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How to Build Healthy Geeky Communities

Buttonholes being sewed with silk to an orange woolen vest lined with black linen
Despite the current situation, one creative project from last fall is finally moving forward! Vest in orange fulled cloth, interlined with linen canvas, lined with black linen, buttonholes in silk thread

Geeky communities attract people who milk them for money, sex, and throngs of adoring flatterers. In the Anglo world I can trace this from New York science-fiction fandom in the 1940s through some of the groups I knew face-to-face in Canada to the Southern California tech world (and the closely related SoCal kink and porn worlds) in the 2010s. There are theories why this happens such as Michael Suileabhain-Wilson’s “Geek Social Fallacies” (2003). But today I would like you to read an essay on how to build a community of plumbers working side by side not rock stars and groupies, a community that the parasites bounce off like a mosquito landing on a buckskin jacket.

No More Rock Stars (2016) by Valerie Aurora, Mary Gardiner, and Leigh Honeywell

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