Some weeks ago, right after the time of the Measure C library tax vote, I virtually bumped into some neighbors through mutuals on the left-leaning Twitter knockoff site, Bluesky. One of them was dropping some funny content (basically the reason I have an account, along with following cat rescues). This person made a couple of rather pointed jokes about the El Cerrito discourse on another social media site: Nextdoor.
Now, I have had an El Cerrito Nextdoor account for a number of years, but never as an active user; I mainly used it to post occasional alerts about loose dogs. But I was curious—given my surprise at how the library tax vote went down, and my budding sense of civic awareness—so I gave in to temptation and logged on.
The very first post I saw was a library comment. I read some of the discussions in increasing dismay, engaged briefly with a particularly “loud” person (loud in this context means making extremely frequent, lengthy, involved, and sometimes esoteric comments in response to a comparatively brief original post), and then found myself suddenly struggling with anxiety-induced insomnia.
Over the weeks that followed, I kept letting myself get sucked in. I had some prior idea of what to expect, given Nextdoor’s somewhat shall-we-say unsavory reputation amongst social media sites, and yet I was initially kind of shocked by how much vitriol was flying towards supporters of the library tax. I was a newcomer, but the moment I stepped forward to share a thought, I was immediately dismissed for being a “Yes” person. I heard that the “Yes” people were the villains. That’s weird, I thought. Didn’t the “No” folks just win an election? What are they so mad about?*
Then I thought, There’s a lot of hurt reflected in these comments. I wonder how I can be helpful here. My recollection of the ECCRG blog, with its narrative of broken trust and tone of righteous anger, gave me some idea of where the C anger might actually be coming from. And I could sympathize. Regardless of where folks were getting their information from, many of them have been swimming for a long time in an information ecosystem that paints the city—and by extension, it seems, the “Yes” campaign—as a corrupt, untrustworthy institution. I just didn’t think things were that simple.
So I started doing homework. I tuned into the upcoming city council race. I had already started looking critically at people who were popping out of the woodwork to run; I ended up going to coffee with a couple of them to try to better understand where they were coming from, and where they stood on the issues. I started watching city council meeting recordings, trying to get an up-to-date portrait of the budget, and the quality of our current governing bodies. (And, oh, jeez, it took me a minute to find the playback speed setting!). I agreed to help out with a peacemaking effort one of the candidates was organizing, “Heal the Hill.” I started posting, and commenting, and answering questions, and trying to meet my neighbors in the middle.
Now, in my view, Nextdoor isn’t really a great substitute for a town square**. Yes, a lot of people are on it, but only a small fraction are active posters, and its moderation design is… faulty, to say the least. I have a fair amount of free time these days, so for a few weeks I put some regular time in there, but I just found it’s hard to be really thoughtful in such a loud echo chamber. Trying to be engaged, patient, considerate, and critical just got to be too much for me. It was taking up too much of my energy. I really, really like talking to people in person, and I enjoy writing lengthy navel-gazing essays to process my thoughts. So I took a step back, and decided I would change format.
Hence, this blog.
And… oof. I haven’t even gotten to anything of actual substance yet. It’s taken three posts to set context, but what I really want to talk about here is El Cerrito governance. History, policy, management, culture, practice. What’s the purpose of doing my own research if I don’t share what I’m seeing?
So for the next few posts I’m going to talk about that city history a bit, and where I see different narratives breaking down.
*Disclaimer: I quickly found out, of course, that there were also plenty of “Yes” people who had been mad, too, and that there were cases where the conversation had broken down into name-calling and nastiness from both sides (allegedly, anyway; I wasn’t there and I don’t actually have the receipts). Feelings had been quite heated for a while, by the time I arrived. It was just shocking to be lumped into a “mean girls” clique when I had literally only just arrived, and when I really do generally make an effort to be kind, or at minimum, polite and willing to admit mistakes.
**I actually do truly like a lot of what I see on Nextdoor. Big controversial posts blow up in ugly ways a lot, yes, but also there are a lot of great posts about pollinator pathways, public parties, and people posing plant identification questions. People get silly, offer useful advice, and sympathize with their neighbors. Sometimes it feels like two completely different sites. I’ve been really glad not to see too much overt disparagement of underprivileged groups overall—maybe the worst examples have been a few cases of people saying horrific things about their homeless neighbors—which is at least somewhat contrary to the ugly reputation of the site. So I’m staying active on Nextdoor, just to a more moderate extent.