A “missing stair” is a horrible person in a community who is such a fixture that everybody just habitually does the extra work to avoid them rather than pointing at the problem or trying to fix it. Everybody, that is, except the people who can’t, either because they’re new and haven’t heard or have been actively misled or who just don’t have long enough legs. Apparently this expression originates in kink, but I learned it from the speculative fiction community, and that’s where I’m applying it now.

The implication, of course, is that someone’s a shitty landlord.

The bottom step of my parents’ cellar stairs had a huge crack in it for years. It kept getting wider. I wasn’t home often enough, my parents and sisters and little nieces and nephews didn’t seem to mind it, but I ended up staying in that house with my family for a week while we all had COVID, and it made me nuts thinking how some poor little foot, or an aging not-so-sure-anymore foot, was going to come down wrong on it, and a head was going to be busted open on cold concrete. I vowed, upon my very next return, that I’d fix it. It was not actually that hard. I had to work out a bunch of rusty tenpenny nails, remove the board, find a suitable replacement in my dad’s scrap wood pile, cut it to match, hammer the bent nails straight, replace the broken nails with screws, and reinstall it. It’s ugly but sturdy. I was so happy and relieved to have done so.

But this process drove home for me the limitations of the metaphor. No landlord that shitty should get to keep his property. Community ownership and responsibility are more complicated than having just one landlord unilaterally responsible for stairwell maintenance. This stairwell of which we speak is co-owned by all of us, or should be treated that way. When the stairwell stops working, it’s only for some members of the community. Some of the stairs aren’t missing, they’re corporate-captured, like your computer printer is now. They flicker out of existence for those without the means to pay the subscription service. It’s the rare stair that doesn’t. In this age of enshittification I feel fairly desperate to find them. I feel like I take a step, then practice balancing on one foot for a random amount of time like I’m trying to avoid sandworms when what I’m actually doing is hunting near and far for something else that looks like it might support my weight.

I propose a map. A map defining a non-euclidean stairwell consisting only of the extant stairs. Like a formalization of the process our brains go through automatically when there is a missing stair in an otherwise functional staircase: our bodies learn where the extra-long step is required, eventually we get used to it and can do it without having to be terribly conscious of doing so. It takes time, and the process is dangerous, and then once we’ve got it, it’s not free of degradation over time, especially if the stairwell falls further into disrepair. But while we’ve got it, it keeps us safe.

I wish I had more of the details of the corporate-independent architecture this map would operate on. I’m spread so thin, we’re all spread so thin. To ask for such a thing would essentially be to ask for a non-corporate internet. Could call it a brightweb to distinguish it from the other thing. The regular web is pretty dark right now. Imagine a web like the one that existed in 1995, but in 2025. Many steps backwards, to something small and reliable for a small number of users. I don’t know if Bluesky or Mastodon should be models for this, they can be cautionary tales instead. Not that cautionary tales work.

Then there’s the question of cataloging the extant stairs, testing them, making sure they’ll hold weight. How do we proceed? Slowly. And with oversight. Somebody’s job has to be to maintain each stair. Somebody else’s job has to be to keep checking on those people. Because stairs don’t just disappear because the got bought up by the conglomerate and replaced with an ad-supported subscription model. They also crumble because their health insurance got bought up by the conglomerate and replaced with an ad-supported subscription model. Or they were rotten when they were put in—but those are the ones we can watch out for.

How do we bring people to the map? How do we keep people from falling? Slowly, with patience and kindness, with a lot of help. Are you one of the people on this staircase with me? Are you also trying to be a solid stair, maybe offering a pair of laced hands to give people behind and below you a boost? I hope so, and if you are I hope I know you and we know we’re both trying. I try to imagine someone like you and me who’s out there doing this too, who maybe somehow isn’t spread so thin, who has the wherewithal to put the foundations under this stairwell in the sky without getting corporate-captured themself.

For now, though, until that person appears, I keep reaching out, looking for other laced hands.