Marl Meetups

it is a truth universally acknowledged: a man with a mailing list must organize a meetup

Subscriber, welcome to Nothing Human!

I’m still overwhelmed by the response to the Tyranny of the Marginal User. It seems to have resonated with so many people! It resonated so much with you, Subscriber, that you gave me write access to your email inbox, where my headlines now compete for your attention with messages from old friends, Amazon delivery notifications, ads for clothing brands you haven’t bought in years, and so on.

What should I do with this access to your attention stream? One thing I don’t want is to enter a producer-consumer relationship with you, where I produce “content” and you “consume” it. The purpose of writing, much like the purpose of music¹, is to bring people together, to coordinate human action.

So! Let’s get together in a park and talk about Marl and how to fight him or perhaps redeem him. I’ll host two meetups over the next two weekends in SF and NYC.

• SF meetup - Saturday, September 30th, 3-5pm by the William McKinley monument in the Panhandle. Add to GCal

• NYC meetup - Saturday, October 7th, 3-5pm by the Josephine Shaw Lowell memorial fountain in Bryant Park. Add to GCal

If you’re not in SF / NYC, please consider organizing a local Marl meetup and comment on this post announcing it. It can be as easy as “will be sitting reading at this cafe 2-4pm Saturday with a piece of paper that says MARL on it, come say hi!”.

Please do come, especially if you “don’t usually go to this kind of thing”, “won’t belong”, are worried you’ll be awkward, are afraid you won’t have anything to contribute, etc etc. We already know what the socially-smooth high-status in-domain people have to say, almost by definition.

Feel free to bring friends, kids, dogs, daemons etc.

1. also the purpose of software! but more on that later