Contact Me

Democracy of Reach is the personal blog of William Maggos.

[ email | social web | matrix | github ]

Someday, it hopes to be the name of a non profit with this as its official website.

I have been involved in politics and the web my whole life. I have struggled to find the best way to merge these two interests to best deal with a larger problem I'm obsessed with. That we never get much closer to the society that most of us could actually agree, would be much better.

While I am on the left, it's not about progressives winning. Doing political work, I got uncomfortable about my own bias. I believed in the candidates and positions I was arguing for, but I knew that given all the relevant information and their own perspectives, the people I was talking to might not. But I could also tell that they were often uninformed or misinformed. Addressing the media environment that biased so many people in this way, largely to serve the media owners and advertisers, seemed like by far the better thing to do. Not to tell people how to vote, but try to deal with the fundamentals so that everyone can better advocate for themselves.

The web took off when I was in high school. I had a blog in the 90s. It greatly expanded our freedom of expression, letting anyone say anything and allowing everyone else in the world to see it. But almost nobody would, even if it was great. Sites generally required being talked about in mass media to get attention. What changed this was social media. A few people could share a link with a few others, over and over again, until it went worldwide viral. To the greater degree allowed by social media site owners back then, regular people could decide if everybody else should know about something. Word of mouth on steroids. This had never been possible before.

So we have the fix, it just needs to be reclaimed and expanded. Where we collectively own that power instead of governments, big media and those with the wealth to advertise. All information, ideas and art being spread in the ways we decide, not them. Articles, podcasts, video and anything else. That's the promise of a decentralized social network integrated into all the media we consume, and everyone participating.