What price can we put on healthy, vibrant, welcoming, and supportive communities? What are they worth? We can calculate the cost of a pool but what dollar value should we place on what flows from a well-used public facility or service? Should we have to quantify it? We can't calculate the financial cost of loneliness. There's no chart that illustrates the contribution to the national GDP of social connection and cohesion, but we understand how important they are.
There's as good group of Kiwis on Substack and a raft of good ideas worth clinging onto from like-minded people elsewhere. Conversations create space, public conversations create public space, and public space provides a place for communities to come together. We might live on islands but we are not islands.
Great to see someone posting local documentary photography. Would love to see a collection of progressive Aotearoa sub stacks combine to produce a leftwing alternative to the likes of The Platform.
That sounds like a workable idea. There seem to be many Substacks that are like mini newsrooms (Bernard Hickey's The Kaka comes to mind). But it must also be possible to create a federation of loosely linked progressive Aotearoa Substacks. It would be easy to share links and lists, for starters. By now, some Substacks must have found ways of using the existing tools to deviate from the direct author-to-reader communication strategy that Substack is designed to enable. I can imagine, for example, a Substack organised by a group of like-minded people who already have their own substack, who contribute to a collaborative Substack with many different authors and no single, dominating voice. People would need to donate their time and labour, but it wouldn't require a financial contribution. For those who are working hard to earn part of their income via Substack, it could also be another way to get their work in front of people who might not otherwise find it.
Impolite to mention it here, but Ghost might be a better platform for a collaboration. Individuals would continue publishing on their own sites but there could be a hub where people could feast on a smorgasbord of independent, fresh, Aotearoa Pacific content. (As you've probably noticed I'm might well be Substack's least productive writer. This is me thinking out loud about how that might change.) The paradox of the web is that it is both a great atomiser and a community builder. But creating communities beyond friend groups or shouty Twitter tribes is difficult.
Good post, Jeremy.
What price can we put on healthy, vibrant, welcoming, and supportive communities? What are they worth? We can calculate the cost of a pool but what dollar value should we place on what flows from a well-used public facility or service? Should we have to quantify it? We can't calculate the financial cost of loneliness. There's no chart that illustrates the contribution to the national GDP of social connection and cohesion, but we understand how important they are.
There's as good group of Kiwis on Substack and a raft of good ideas worth clinging onto from like-minded people elsewhere. Conversations create space, public conversations create public space, and public space provides a place for communities to come together. We might live on islands but we are not islands.
Great to see someone posting local documentary photography. Would love to see a collection of progressive Aotearoa sub stacks combine to produce a leftwing alternative to the likes of The Platform.
That sounds like a workable idea. There seem to be many Substacks that are like mini newsrooms (Bernard Hickey's The Kaka comes to mind). But it must also be possible to create a federation of loosely linked progressive Aotearoa Substacks. It would be easy to share links and lists, for starters. By now, some Substacks must have found ways of using the existing tools to deviate from the direct author-to-reader communication strategy that Substack is designed to enable. I can imagine, for example, a Substack organised by a group of like-minded people who already have their own substack, who contribute to a collaborative Substack with many different authors and no single, dominating voice. People would need to donate their time and labour, but it wouldn't require a financial contribution. For those who are working hard to earn part of their income via Substack, it could also be another way to get their work in front of people who might not otherwise find it.
Impolite to mention it here, but Ghost might be a better platform for a collaboration. Individuals would continue publishing on their own sites but there could be a hub where people could feast on a smorgasbord of independent, fresh, Aotearoa Pacific content. (As you've probably noticed I'm might well be Substack's least productive writer. This is me thinking out loud about how that might change.) The paradox of the web is that it is both a great atomiser and a community builder. But creating communities beyond friend groups or shouty Twitter tribes is difficult.