David Bates

Mar 16

Liked by Ashley Zhang

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.