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I agree with you! We host many in-person events for this very reason, including my Art of Being Human event series. My primary intent for hosting the series is to gather people of different backgrounds, with good food and drink, to discuss the human questions that pertain to all of us; and then to use this Substack to share these ideas with people who are not in SF, but who might appreciate them and feel inclined to share their own thoughts.

We shouldn’t take digital spaces to be an adequate substitute for physical gatherings, but I do think the Internet can be a connective force to converse with people we might not otherwise encounter (like our conversation here!), to be exposed to perspectives outside of our immediate milieu, and to, ideally, ultimately meet in-person. I like to think of digital platforms as a means of correspondence (like the Republic of Letters) rather than a space to reside in, and shudder to think of the virtual “metaverse” that many tech moguls are pushing for.

I believe we share the same hope for technology: to enable us to spend more time with people we love, doing what is best in life — relishing in good conversation, cooking and eating together, being in the sun — not staring at screens. This aspiration is the core of the work we do: creating software and agents that can work reliably on our behalf, that can work without our constant supervision, so the technologies in our lives are tools that we can pick up and put down at our own will, to use toward our own ends, rather than devices we feel beholden to.

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David Bates

I really appreciate this response, thank-you. As I said, the good-faith and good intentions here are obvious and shared.

I was going to acknowledge the in-person events you do there but then realized it sort of goes into the problem deeper, and I didn’t want to get lost in the weeds. Full disclosure: There’s a generational aspect to my response (I’m Gen X) and I’ll confess that depression sometimes “talks over” what I’m trying to say (I’ve acknowledged mental health struggles in my ‘stack, so it ain’t a secret).

I’ve definitely taken advantage of the Internet’s connective force, through classes and webinars, online learning platforms (organic, ground-up) and reading ‘stacks where “my people” are, but those connections pale next to in-person events. I find Zoom conversations, particularly, to be an almost annihilatingly lonely experience.

It’s laudable that you’re doing in-person events there, but that’s 600 miles away. My two favorite stacks regularly do in-person events that I'd love to attend, but one is in Britain and the other is on the East Coast; they might as well be on the moon. Roughly a fifth of Americans live in metropolitan areas, the rest of us are out here in small towns and cities and in the country. A lecture or discussion group or author reading in SF or LA or New York means nothing to me … or rather, it means nothing to the vast majority of people. So we’re left with the online spaces to “reside in” if we want to be connected with kindred spirits and fellow travelers at all.

I don’t know the answer, and I suppose there’s an inevitable irony in the fact that if I did have the answer, all I could do, and would do, is share it online and hope it gets legs. But with a couple hundred subscribers, I doubt that it would.

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