We’re going to need a bigger village

It might surprise some readers here, considering the proactive tone of many of my posts on OnlySky, but I spent the last two years living with deep, pragmatic skepticism about the long-term viability of this project. While I had hoped this day would never come, I wasn’t shocked when it did.

You won’t have seen that in the writing, of course, because I leaned in hard from the outset. We all did. From the beginning, OnlySky was staffed by people eager to try to make something new, and the writers here adjusted content and workflow over the last two years in response to every stated need, to give this site its best chance at sustainability. We had a clear mandate: to try to center secular perspectives and cultivate conversation about how to advance better policy and empower one another in an increasingly nonreligious world. But there was a great deal to learn in the process, and it was a volatile time to be learning as we went.

I worked with many excellent people here, but I also knew how difficult a period this was: for investment, for digital ventures, and for the world.

And boy howdy, did it just get a whole lot harder along the way.

READ: Downsized news media, AI futures, and democratic losses

Behind the scenes, I cheered on my fellow writers extensively. At one point in our private communications, I started writing weekly celebrations of pieces I’d enjoyed by authors here, so that others on the writing team might read them as well. That became the inspiration for a whole new site feature for a bit: a weekly round-up of can’t-miss content on the home page, as recommended by me.

It was a privilege to be able to work with this team and to uplift the writers in it.

In my own work, I tried to offer articles and essays that went beyond breaking news and related clickbait. I strove to write on media literacy, scientific literacy, and issues of broader relevance to human agency: through global humanist analysis, historical explainers, and other major topical deep-dives.

And I am thankful for the conversations that many of those pieces yielded.

It was a privilege to be able to contribute to a better discourse with all of you here.

The worldly turn

However small and fleeting, a platform is never nothing. It is always a gift to be able to speak with an expectation of an audience, and yet that gift is never fairly distributed (as we all know very well from the state of global politics).

Where I live right now, I am daily exposed to many people who through no great fault of their own spend their days begging for coin, instead of being able to cultivate more elaborate talents, and otherwise live in more fulfilling ways. Elsewhere, people trapped in war, indentured servitude, and other forms of cultural oppression also have few opportunities to learn and grow. In a world of eight billion, plenty of us never get the chances that we in public-facing media roles often take for granted.

Early in my time with OnlySky, I once expressed dissatisfaction with the top-down nature of blog-style news, which can lend an air of authority to our writing before it’s earned that high esteem through the quality of argumentation itself. Meanwhile, the real heart of the conversation—the critical push-pull of community members adding to any given topic from a wealth of different experiences, usually gets driven to the bottom of such media pages, buried in a mess of embedded threads.

Wasn’t there some way to create a better conversation with all the deeply insightful people who visit forums like these and try to contribute to them?

Back at the beginning of this project, we had so many ideas for how to break from media conventions, and to build a new platform where richer discourse might take off. Such grand schemes were hatched behind the scenes! But the problem was that this venture still needed to play by some conventional, industry-driven rules to try to make itself viable, even when it was aspiring to be something different. And so, that tension between the drive to innovate and the need to become financially stable ASAP yielded many challenges along the way.

This certainly doesn’t mean striving for something new and better isn’t worthwhile.

It just means we weren’t able to pull it off ourselves.

But I’m thankful for everyone who gave this platform a chance (many chances), and for everyone who engaged with my work while I had a chance to share it here. I’m thankful for the folks who disagreed with what I wrote, and who offered thoughtful counters and additional data. I’m also thankful for the folks who found some value in the work in and of itself, and whose kind words kept me focused on doing the best I could with the time I had. I’m deeply thankful that, on a few occasions, I might have offered words that clarified, informed, and fortified others in hard times.

For all my topical beats here over the last two years—global humanism, international politics, threats to civic agency and human rights, the false promise of futurism, environmental and tech concerns—my real area of expertise is much simpler:

I’m someone who’s learned a decent amount from failure. That’s it.

I doubt, though, that this makes me unique.

History teaches us that humans haven’t much changed in thousands of years. We’re still driven by ego, fear, and anger far more often than we might wish to be. We cling to many forms of worship that dehumanize us and others, and we struggle to apply critical and empirical thinking to the vast majority of our lives. We still have tribes, and we put them first in any great calculus of social action (even if our tribes now go by different names). We speak grandly about all our enlightened civilizations, then rest on those laurels to cover for any heinous actions still taken in their names.

Yes, we have shinier (and deadlier) technologies these days, and we like to think that our elaborate material lifestyles, created in large part through a self-destructive consumer pact with industries destroying our ecosystem, reflect the optimal way in which human beings might live. We are still a fairly small-c conservative species, by and large: risk averse even when we need to make great changes to offset all the damage our recent socioeconomic systems have done.

And yet, goodness knows, many of us are also “triers”. We want to be better than this part of our collective nature, despite the odds against us. So we keep on trying to improve, day by day, one by one, with whatever little agency we have left.

We’re brief witnesses to an indifferent cosmos, and we share our fleeting time alive on one tiny lifeboat, one pale blue dot in a lesser arm of a blip of a galaxy, with eight billion other witnesses also just trying to figure out how best to live themselves.

Next steps

Going forward, you can find this “trier” at Better Worlds Theory, my four-times-a-week newsletter on Substack. There, I continue my work from a global humanist perspective, in posts exploring issues of media literacy, global news analysis, and historical reframes, along with deep-dives into broader cultural issues. It’s not a perfect forum, but there are a lot of good names on the site—historians, scientists, political analysts, human rights advocates—and I’m looking forward to continuing to grow with many thoughtful people there, all trying to make the best of an online media sphere otherwise skewed heavily toward private (corporate) interests.

As I’ve written here before, we need a better media ecosystem. 2024 started with a reminder from the World Economic Forum that disinformation is widely considered our greatest danger for the next two years, precisely because of its power to impact a significant number of global democratic contests in that time span.

We’re facing a great many difficult tipping points. Our societies are embroiled in two larger wars that are sorely testing international relationships (if not entirely undermining our confidence in global institutions and alliances). Meanwhile, other regional conflicts are also diverting our focus from a climate change crisis that we’re not doing anywhere near enough to mitigate while we still can. Nationalist extremism and environmental refugeeism are already rising in lockstep, and the domestic stressors that accompany increasing financial disparities have only left more of us easy prey for fear- and hate-mongering politics writ large.

The 2024 US Presidential Election also presents a particularly heavy stressor in many lives right now, because the delicate fabric of this democratic republic is at further risk if the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is implemented next January. Many marginalized demographics will be hurt earlier than others after November, too, as seen in state-level actions already mounting against them.

In other words, even as the gutting of media spheres continues apace under AI hype and other corporate pressures, the world needs more investment in nonprofit and local news: to offset political polarization, to empower more people to take part in democratic projects, and to provide citizens with better contextualized data.

We’re going to need a bigger village: a great deal more hyper-local thinking about how to effect change close at hand, right in our neighborhoods, so that together we might be able to move the dial for the world’s biggest problems, too.

Wherever readers land next (and wherever else you’ve invested your time and insights already), I wish you great strength, clarity, and community in your journey.

This life is the one and only chance we get to contribute to human thriving.

May you all continue to do the very best you can with yours.