Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
This weekend is your last chance to nominate your town for the seventh annual Strongest Town Contest! Nominations are due by February 20, 2022 at 11:00 p.m. CT.
This bracketed March Madness-inspired tournament puts your community in the spotlight for its careful accounting, its focus on resilience over efficiency, and its dedication to strength. We're not looking for a place that's already perfect. Instead, we want to showcase a place that's doing the hard work to 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 stronger—one that can set an example for the nation.
If that sounds like your community, then nominate it today for the chance to be recognized at the national level. You’ll also get a visit from Strong Towns President Charles Marohn to celebrate the victory and share the Strong Towns message. Click here for more information on the contest, or check out our Q&A video!
Comment of the Week:
This comment came from the article “The Real Reason We Keep Getting Distracted by Transit Boondoggles.” Check it out here to join in on the discussion!
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were up to this week:
Seairra: Are you a space nerd like me? This past weekend, arguably one of the coolest selfies has entered our lifetime and I have never been so stoked to see it. The James Webb Telescope was launched into space this past December and has just granted us with its first few glorious blurry images of stars and it has blessed us with a classic selfie. It’s a marvelous piece of technology that's been decades in the making and I find it so awesome one of its first images is a picture of itself.
If you haven’t heard of the James Webb Telescope here is a helpful little explanation from NASA of its purpose: “We have yet to observe the era of our universe’s history when galaxies began to form. We have a lot to learn about how galaxies got supermassive black holes in their centers, and we don't really know whether the black holes caused the galaxies to form or vice versa. We can't see inside dust clouds with high resolution, where stars and planets are being born nearby, but Webb will be able to do just that.”
(Source: Flickr.)
John: Last week, my wife texted me a link to a recent episode of The Daily, saying, “You should listen to this. You’ll like it.” For the first two-thirds of the episode, I confess to wondering how well my wife actually knew me. It was an interview with Peter McIndoe, the young man who started Birds Aren’t Real, a parody conspiracy movement that claims the winged creatures we think are birds are actually government drones spying on the American public. Birds Aren’t Real, said The Daily, is a movement to “fight misinformation with misinformation.” The group has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers online, and even spawned in-person rallies, including one outside Twitter headquarters where protesters called on the social media giant to change its logo (“pro-bird social programming”). Okay, so this was objectively interesting but—shrug—I just don’t care that much about Internet culture.
Then, toward the end, I understood why Kate really wanted me to listen. Conspiracies, says McIndoe, are symptoms of a greater sickness, a society that is void of meaning and community for many people. (Breakdown of society? Now that’s my jam!) Sadly, many people feel like the victims of their own life, and when they look around to see who has their thumb on the scale, they see the Deep State, or Satan-worshiping Hollywood elites, or whomever. Joining with others to expose those villains transforms them from victims to heroes. Creating his own comedic conspiracy has led McIndoe to feel empathy for those caught up in real ones. This isn’t just interesting to me, it’s wise.
Jay: Our friends at Not Just Bikes collaborated with a video producer who deadpans he is “sitting in a room alone talking to strangers and asking them to go to a zoning meeting.” He is Rollie Williams of New York City and his YouTube channel is Climate Town, a fun, smart, and irreverent take on all things in that sphere. The episode I’m sharing traces a progression of ideas questioning the car-centric Suburban Experiment as analyzed by the Strong Towns approach, then molded into a very successful video series by Not Just Bikes and, ultimately, distilled here in a hilarious and clever 20-minute video. Trigger alert: Narrator says the words “racist” and “climate change” and shares archival footage of Hulk Hogan. It seems demographically and culturally targeted to millennial fans of the Joe Rogan podcast. Whether that’s your bag or not, three-quarters of a million people—and counting—have watched a video called “The Suburbs Are Bleeding America Dry.”
(Source: Epsilon Theory.)
Chuck: A couple of weeks ago, I shared Part 1 of a three-part series from Epsilon Theory on narrative and the metaverse. That first part was mind-blowing and the follow up—”Gain of Function”—only builds on it. The idea that, as Ben suggests, “the takeover of the human brain by language is not like a parasitic invasion. It IS a parasitic invasion,” is radical enough until you recognize that the time we find ourselves in is a gain-of-function weaponizing of that parasite. I’ve frequently described this as a second Gutenberg moment, referring not to a historic event we often celebrate (the printing press) but one which was deeply destabilizing until humans figured out how to negotiate the way unleashed narratives messed with their relationships with each other. We have similar destabilizing forces, and similar challenges, in learning to communicate with each other in this new narrative landscape. I anxiously await Ben’s thoughts in Part 3, aptly named “The Luther Protocol.”
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Dennis Apgar, Christopher Babinec, Ingrid Fullerton, Brent Hastey, Jordan Hedberg, Marco Hemken, John Hursh, John Inzina, Liz and Charley Kanieski, Donovan Lacy, Alyssa Lee, John McBurney, Dosite Perkins, Jacob Pritchett, Jacob Shepherd, Vinayaka Thompson, Debbie Trice, Marc Voorhees, Kelsey Wolfe, and Samuel Yancy.
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments!