Background

 From 1990 to 2009 I worked for Big Evangelicalism in Maine.  I was the spokesman for what remained of Big Corporate Protestantism.  My title was “Executive Director” of the Christian Civic League of Maine.  Last time I checked Maine was the second poorest state in America.  That mean’t being “Big” and “Corporate” there didn’t translate into big money.  Our power was derived from the fumes of previous decades of political, cultural and religious work by Protestants.  When it became clear to me that the big donor class of evangelicalism had decided to abandon my mission I resigned.  I only had two big donors because Maine was so poor.  But those two donors made up a big chunk of the budget.  As far as I know those donors are happy with the current tamed, Republican-first, last and always administration.  They sure did drop me like a hot potato.

Everyone uses Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.  I have accounts on those platforms.  I never embedded myself out of fear.  I was psychologically traumatized using email before social networks emerged online.  I am still working through the effects of that trauma.  Sometimes it takes awhile.  It’s been fifteen years.  I plan on pushing content that originates here onto those platforms.  I am not going to build on those platforms for obvious reasons.  It is unclear at this time how their censorship plans are going to play out against Christians who don’t want to lose all the truly valuable things about their culture, religion and nation.  I think a combination of government regulation and technical innovation will secure political and religious free speech on the big Western platforms.  But I could be wrong.  Regardless, it now makes economic, as well as social, sense for me to bake membership functionality into my website so that’s what I’m doing.

I see the internet breaking up along national and language lines.  National borders are going to emerge as important in coming years.  Nations and people groups all over the world will adopt the technology and develop their own hardware and software layers.  American hegemony over all things internet will decline, as it should.  At the same time privacy advocates are going to secure individual control over digital assets through government regulation and technical innovation.  This technology will be tamed by humanity.  An ettiquete for it’s use will emerge.

Technical

We use two open source codebases for the presentation of our digital information.  WordPress and Phptube are those codebases.  It is not technically possible for us right now to merge the two codebases under one login.  While this is annoying and inconvenient to the end user I pray that we are able to make the content worth the annoyance.  Besides, folks are developing strategies to deal with multiple username/password requirements on this fast changing version of the internet.  A good online tool for username/password management is Lastpass.  I use KeepassXC.  There are many others out there.