All The Worst People In The World Don’t Want You To Be An Autopian Member. Screw Them.

The world is in a strange place right now. David, one of the co-founders of this site and our Editor-in-Chief as well as a man who can make a hotel room an absolute disaster area in a shockingly small amount of time, was telling me about a press event he attended recently where the editor-in-chief of a major automotive publication arrived and proudly announced he didn’t drive at all on the way to the event, the car did, and he spent the time “surfing the web.”

David was appalled. I was appalled hearing about it. I bet if you could ask the hors d’oeuvres how they felt, they’d be appalled as well. And the site that this Editor-in-Chief came from was one that proudly announced they will be using AI to write articles. Artificial intelligence – which has never experienced the joys of driving a car, never felt the deep-seated thrill of torque pushing you back in your seat, never felt intoxication at the smell of gasoline, never had their pulse quicken at the growl of an engine – this unfeeling mass of if-then statements and terabytes of raw, stolen data is somehow being entrusted to have a say in articles about cars?

Not on our watch.

This is a lousy time for media, at least for media that’s worth a damn. As we speak, Google has massive humming racks and racks of servers, humming with their fans blowing on piping hot GPUs, full of RAM that has been made too expensive for you and I to buy, and those servers are running AI models that, when someone searches for something, combs sites like the Autopian, takes our hard-earned answers and ideas, and then delivers it to the user in an AI summary that usually precludes anyone from clicking the links to the sites that these answers or opinions or ideas were stolen from.

This means we don’t get the traffic or ad revenue, because Google’s AIs have effectively stolen it from us. And it hurts!

We’re not going to give in. We’re not going to use AI to create slop of any kind, text or visual. This puts us at a disadvantage when it comes to how the internet currently works, and makes it harder to exist as a company. But we have to keep existing, for a lot of reasons: first, I love existing personally, as it gives me much better access to my cars and the physical joys of the world, like a well-crafted hot dog or pushing your hand into a large vat of seeds or other small particulates.

But more important is the part of our existing that includes you, all of you: the Autopian community. Do you realize how wonderful this community is? I sure as hell do. I see it every day in the thoughtful comments, in the spirited but fundamentally kind and welcoming discourse. I see it at our in-person events, like our recent Lime Rock track day, where people showed up in all sorts of vehicles, vans and Porsches and old Subarus and trucks, and one member even brought a grandfather clock for me to shove into my Citroën.

Other people in our industry notice this community we have all built and are envious. Where so much of the internet devolves into miserable factionalized bickering and general assholery, somehow our community retains its dignity and humor, its knowledge and grace, and remains a very welcome oasis on the internet.

What we’ve built here, this strange and wonderful thing centered on cars, is truly special, and worth keeping going. It’s not the sort of thing your average private equity firm wants. It’s not what all the weirdo AI-worshipping techbros want. It’s not what a world increasingly willing to accept sub-par AI slop in lieu of actual humans doing actual things wants. But I think it’s what we want.

All of this is, yes, a plea for membership. We want more members at the Autopian. I want more members to be part of our community, and I say this as someone who is woefully behind on making member birthday drawings, so that should tell you something.

We’re not a huge staff here at the Autopian; we keep things lean, but that often means that we get quite busy. We want to make the site something that you’re delighted to visit every day, always something new and novel and exciting for you. We’re also trying to make deals with businesses to do sponsored content or other collaborations, but always in ways that we think you, our readers, will find engaging or entertaining or enlightening or educational or something else that starts with an ‘e.’ Erotic? Sure. Let’s say erotic.

But let me get back to my original point: we’re surrounded by crap, by people just looking to extract every bit of personal information and money out of us, by algorithms and demographics and metrics and all of the noise and detritus of modern life. We’re an oasis that I cherish, and we need members to keep it going. So, please, consider becoming an Autopian Member, because cars that you still drive still matter, because real humans writing and drawing and building still matters, because you still matter.

Remember, when you become an Autopian Member, you don’t have to see ads anymore; you get T-shirts and other merch, you get first access to new merch like our boldly experimental Stain-O-Flage shirts, those birthday car drawings I mentioned, access to our live events and meetups, the ability to read members-only posts like our Tales From The Slack series that gives the most raw and unvarnished behind-the-scenes look at the automotive journalism industry anywhere, and Exhaust Leaks, which dishes out the dishiest dirt that most other outlets wouldn’t touch with a 12-foot driveshaft.

It would be great if we could just do this and never ask anyone for a penny and everyone just gets everything, all the time. I’d love that. But that’s not how reality is, and the truth is that we need you, we need paying members to keep this going in the way we’d all like.

We’re already the best, most knowledgeable, most welcoming, and sexiest car community on the entire internet. That’s something worth preserving, and membership is how that happens. I really appreciate it.