What Two Weeks Look Like

Draft in the founder’s voice, built from his 2022–2024 writing and the tape. Under review by Maceo; sentences in quotation marks are his or his subjects’, verbatim, and link to where they were said. Not sent by email yet.

Hello everyone, Maceo here.

At the start of this month the site had 115 interviews written up with their transcripts. It has 142 now, most of them from the last week, and I want to walk you through what these two weeks were, because they were the fastest we have ever moved and the first time I have been able to see the whole thing at once.

The archive got a front door

If you have not been to wethem.xyz since August, go look. The homepage opens on one sentence from the tape, at poster size, a different one every visit, with the name of the person who said it, where, and the second they said it. There is a Start here page that gets a stranger from zero to the work in four minutes. Places puts every piece on a map by country and city. People gives every contributor their own page. And One Question now holds nine questions and a hundred and two answers, each one linked to the moment on tape it was said.

The rule behind all of it has not changed: nothing on the site is paraphrased. Every quote is checked against the transcript by the build, and a line that is not in its transcript stops the build. That is the reason it took a while and the reason I trust it.

Nine countries

Hamza Khan sent a Bitcoin Pizza Day piece from Islamabad, and Pakistan became the ninth country where the work has shipped. His line is the one I keep hearing: “Nobody changes the world alone.” A second voice from Islamabad is on the channel and goes up the day I confirm his name. Ghana is next; the ETH Accra interviews are being transcribed as I write this.

The Nigeria desk, at last

The pieces from my first trip to Nigeria are finally written up. Ánesi, the founder of Creative Alchemy, our partner in Abuja, for thirty-eight minutes on why she built it: a festival where music was disrespected, and the decision that “It is time we start creating the experiences.” Ayodeji Awosika at Web3Bridge in Ikorodu, the programme that has trained blockchain developers across Africa for five and a half years, with applications for the next cohort “from Cameroon, from Togo, from Kenya, from Zimbabwe, from Uganda.” Daniel on why a phone is enough to enter Web3, and on saving in stablecoins when saving in naira is burning money. JED XO, at the end of that trip, on the bus from Lagos and the speedboat to Ikorodu. Executive producer credits on that series go to CY, with Donna Dalton and Aja Davis as supporting patrons, and I have finally put the people who paid for this work on one page, the partners page, quoted from the tape.

The tables turned

Twice now somebody has pointed the camera at me, and both interviews are on the site. Daniel in Abuja got the clearest version of what this is that I have ever said: “We Them Niggas is me documenting us I think We Them Media is us bringing us to market in a meaningful way.” Blue of Archive, in New York in 2024, got the honest version: fewer than fifty listeners then, and “this is practice, this is not the product.” Reading them back to back, two years apart, I can see the line from the podcast to the archive, and I would rather you see it than take my word for it.

Philadelphia, Denver, and one gallery in Vermont

Bobby, fifty-nine, from North Philly, answered our question about social anxiety for sixteen minutes in Germantown and gave us a better question back: “Why don’t we get along?” Jocer, fourteen, told us about a teacher who explained the draft to his class, and that “all I’m trying to do is make it out.” Two brothers from Texas in Denver explained Southern hospitality better than I have heard it explained, then guessed what Ethereum is. And in Brattleboro, Kay Curtis showed me a cooperative art gallery that is seven years old: thirty-eight members, sixty dollars and eight hours a month to belong, and her reason it survived COVID when the rent-paying galleries folded: “if you spread the work You spread the rent.” I told her on tape, “I’d like my media platform to be a cooperative.” I still do.

Something that went wrong, on purpose

The weekly contest we ran this spring lived on poidh, Kenny’s bounty board. Kenny came on the podcast and told us about the bounty that fooled him: a tree planted in Gaza, real photos, a middleman, and money that never got where it was going. “I didn’t feel great about it from the very beginning.” I put it on the site because that is what building in public looks like, and because the contest pieces sit right next to it.

What I need from you

• If you are a contributor, send one photo. The people page is ready for faces and is showing initials until they arrive.
• If you have not watched anything in a while, watch Hamza, fifty-four seconds, and then Kay, five minutes. That is the range.
• If you can, become a monthly supporter. Fourteen people at a hundred and fifty-nine dollars a month is what keeps the transcription and the pages moving; the goal on tape is a paid contributor in every country where we have a supporter.

The line I said walking around Denver in March is the one the whole site runs on now: “Not for polish, but for posterity.” And the goal I told Daniel is still the goal: “no longer being Maceo, the guy who does 25% of it by himself.”

Thank you for being here.

– Maceo