About This Website

What is 02186 Dispatches, and why did I create it?

The short answer is that this website is a community space for the Town of Milton and its 28,000 or so residents. It is meant to be a place where people can learn more about their neighbors. It is meant to be a site where people can talk about politics, learn about community events, share their fiction and poetry and photos, write about AI and sports and democracy, and do it all in a way where we look forward to interacting with each other.

But it's a little more involved than that. This website is also meant to be an antidote. It's a reaction to the toxicity I have witnessed and participated in on social media sites that are ostensibly meant to function as community spaces, but where instead we are encouraged to engage in a sometimes vicious, rarely illuminating, tit-for-tat about the things that make us mad: usually, politics and the personalities around our local political life. It is well understood, reported, and documented that social media sites thrive on negative engagement. (To be clear, I'm not talking about our fellow neighbors who run such sites; I mean instead the structure of the platforms themselves.) I myself have been engaged in community Facebook pages in various political campaigns where it has been easy to descend into the vortex of comment-fueled anger. Attempts to educate, inform, and stay civil are extraordinarily difficult to successfully maintain; it's much easier to give in. And that's how those sites are designed to work.

So rather than build a new one of those, I decided to build this. It's a very late-90s idea: instead of microblogging, let's long-form blog. Let's create a space that encourages people to communicate their ideas more fully, with time, and without the constant ping of commentary and chatter. My hope is that this can be a site where, if we talk about politics, we can talk about it with sympathy, civility, and elbow room. Let's give people the space to talk, think, and breathe.

But this site can be more than just offering a point/counterpoint style of political commentary. It can let us get to know each other better as neighbors. So as this site develops, I hope that the content can be broad and varied, allowing us to build community in the following ways:

• By hearing from our neighbors. In this inaugural publication, I've interviewed our two outgoing Select Board members – Ben Zoll and Richard Wells – who were kind enough to make time for very DIY, rank amateur interviews with me. Ignore the production quality, but please listen to what they have to say: their perspectives on town politics, whether or not you agree with their political stances, are valuable for us to hear, understand, and appreciate. And over time, I hope to hear from all of you and your lives in Milton and beyond: business owners, little league coaches, community organizers, fiction writers. If you want to be interviewed, let me know by emailing me at admin@02186dispatches.com.
• By reading and watching things that have nothing to do with politics. There is so much about Milton that is vibrant, and our neighbors are involved in an astonishing array of activities. I want to know about your experience as a little league coach, as a non-profit board member, as a teacher, as a small business owner. Your neighbors do, too.
• By having all content curated. That means no comments. This site will not have Discord threads; it will not be advertised on Facebook or X. It will be its own thing. So, it will grow slowly. But that's a feature, not a bug. Having comments threaded into the site would defeat what this site is trying to accomplish. I imagine people will have reactions to the interviews I posted this week (either about the interviewees or the interviewer, or both). I want to know about them, and your neighbors might, too! But send me an email and I will publish content in our "Letters to the Editor" page, in accordance with this site's submission guidelines. Hopefully, this gives us all time to think, consider, and breathe. Social media does none of those things. This site is meant to be different.

For this site to be successful, it will need to have our Milton neighbors invested in its success. I hope that I can create a website that will make you interested in checking out the content; subscribing; and best of all, submitting your own content.

One thing this site is not: journalism. This is not a replacement for the Milton Times or any other newspaper. I am not a journalist. I am happy for your feedback about what I might do better as an interviewer, for example, but I'm not Anderson Cooper and I won't pretend to be. The interviews are meant to help us get to know each other better, and I hope you'll take them in that spirit.

I look forward to what this site will bring, and am deeply hopeful that it will play a small part in building our Milton Community.