This is an independent website launched in November 2024, to help my friends and family take control of their news intake back from billionaires and their influencer army.
This site attempts to demonstrate a healthier way to consume news which avoids social media and .
The tools here will let you automate your news consumption, without algorithms or manipulation. For free.
What we do here
- Provide tools and a methodology to help you stay informed about what is happening in our country, free from algorithmic influence. You should be in full control of the information you consume.
- Recommend some steps to protect your personal privacy, and keep you as safe and secure as possible during the Trump II administration. I can't tell you precisely why, but you will be glad you did this.
- Curate an ongoing feed of articles on national politics and policy activity I think is worth paying attention to.
- Share my views of how we might organize our politics and government to be a little bit less of a shitshow. Given the state of things, I believe we are each obligated to give this some thought.
Unfortunately, many Americans are tragically ill-informed about basic facts of what has happened in our country in the last decade. There is a collective amnesia among many people about what decisions were made by what policymakers and what the impacts of those decisions were. We are not well-informed.
Much of this is due to the billionaire-controlled algorithms that pollute the feeds of nearly all major social networks.
- Threads is explicitly hostile to whatever Meta decides is "political" content, de-prioritizing it across everyone's feeds.
- The site formerly known as Twitter is becoming a haven for right-wing provocateurs as its owner removes moderation safeguards and user privacy protections.
- YouTube has become infested with right-wing influencers who target children and teens with propaganda about gender, race, and the economy.
How to curate your own news feed - without the algorithms
My method for staying informed is easy to set up and free. I use Feedly, an RSS reader that publishes news articles from sources I have selected, in real-time.
With RSS there is no algorithm to decide what you read. Choose the writers or sources you subscribe to. Browse content from your selected sources in real-time, in the order each piece was published. Organize them how you like. Filter out keywords or topics if you choose. Add new sources as you find them. Remove sources anytime.
If you don't curate your own news, rich people will do it for you.
Michael
Why I built this site
Why be informed? It's not easy to pay attention to the news, to politics, to world events. It's tiring, and the mental health impacts can be real. But the truth is that the news is about to get very much closer to home.
After January 20th, 2025, your neighbor may be deported. A family member may lose a job because of tariffs. A friend may get sick from contaminated food. A friend's child may commit suicide because the state will not allow them to receive gender-affirming care. It could be much worse.
You will see these things happen. You will need to know why they happened and who is responsible and what you can do about it.
It is important that your knowledge about what is happening is based on facts. Unfortunately, we are awash in propaganda, and facts can be hard to come by.
You will have to decide if what the government is doing is right and proper. You will need to consider where your moral boundaries are.
Given all that, it is rather important that we be operating as much as possible from the same set of facts. There is a connection between the information you take in, and the way you interpret the events that happen around you.
You will need to know what is happening and why, and a lot of people will be lying to you.
Naturally, one might ask what I believe, which I'm happy to share:
What I believe
- Civil rights and democracy belong to individuals - we the people - not corporations.
- The state exists to protect its citizens from mental and physical harm, which includes a full right to bodily autonomy; and from economic harm, which includes everything proposed in FDR's Second Bill of Rights, and beyond.
- Universal suffrage and equal democratic participation and representation for all is an urgent national priority.
- Elections and policymaking in the United States of America have been corrupted by an un-disruptable two-party system and partisan gerrymandering, an antiquated Constitutional system of districts and apportionment, and the pervasiveness of money from corporations and the wealthy. This must be remedied.
- There exists in American a fundamental imbalance of economic and political power, and citizens are constrained from using available political means to change it. This must be remedied.
- The civil rights of a majority of Americans are under threat from Christian nationalists who want to write their religious beliefs into our laws, and from jingoists and fascists who want to do the same for their racism, bigotry, and hatred. This must be remedied.
Where this came from:
When Trump was elected in 2016, I went looking for - and found - a volunteer project that felt real. My friend and I, along with a volunteer dev from the Clinton campaign, built the first professional website for the then-nascent Indivisible organization. I migrated the first version of the Indivisible Guide from Squarespace to WordPress by hand. When that project ended, I felt a sense of pride and accomplishment but it quickly faded. I wanted to keep up the fight.
Facing the horror of a second Trump administration, I built this site to share my views, and my techniques for staying informed, private, and safe with my friends, family, and any other fellow travelers in these troubled times.
