Leaving Social Media

In a few days Urban Maille's Facebook page is going to disappear so I wanted to take a bit of space here to explain why we're wantonly deleting a page followed by more than 5000 of our favorite people. There's a bit of explanation involved, so feel free to skip down if you don't care about this sort of thing.

Gary and I are old school patriotic types who believe in old school free speech and the free market. We believe in defending to the end each and every person's right to speak their beliefs, even if we loathe what they're saying. Maybe even especially if we loathe it... because when people can speak freely, it's easy to see who they really are. That's where the free market comes in. We vote with our dollars and with our time and attention. We don't give any of it to people whose beliefs are abhorrent to us. Instead, we find like minded people and give them our business, our time, our attention, and in this way we vote for what we want to see more of and disregard the rest. It's a wildly effective system that's completely fair to everyone, suppresses no one, and allows for each and every person to reap exactly what they sow; a blissfully, perfectly, fair result that no form of censorship can ever provide.

Unfortunately, some social media platforms are trying to socially engineer us by deciding what we can see and what we can't. It's just a modern form of book burning, a concept unbearable in any form. The only power we as individuals have (or need) is that free market vote of money, time and attention, so Gary and I have made the decision to stop giving ours to platforms that choose to censor what we see instead of just giving us the tools to filter our own information as we choose. So... bye bye Facebook. It was fun while it lasted.

We've had a lot of lovely rain in the mountains this summer, so even though it's been cool since mid-August, the aspens are only just now turning from green to yellow and the ground is purple with asters well beyond the usual end of our summer flowers. It's hard to pick a favorite season when they're all beautiful but autumn is just special. I hope yours is just as lovely. Until next time....