The World’s Most Exclusive Website

http://theworldsmostexclusivewebsite.com/

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As Weinergate blows up the Twittersphere, and Rebecca Black’s parents reportedly fund the 13-year-old to create an abomination of a YouTube music video, isn’t it time we reintroduce a little more exclusivity to the web? Aren’t we all nostalgic for the days when Facebook was accessible only by Hahvahd? Politicians seem to be. Congress has shied away from Twitter, with tweets from our nation’s representatives dropping almost 30 percent since the news of Rep. Anthony Weiner’s (D—N.Y.) scandal broke, according to government-tweet-tracker TweetCongress.

That’s where The World’s Most Exclusive Website comes in. A digital art project, the site limits entry to the internet elite: verified Twitter accounts. Sadly, this does not include me. When I and all other Twitter hoi polloi approach the site, we are welcomed with a forbidding door and brick wall. After attempting to log on, we are let down with a tongue-and-cheek banner: “Verified Twitter accounts are reserved for the famous or otherwise socially significant. You are being redirected to a slightly less discriminating destination.”

That destination is Olive Garden’s homepage. After such a rejection, Four Cheese Pastachettis has never sounded more comforting.

After my failed attempt to sneak into the site, I found an interesting twist to the project: even those with verified accounts are redirected to doors. Granted, there are a variety of doors, from carved museum doors to dreary bathroom doors, each chosen based on the number of Twitter followers the account has. Still, they’re just doors. This is getting downright philosophical. Aren’t we all trying to gain entry to something more exclusive, regardless of our status?

The project was designed by three internet artists and pranksters extraordinaire: Jeff Greenspan, Mike Lacher, and Chris Baker. Greenspan was behind the “Tourist Lane” stunt that separated tourists from New Yorkers on a city sidewalk. Lacher designed The Geocities-izer, a ’90s wallpaper throwback to one of the original social networking sites, GeoCities.

Thank you, gentlemen, for creating a website that doesn’t allow us to publicly humiliate ourselves. Then again, it’s still just as easy to commit embarrassments the old-fashioned way via Christmas cards.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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