Pick a meetup
As a humble reminder, we’re out at a conference this week. We’ll be back the week of May 19.
Since we obviously aren’t buying anything anymore, we are now a bit post-gear here on text. Prior to this, about a third of text has been about things. Now we’re buying as few things as possible. The goal, then, is to live with them, all of it, to figure out what it is. I was chatting with my partner and we remarked that why did I buy that would make for a good podcast series. You bring an object on that you may or may not use, and you try to figure out why you bought it. In this space, if you don’t know why you bought it, you probably lost the plot.
We turn, then, to living, to meaning-making, to linking & building on the ground, to focusing on what’s in front of you, no matter what stage of life you happen to be in. Mortifyingly, an awful lot of that needs to happen using our eternal enemy: software.
And so you’ve gotta pick a tool, and a lot of tools wanna capitalize on the whole get-out-of-the-house thing. Also, because of the one-two of fascism & platform collapse, nobody cool is on social media anymore. There is Pie here, at least, in scattered places, but they’re unpaid software and have weird funders, so we can’t use them. Fortunately, the two biggest platforms for outward social engagement are still, mercifully, blessedly, Eventbrite & Meetup, which of course have their own problems but are very critically actual businesses and will hence be able to attract life in a way that is actual, that is negotiable.
There are multiple genres of hang. There’s the “I’m new to a city and want to make friends” hang. There’s the “I’m mad at institutional collapse and want to clean up my neighborhood” hang. There’s the “I’m really mad at institutional collapse and want to protest/destroy the system” hang. You make friends at all of these, of course, but you make different friends who value different things and spend their time in different ways. The spectrum seems to be vibes to fury, no wrong answers.
You can, of course, run one of these. Come up with an idea, put it on the internet. Promote it, god help us, on social media, once or twice. Text some friends. If you don’t have friends, go to a few meetups first and make some. The kind of people who befriend you at a meetup are likely to attend one you plan yourself.
I have run my own meetups through plain text, of course. I go to a different pastebin tool every time, ramble into a box, and then I text the URL to a few dozen people. This is both unscalable and effective, creating precisely the offering that I want to create for this moment: private, small, intimate, ours.
Do this, or build a media empire, do something in between, or attend someone else’s ish, but gosh, do something.