The Wellington City Council’s Facebook page recently featured a post on the flowers its gardeners had planted on Lambton Quay. More than one comment bemoaned the council “wasting money” on wild poppies when it should be fixing water pipes. It reminded me of a quote often attributed to Emma Goldman:
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.
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.
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.