Hacker Cinema
Join or Die
2024 · Film · documentary · 99 min
Directed by Pete Davis, Rebecca Davis
A film about why you should join a club—and why the fate of America may depend on it. Follow the story of America’s civic unraveling through the work of Robert Putnam, whose legendary Bowling Alone findings light a path out of our democracy’s crisis.
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4 comments on Hacker News
Back in the pandemic I remember movie theaters being in a real hurry to get the food concessions running again.
I don't think I've ever been one to get disgusted quickly and I might even like insects and germs better than people, but when things were re-opening my sense of cleanliness was reset and the thought of dealing with a popcorn and Coke mess was just unbearable to me.
Since then I've only been out for Barbie and Join or Die, the latter because the showing was sponsored by my employer and some of my coworkers showed up in it.
The first thing that comes to mind for me is
https://nextdoor.com/
which is very much about community organizing but it has an aura of "people spreading rumors about bicycle thefts at the movie theater downtown (why don't they call the cops?)", the woman who radiates creepy signs of precarity (is cleaning up and looking for the phone number of the people who are suspected to run an illegal landfill) and then posts screen shots of the creepy come-ons she gets from guys who want to be her sugar daddy, etc.
Maybe there's a space for a platform that specifically targets small, community, in person kinds of organizations, maybe even targeted to a particular geographical area; something like Meetup but just a little less structured.
Here's a fair sized local organization (has more than one run a month) that has a good site
https://fingerlakesrunners.org/
But making that scalable is tricky; somebody in the club's leadership is a Wordpress pro. $5 a month would be cheap, but people are niggardly. If you're a web tech native owning a domain name is table stakes, but I think you'd lose 80% of "normies" even the phone-dependent "internet natives" if they had to get a domain name. There is a certain amount of panic over the breakdown of community organizations, see the line of research described in this film
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/join_or_die
and rather than getting $5 a month out of people who think they can't afford it, getting funding from somebody like the United Way (for a particular area) or the Knight Foundation might be a better idea.
Oh sorry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join_or_Die
We had a showing of the movie that my organization sponsored at Cornell cinema. A few of the people from my office were in the movie and were at the showing so it made me think of the ending of Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure.
Here is what I practice today:
(1) Science & engineering: A physics PhD and involvement in technology has given me a good foundation for climate science and also the engineering of solutions ranging from solar energy, biomass, carbon capture and storage, etc. Every so often I wish I knew some more about chemistry. My RSS reader shows me many articles on this topic every day that it selects for me.
(2) Social sciences. I have a perspective on the science of civilization that we are in a race between problems and solutions. When the problems get too bad people start looking for solutions and when they get really bad growth stops and there is no choice to find solutions. Someone could have despaired for humanity in 1938 but it turned out pretty well in the end.
(3) Meaningful work. I'm a software dev at a public opinion data archive. As GW is really a people problem this is relevant. Somebody down the hall from me has written a lot of papers about what people think on the subject and the difference you get when the issues are framed differently. We enabled the research described in the movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Join,_or_Die
(4) Shamanism. I've recently felt a call to the ministry and I'm learning about Chinese and North American shamanism and developing a practice that helps people change even when it seems impossible.