I don't want to only feel safe when our side is in charge.

Online, in the left-liberal circles I frequent, there's a lot of talk lately about giving up entirely on winning over conservative voters, because it's too hard to get through all the misinformation from right-wing media, and because a lot of conservatives on the internet are rude, antagonistic, and difficult to have good-faith conversations with. Those are valid critiques—at least in my experience reading and talking about politics on the web—and I can't blame any Democratic voter who doesn't want to engage with Trump supporters. That is not the correct work for them.

But I think we can't give up on solving the country's political polarization problem. I don't want to live in an America where any of us only feel safe when our side is in charge.

I'm not both-sides-ing this—I think it's silly for conservatives to feel unsafe under a Democratic president, and reasonable for a lot of traditionally left-leaning demographics to feel unsafe under Donald Trump. I just don't think the problem is solved by simply saying "That's silly and this is reasonable" or by ignoring it. It will take more than that. We have a real trust problem in this country.

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"I have never contested the basic hilarity of the sketch," says Buck Dharma, frontman for Blue Öyster Cult, in an interview about "More Cowbell." The band had been around for three decades when the SNL sketch aired in April 2000, making them more famous than their (successful!) career in rock music ever had. The singer says the band is pretty grateful, pretty zen about it: "Sometimes you just get carried along by the culture. You don't really control it. We're all riding the worm like in Dune. The worm knows where it's going."

If you have enjoyed using Twitter, or used to enjoy it, or always wanted to try it, there is a new and better version of Twitter called Bluesky. Faine Greenwood wrote a post explaining what makes Bluesky different from Twitter and better.

The main thing worth understanding is that Bluesky does not run on technology owned by a company, like Twitter and Facebook and the other big social networks. Bluesky is built on what it calls the Authenticated Transfer Protocol, or ATProto, an open standard it designed for social networking. The open standard part is the key: It means other companies can also develop social platforms and apps using ATProto—and that those platforms and apps will be able to understand each other, because they're all based on the same underlying program. It also means that Bluesky users own their data, and could build another ATProto platform and move their accounts over there. It's a very smart, ethical, systematically thought-out approach to internet technology that empowers users rather than Silicon Valley billionaires. It is designed to be uncontrollable, as someone put it the other day, which is what you want in a tool for speaking your mind on the internet.

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Oh, one of you who filled out the survey (thank you to those who have, but also to those who have not, because there is nothing wrong with that) asked if I could make the links in the newsletter open in new tabs. Doing that is harder than it should be, but it's on the to-do list.

The Fun Part

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Hit me up at joshwimmer@gmail.com with questions, suggestions, thoughts and feelings, tips, and politely worded corrections and criticism. If you think someone would be interested in this newsletter, forward it to them.