Announcements
Announcements
Subscriber chat, and next month's roundtable with Pedestrian Space
Readers who’ve downloaded the Substack app might have noticed the new chat feature. Since I don’t have any other social media accounts (I almost went back on Twitter last summer but now am kind of glad I couldn’t bring myself to follow through), I’m curious if the chat option for On the Commons can help us all connect in more casual ways. I enabled it this week and started with—of course—asking what people are reading (I finally started Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy).
I have a feeling I might be using the chat to talk more about walking and walkability, as well as private property, the commons, and trespassing. A lot of the photos I take but don’t get around to using on the newsletter are related to walking infrastructure and car-centric culture. It’s something I could write a lot more about, but since I wrote a whole book about it—which, you know, I think is actually pretty good if you feel like reading something on that subject!—it feels like I’m repeating myself a lot of the time. And without social media, there’s not really a way to share short observations of things like missing crosswalks or sidewalks closed for construction (there is always a sidewalk closed for construction).
Anyway, it’s there if you want to join! You’ll need to download the Substack app (messages are sent via the app, not email). From what Substack has said, this feature is in beta, so you might not see it yet on all the newsletters you subscribe to. Annoyingly, it looks like the chat function is only for iOS (Apple devices). I think all of you who’ve commented that Apple-centric apps are like a walled garden are probably right.
Here’s Substack’s explanation of how to get started:
How to get started
Download the app by clicking this link or the button below. Chat is only on iOS for now, but chat is coming to the Android app soon.
Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for the chat inside.
That’s it! If you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.
And . . .
On December 9th, I’ll be joining Pedestrian Space for a roundtable conversation about walking and walkability. To join, you can tell me and I’ll send your email to the organizer, Annika Lundkvist.
These roundtables are very small and probably tend toward the more policy-wonky or granular end of advocacy. But I wanted to mention it because Pedestrian Space is well worth following even if you’re not interested in the roundtable. It’s a very cool organization headquartered in Warsaw, Poland, that advocates for pedestrians worldwide—especially through its Global Walkability Correspondents Network—and is supported by the Schumacher Institute. If you’re despairing of the world, connecting with walkability advocates is a great way to give yourself some hope.
That’s all! I’m hoping to give some book progress updates soon. I’ve been waiting on an interview that I think is necessary for one of the stories in there, and for a visit to the ranch that my mother grew up on, which might take a few months to organize.
(four days later) This revamping everything electronic definitely slows me down. Yeah, so I pilled the trigger and got an iPad (I am undecided on the merits of ios v. Android) which let me use the chat - don't think they've got the implementation quite right yet but it works. Feel free to use it or not, I'm game either way.
elm
i'm not sure making comments in the app is that great
Speaking of social media platforms, with the imminent collapse of Twitter many great writers and researchers are frantically importing some of their more substantive threads from over the years to another platform (or even creating impromptu Substacks to preserve them) before the whole thing goes down. Whatever you think of social media, Twitter in particular was a really wonderful resource for all kinds of discussions and insights that never made it into published papers or official stuff anywhere else. The toxicity and other problematic dynamics will obviously not be missed (but eventually be reproduced elsewhere); in the meantime it's sort of a minor tragedy to lose all those great threads, dialogues, anecdotes from hundreds of thousands of people. It's like having an enormous library suddenly burn down and losing everything inside, except it's a library for short-form posts. I'm not aware of anything like this having happened before in history, digitally speaking. There are other social costs as well: lots of key advocacy and real-time crisis response took place there and no other platform is currently equipped to do this nearly as efficiently.
Not that it's healthy to have a hoarding attitude toward information or verbal material, of course, but I think there's an instinctive need many of us have to hold onto records of our meaningful conversations, ideas and philosophical reflections, spontaneous observations; in short, one key dimension of our shared memories and knowledge. It made me think more about this less material aspect of ownership: archival memory (both shared and individual), recorded knowledge, the trivial infrastructure of our social communications. Along with the museums, memorials and historical archives. The latter are more like the commons, but the former is at the mercy of the whims of one narcissistic billionaire.
Anyway, I came across an updated fleshed-out version of that Twitter thread on land ownership I shared recently (now in a blog), so thought I would post it here:
https://helensreflectionsblog.wordpress.com/2022/11/18/property-ownership-and-the-twitter-conundrum/