Posted by Joe P in Endorsement
What kind of club do we want to have?

The club is now 29 years old, as of yesterday. I have been a member of it for a little bit less than 10 years. How crazy that last sentence sounds will depend on how long you’ve been in the club. When I was new, it was insane to me that anyone would stay anywhere on the Internet for more than a few years, despite the fact that we had several members who had been here for 10-15 years already at that point. Now it seems less odd to me, though I’m only just now starting to feel a little like an “old member.”

Everyone who comes here has a story about why they came here, and why they stayed. When you hear enough of them, you realize that the details are different, but they all kinda have the same shape. Here’s the elevator pitch for The Pilot Episode of the STF Show, Starring You, as explained to some person you know in real life:

“Well, things were kind of bad because [whatever reason from moderate teenage boredom to the worst pandemic in a century], and then… uhh… I found this thing on the Internet… and… umm… it’s… a club… where we like… create characters and stuff… you know, uhh, like we’re on Star Trek… and it really helped me get through it. I made some friends too. And I actually spend quite a bit of time there now.”

That story has distinct phases to it, and they’re all important. The way to understand this election, and the differences between everyone who has participated in it (whether as a candidate or not, whether on the boards or not), is that there is an unstated, unacknowledged disagreement on which parts of those story are the most important. Everyone agrees, implicitly, that the President should focus on the most important things to keep the club running, or at least I hope they do. But, we don’t talk much about what we don’t agree about any more. We don’t talk as much as we used to about what the important things are, for whatever reason.

So, what are the most important things?

Friendship is obviously very important. A lot of people stay because of friendship. Friendships develop through the ways we interact, and they can expand beyond this small corner of the Internet to other places, or even out of the Internet entirely and into “real life.” But, their nature is inherently not a shared thing; they develop between pairs of individuals, or… they don’t. More importantly, friendships are how that first episode of the continuing STF member ends. We all have friends here, even if we aren’t all friends with every single other person who is here. That would be a crazy thing to expect or maintain; very few people are social enough to be friends with 120 other people, or would even want to be.

So how did we all end up with that first episode ending the same way?

We don’t all share the same friends, but we don’t have to, because we share something else, the most awkward part of that story: “where we like… create characters and stuff… you know, uhh, like we’re on Star Trek…” We usually call that “roleplaying”, but a better word for it is “creating.” We create characters, who we use to create stories, with other people who also created characters, and then we talk about what we created, and what we’re creating, and we end up making something together that we wouldn’t have created on our own, something better than we would have if we were just doing that all by ourselves or people we knew already.

Then we keep doing it, every week, sometimes even daily, and we end up making more things. Like, ships, fleets, departments that do things to help the ships and the fleets, departments that are both a department and a fleet of ships to help people do all of that creating in the first place the first time they got here, departments that create some of the things that we use when we create stories instead of other things, etc. Over and over again, the cycle of creation continues, and three decades later you end up creating friendships, relationships, marriages, children, novels, careers in writing, careers in technology, careers in outer space politics, careers in actual politics, careers in highly customized web applications, and so on. We build on what we created before, and then we end up making things even grander than whatever our one little character was to begin with.

Creation is what makes it all work. One of these tickets is about creation. I mean, they call their platform “Member Support from Top to Bottom”, but if you actually read it all, it’s about making things to make people into better members, who will then go on to create new things and make this all better for everybody, and keep all that creation we all do here going. A club that is focused on creating things together is something we can all be a part of, no matter regardless of what our outer space ranks are or even whether we all like each other. A club that’s focused on whether or not everybody is friends or exactly which rank past Captain everybody should have is a lot harder to be a part of, because these tend to be necessarily individual and particular concerns by nature that are hard to get people who don’t share those concerns involved in to do something fun that can be built upon, or even just to keep the lights on.

I don’t know what kind of club you want to have. I know the kind of club I want to have is the club that works to create things together. That’s why I voted for Sarah and Rob, and that’s why you should too.

– Joe

Thank you, Joe. It means a lot that you truly grasp what we’re trying to do with the club.

• Sarah