Block Parties, Book Bans, and Broken Backers

Last week, I asked for your opinion on my “Odds & Sods”. Permit me to distil your observations: I am accused of relying too much on reportage and not enough on myself. The charge, if I understand it, is that the newsletter is overrun by the journalist while the man called John is left somewhere in the footnotes. Moreover, it seems I have been found guilty of an unseemly American provincialism, leaving the Old World to languish in the wings. The point is not only taken but, like a good claret, decanted and considered. Let us start in Europe this week:

The Dialectic of Disconnection: Leftism’s Forgotten Pulse

Here’s my world, as seen through the screen of my phone: It’s easier to know what a stranger in Buenos Aires had for breakfast than to remember the face of the neighbour across the hall. I can debate politics with someone in Seattle at midnight, yet I’d struggle to borrow a cup of sugar from my next-door neighbours. The paradox is glaring: never before have we been so connected, yet so estranged from the very people who share our walls, our streets, and our city blocks. While we may be more familiar with the struggles of distant strangers, our ties to the people next door have weakened. The left, once rooted in the soil of mutual aid and shop-floor solidarity, now often floats in the ether of chat groups and viral campaigns. But when the lights went out across Spain and Portugal last week, I saw something primal stir—a flicker of what Marx might call Gemeinwesen—the Ghost of Communal Instinct. The blackout is a revelation.

Indeed, when smartphones died, and Wi-Fi evaporated, neighbours became lifelines. In Madrid, battery-powered radios were hauled onto balconies, transforming private panic into public bulletins. The city’s metro tunnels echoed not with silence but with strangers sharing candles and contact numbers. This wasn’t mere crisis management; it was the left’s ancestral memory reawakening. The irony stings: our hyperconnected era has atomised communities while globalising grievances. We’ve traded block parties for blockchain, mutual aid for mutuals on social media. The Iberian blackout exposed a truth we’ve suppressed: solidarity cannot be streamed.

This is the left’s dirty secret: its most significant victories were won not through manifestos but through proximity. Historically, the core of leftist movements has been precisely this sense of community. This is repeatedly evidenced by the effectiveness of community organising and mass protest, as shown in the BLM movement, Kill the Bill protests, and local economic initiatives like the Preston Model.

Yet we modern progressives often treat community as an aesthetic. We’ve allowed the convenience of digital activism to eclipse the hard graft of building solidarity with our neighbours. Studies show that low-impact digital actions, such as liking a post or signing an online petition, can reduce motivation to participate in more meaningful, offline activism. The web didn’t kill community—it gave us the means to outsource it.

Madrid and Lisbon showed that crisis doesn’t create community—it reveals it. The left’s fatal error has been to conflate connectivity with collectivism. Twitter threads on intersectionality won’t save you when the grid fails—but the person who lends you their transistor radio might. This isn’t Luddite nostalgia. The internet has been revolutionary for marginalised groups: from trans and queer youth worldwide finding affirmation and support in dedicated online communities like Trevorspace—a global forum that provides a safe space for LGBTQ+ young people to connect and share resources—to disadvantaged groups utilising digital platforms to broaden their social networks and access support they might never find offline. These digital spaces have become lifelines for those facing isolation or discrimination in their immediate environments. The left cannot abandon global digital networks.

Still, we must revive local bonds. If the left is to endure and remain relevant, it must not lose sight of this foundational principle. Digital tools are invaluable for organising and amplifying causes, but they cannot replace the hard, sometimes inconvenient work of building and sustaining local communities.

Imagine apps that map neighbourhood skills instead of influencers. Envision digital platforms owned by co-ops, not Zuckerberg. The Iberian blackout was a dress rehearsal. Climate collapse, cyberattacks, and illiberal regimes will test our resilience. Will we default to Amazon drones dropping survival kits? Or will we rebuild what the internet eroded: the sacred, sweaty, inconvenient work of knowing who lives three doors down? My take: When the lights go out, it is our neighbours, not our followers, who matter most.

When You Can’t Win the Debate, Sue the Library

Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., sent a letter to the Wikimedia Foundation threatening its tax-exempt status, alleging that Wikipedia permits foreign manipulation of information, thus violating nonprofit obligations under U.S. law. He claims the board comprises mostly foreign nationals, which he believes undermines American interests.

Oh, the audacity, or perhaps the desperation, of those who, finding themselves unable to win the argument in the open agora, instead reach for the levers of bureaucracy to throttle the infrastructure of knowledge. It’s the urge to silence what you cannot control. Wikipedia, for all its imperfections and the occasional whiff of amateurish zealotry, remains an unbought repository of collective human curiosity. This encyclopedia answers to no party, no advertiser. To attack it is to reveal not just a distaste for error but a terror of dissent, a fear that the narrative might slip the leash and gallop off into the wilds of unapproved thought.

This is not the act of a man confident in his cause, but of one who suspects, rightly, that the facts are not his friends. It is a declaration of war on the notion that truth should be accessible, collaborative, and, above all, free from the grubby fingerprints of government censors. If this is what passes for statesmanship in the age of Trump, then let us be clear: it is not Wikipedia’s neutrality that is in question, but the administration’s. To stand by while the state menaces the keepers of our shared memory is to surrender, inch by inch, the freedom that makes any other virtue possible.

Kickstarter — Paying Extra for the Privilege of Being Swindled

I want to talk about Kickstarter. Remember when that came about? The crowdfunding revolution was supposed to democratize innovation, a utopian bypass of gatekeepers where plucky underdogs could thrive. Instead, it’s become a graveyard of broken promises and tariff-induced extortion—a digital panhandler’s paradise where desperation masquerades as disruption. Kickstarter’s new “Tariff Manager Tool” isn’t just a Band-Aid for Trump’s trade war; it’s a confessional booth for an entire ecosystem built on the delusion that amateurs with Powerpoint can outmanoeuvre global supply chains. If your business model requires shaking down strangers for retroactive surcharges, you’ve already failed. Crowdfunding is the financial equivalent of a Hail Mary pass—thrown only when every professional investor has already left the stadium.

Consider the arithmetic: 9% of funded projects collapse entirely, while hardware campaigns drown in design flaws sharp enough to slice through both skin and budgets. Now layer on tariffs that bleed $1.5 million from a single board game publisher, and you’ve got a perfect storm of hubris meeting reality. Kickstarter’s solution? A digital tin cup for creators to rattle at backers who’ve already paid for vaporware. “Just one more fee,” they plead, as if tariffs are an act of God rather than the predictable consequence of betting your supply chain on geopolitical whimsy.

This isn’t innovation; it’s a Ponzi scheme with better graphics. Private citizens are now the venture capitalists of last resort, armed with nothing but a Youtube demo and the dim hope that this gadget won’t join the $26 million crowdfunding scrapheap. They’re told to “trust the process,” even as creators fumble with half-baked prototypes and production timelines written in fairy dust. Meanwhile, the real investors, those who get paid to spot viable ideas, are conspicuously absent. Why? Because they know a sinking ship when they see one. Imagine backing a project years ago, only to be told now that your “support” requires a tariff surcharge to fund a product that’s already late, over budget, or—let’s be frank—mythical. The backer’s choice? Pay up or beg for a refund, as if either outcome absolves the platform’s complicity in this farce.

Crowdfunding doesn’t empower the little guy; it preys on him. It’s a carnival where every carousel horse is labelled “disruption,” and the only winners are the charlatans who’ve mastered the art of selling dreams to the desperate. The Tariff Manager Tool isn’t a lifeline; it’s the final admission that this model was doomed from the start.

You’ve reached the end. By the time you read this, I’m most likely standing in Cologne’s football stadium, cheering on Werder Bremen’s women's team in the cup final against Bayern Munich. What a day.

Thank you for reading.