The @Hosts have agreed to reorganise the JBP Community, away from a Jordan B Peterson focus (as we have already studied all of his material extensively), and into a general and more expansive Philosophy Club, of which JBP topics would be a subset.
This rebranding and restructuring, also includes a migration explicitly as a Bevry Cooperative Initiative.
The sessions for this week will be discussing this, and working through the logistics. Please raise your questions, and we will answer them.
Logistics will be this week. Implementation will be next week. With the launch in time for next week’s sessions.
Benjamin, I have reflected on this post for some time because it has left me feeling somewhat unsettled. I appreciate that there must be significant thought going into this endeavor, and that you are quite a smart person. That said, I am a fan of Jordan Peterson and I am not sure how I feel about participating in a forum that has formally broken away from this icon. I am happy to watch, listen and think about how this new form evolves and contributes to areas that I find to be valuable.
I wish you and your initiative all the best, and in light of this intention I wanted to share with you my thoughts instead of just simply fading away.
Thanks for the feedback. The concern is definitely valid, and is an experiment going forward to see how it pans out.
With Peterson’s JBP Daily announcement, which is $10/month for what this community has been offering for a year now, it doesn’t make sense for us to compete with Peterson. It is unfortunate that Peterson decided to compete, rather than to collaborate. And by doing so, made it impossible for us to compete, as he has turned the environment into a competitive rather than collaborative landscape.
As such, for Peterson content, there is no way we can offer a better experience than what Peterson’s JBP Daily can, due to the official endorsement, the paywall, and the fanbase that will subscribe their money to anything he announces.
So rather than ourselves fade away into obscurity, it makes sense to branch out, and focus on creating a collaborative open community instead.
The @Hosts are all people who have studied Peterson and his works intensely (all his lectures twice, his two books, and half of his essential reading list). So the new community will continue to leverage Peterson’s wisdom, but without the constraining idolisation.
Given Mr. Peterson’s move away from Patrion, I can see one reason for the need to increase revenue. Ethics can be costly, and perhaps your departure will be another form of consequence. It seems very unfortunate, for everyone involved, that this fragmentation is happening.
Benjamin, I hope you will be able to keep the door open to contributing to the Peterson … experiment(?). I suspect we are all better together and I expect the loss of many hosts, with significant experience, will be felt by all.
Peterson earns a few hundred thousand dollars a month, of which Patreon is a small amount, which his move to alternatives and self hosting reduces the high Patreon fees increasing revenue. Patrons tend to move their support to different platforms, rather than dropping it.
There are plenty of existing free speech alternatives to Patreon, that he has not opted for, as it seems he didn’t drop Patreon (or announce an alternative) to support free speech — as his alternatives do nothing to address the censorship issue at all (payment processor censorship, compute & hosting censorship, domain censorship) and he himself has a history of deplatforming those which association can hurt his public image (he wouldn’t share a stage with Faith Goldy as she was “a property too hot to handle”, so why would he share a liberty patron service like BitPatron, Collide, BitBacker, with such hot properties) — his approach only seems a tactic to ride the hype into reduced fees and more control of public image.
Furthermore, Peterson is now running quite the family affair. His wife is his personal assistant, having access to previous clinical emails. His son (having done only a single web development bootcamp with only a sliver of open-source contributions) is his (a?) web developer for his businesses (something Peterson’s companies don’t mention, yet it is on his son’s resume).
Sources:
A listing of current alternatives that are tackling his proclaimed requirements:
To be clear, the Jordan B Peterson Community (at least the website, youtube channel, and this forum, and our social media profiles — that is to say, all the things which have been Bevry initiatives) will be dissolved into the Philosophers Club, which will be a subset of the Bevry cooperative. All @hosts have indicated support for this from private discussions which have been affirmed in last week’s public sessions.
It has not however been an easy decision. The discussions transpired over the past few months, with growing tensions that catalysed a few weeks ago, and has reached catharsis with the new proposal. Each host raised concerns, which the curent proposal seems to be the best effort at addressing.
The JBP Reading Group may or may not remain untouched. Will see what the best option for it is, after migration of all the rest.
Migration will be happening this week.
We will still continue our #projects, just under the Bevry cooperative instead, and they will not be constrained to Peterson.
@ForensicMike With anything that is really deep, sometimes it is possible to mine everything we can with our current skills and tools. It is at that time best to pivot to something else for a while to see if the other things sheds new light on what previously was not relevant to our way of thinking. I hope this helps, and I have some nuance and disputations on JBP. I agree with him on the vast majority of things, and I think there is more area to explore on some of the current frameworks or assumptions that were held to get us to this point. Peace to you.
