it, so people always give up on it. This is nuts. We should have tools like
Detour,
Findery, and an amazing curated community calendar—but ones that are managed for the good of the community, not to juice tech company growth. There's so much we can do. (Just check out how Ethan Zuckerman is thinking about
Digital Public Infrastructure to see how far this line of thought goes.)
For the people on this list specifically, I would obviously need help from a lot of you to make this vision into some kind of reality. Some of you could fund it. Some of you could build it. Some of you would be inside the community. Some of you could teach me how we should really try to do this. If you're interested, get in touch.
If not, I get that, too. In that case, gently close the email, resolve to sometime check out the show, and enjoy the rest of your Sunday. Or, for old time's sake, click one of these mysterious links.
*
The Pirates of Richardson Bay *
Where Your Prius's Stolen Catalytic Converter Goes *
The Case for Open Borders *
The Hyphen, an object lesson *
The News at the End of the Earth 
