I want to echo and extend solderpunk's "Hey you! Host something!" post [1] by tying it to a recent post on SDF's bboard. Someone (not me) anonymously posted on bboard about the increased incidence of depression in society. More and more people are diagnosed with depression, with the average age of onset trending toward younger and younger individuals. The post referenced a 2016 article blaming this trend on Western consumer culture [2]. I read this article and found it to strongly support some of the reasons I am so excited about public access shell communities (called "pubnixes" in this post). The article argued that the reported increases in depression are not actually depression at all. Rather, they are forms of "culturally generated demoralization", something caused by the anti-pattern [3] of using consumerism as a path to meaning, purpose or self-fulfillment in life. This anti-pattern leads to what Noam Chomsky calls a "philosophy of futility", in which "people feel naked of power and significance beyond their conditioned role as consumers." But if there is demoralization among pubnix users, I don't think this quite explains it. Instead, people see the enormous problems facing future society-- global warming, polluted oceans, extreme inequality in economic opportunities, deforestation, jingoism and geopolitical militancy, etc --and they see an absence of coordinated action to solve them. These problems need a massive type of collective action that won't happen while mainstream social and communication media have a profit model based on enraging and dividing people. The demoralization I see on pubnixes is a consumer culture outsider's recognition that consumer culture has a lot of momentum and is on a collision course with societal collapse. Consumer culture is the problem, underpinned by short-sighted, uncontrolled government and cultural manipulation by for-profit corporations. And as long as corporations continue to dominate social and communications media, things aren't going to get any better. But Google keeps getting bigger. Facebook may have a black eye right now, but it still counts its users in the billions. Fox News and CNN warp the views of millions of U.S. voters. It is easy to be pessimistic. It is easy to feel powerless and disconnected from a society trapped in the gyre. Everyone wants to do something meaningful that supports what they think is right, but it feels like the proverbial rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. If you're a digital refugee from consumer culture, what can you do? It is a huge uphill battle, but why not start at the root: help re-build the non-commercial internet. Allow it to be used for good rather than pointless consumerism and propaganda. Help establish and protect user controlled tools for social and communication media. Put your efforts behind something you can believe in. It feels good when you're supporting a positive cause. So to echo solderpunk: hey you, host something! [1] But I want to extend this call to arms by making it even more broadly inclusive. If you don't want to or don't have the knowledge to host something, you can still support this cause by simple participation. Join a pubnix community. Be a constructive member. Test out software others are developing and give them user feedback. Educate yourself on issues that matter to you and be an interesting contributor to chats or to the phlogosphere. Help make it a true, supportive community. If you're not sure how to get started or what you can do, feel free to contact me. I make it a hobby to connect people with others in these communities. You can email me at username@sdf.org (where my username is 'cmccabe'). [1] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/hey-you-host-something.txt [2] https://newint.org/columns/essays/2016/04/01/psycho-spiritual-crisis [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern