Issue #41: Your Sacred Obligation to Speak Truth to Power
Fight. Fight with all that you've got.
This is my first issue of 2025. And I am coming to you right now at one of the most critical moments in my nation's 249-year history.
Alas, even if you yourself aren't an American, what happens here indirectly affects you—especially when our electorate has made the terrible mistake of putting a madman and a criminal back in power.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: this is not a political newsletter. But as content creators, we are not immune from the winds of fate that blow across the body politic. My tagline at over at Fresh Fusion Podcast is it's "a show about the business, the art, the ethics of content creation"—and this newsletter follows the same principles.
Consider subscribing to Creator Class, where the challenges and rewards of being an indie content creator building an audience one connection at a time is always the topic of the day:
Ethics. Let's talk about that for a moment. (But before I do, I hope you and your loved ones are safe. This is a really scary time for a lot of people, and a lot of innocent bystanders are getting hurt suddenly by cruel and inhumane policies. I want to acknowledge that. For the record, I am doing OK…for now. But at the same time: is any of us really doing OK??)
For a long time, I felt like ethics had taken a backseat in a lot of the conversations around content creation. (Hence the theme of so much of my work in recent years!) Sure, the really super duper obviously bad stuff, like influencers reviewing products and recommending them without any disclosure they were paid to do so by the manufacturers, got frowned upon some time ago and most platforms took steps to remedy that. But that's simply one example among many, and there's been a ton of gray area that continues to go unchecked—and unfortunately that's only mushroomed into an outright crisis, where content creators all across the interwebs are spewing hate, spreading lies, and promoting anti-humanist agendas with impunity.
The good news (if you can call it that) is that finally there is a reckoning at hand. Content creators and platform owners are being called out for their filth—or their dissembling which is nearly as bad. Because this isn't a time to be mealy-mouthed, weak-kneed, or promote a kind of toxic positivity. Burying your head in the sand when antidemocratic fascists are actively at this very minute attempting to harm people of color and folks in the LGBTQ+ community while striking fear into the hearts of the poor and into immigrant communities—well, that has become throughly unacceptable among all people of good conscience. (And if you're reading this, I hope that describes you!)
Let's get crystal clear on exactly what I'm talking about.
I'm not afraid to call out people publicly should the situation warrant it, and unfortunately that has happened on more than one occasion very recently.
Here is one example. Jamie Lawrence, the Chief Technical Officer at Podia which is itself a platform for content creators, recently published a blog post for his personal blog "I disagree" wherein he wrote the following:
We shouldn’t feel bad about enjoying the art even if the artist turns out to be reprehensible. The art and the artist are not the same thing and enjoying that music, or book, or web framework does not mean you inherit the flaws of the creator. They are not their art, and you are not them. It’s not a transitive relationship. And we can feel angry and betrayed and disappointed but we shouldn’t feel guilty. It’s not our responsibility to police the entire world.
Now if he'd left out the part about "web framework" (more on that in a moment!) and kept talking merely about personal enjoyment of art, I might have even agreed with him. As I recently mentioned on Mastodon, I was reviewing the Wikipedia entry about the attitudes and political beliefs of my favorite Surrealist artist, Salvador Dalí—and whowee that is quite the eye-opener.
But Jamie didn't stop there—he went on to talk specifically about a topic very relevant to my professional life: the Ruby on Rails web framework and in particular its stewardship by founder and "BDFL" (Benevolent Dictator for Life…an increasingly controversial phrase used in the Open Source software community) David Heinemeier Hansson—aka DHH.
I'll explain in a little bit just what an odious fellow DHH has become—a man I might add I once greatly admired and even aspired to emulate—but first, what Jamie wrote:
When I type
rails cit sure doesn’t feel as if I’ve just given a big thumbs-up to whatever shit-take DHH has just published on his blog. I’m not over here runningbundle install fascism.The thing is, I don’t care about literally anything DHH has to say that isn’t 100% about Rails. I don’t care what sort of moment he’s having or which extreme view he’s decided to cosy up to today. I don’t care about his social commentary. I don’t follow his blog or subscribe to his feeds. I’m only aware of any of his views when those outraged by it decide to push it into my life. It’s those people who are giving him more power, and elevating his status, outside of the one narrow place where he might deserve it.
DHH is not my moral and political compass.
OK. The thing is Jamie, you're the Chief Technology Officer of a company whose platform is literally built on top of Rails and who directly employs people who literally promote Ruby on Rails. I think we deserve moral clarity from you a bit better than "I don’t care about literally anything DHH has to say that isn’t 100% about Rails"—and not only that, essentially victim-blaming the people who amplify DHH's abhorrent views in an attempt to raise awareness because…that gives him more power? (So is that what journalists do when they critique those in power, exposing their corruption and their inhumane policies? Give them more power?!)
And let's get real here, DHH's views are truly abhorrent. I hate to even link to his blog, but here it is. Just since November 2024 (!!), he has managed to:
- Bid "good fucking riddance" to DEI and "woke orthodoxies"
- Promote a noted transphobe, author Abigail Shrier, all while making fun of "therapy at work"
- Spout ridiculous and uninformed opinions about ADHD diagnosis and people who need to take medication for ADHD
- Praise Mark Zuckerberg for removing LGBTQ+ protections and other safe moderation policies as well as fact-checkers: "I for one am stoked about Meta's pivot on censorship…The world needs America and its exceptional principles more than ever. I will cheer for Zuckerberg without reservation when he works in their service."
- Laud the supposed failure of "integration and the fall of multiculturalism" in Europe, even going so far as to assert that hesitation to sound too much like, well, 1930s Nazis, shouldn't stop people from defending "national pride in history, traditions, and culture"
- Celebrate the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. President, saying "Trump is back at the helm of the United States, and the majority of Americans are optimistic about the prospect…And I'm right there with them. The current American optimism is infectious!" and that "After spending so long lost in the wilderness of excessive self-criticism and self-loathing, there's finally a broad coalition of the willing working to get the mojo back…Pessimism is literally for losers."
And that's just in the past 2 1/2 months!
So Jamie, as I said on Mastodon (still waiting for a response, BTW), nobody's asking you to rebuild your entire platform using another technology stack. But we are asking you to recognize that when you know about DHH's horrible and frankly dangerous political views which he is very happy to promote and defend in public, and yet you think it's perfectly acceptable to bundle install rails, maybe what you're actually doing is indeed bundle install fascism and you simply lack the backbone to admit it.
Zero-Tolerance for Nazis—why is this controversial?!
I published One Week Down, Only 207 to Go! last Friday wherein I stated in response to some other shenanigans (such as Jewel's sorta-kinda half-hearted apology for performing for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at an Inauguration Day Ball):
What bothers me more than the outright American Nazis and fascists themselves are the mealy-mouthed, cowardly people who either find ways to defend them or find ways to defend other people who don’t seem to be bothered by associating with them.
I don’t blame MAGA for being MAGA, in a sense. They are bold and forthcoming with their hate and stupidity. You know where you stand with them. What I absolutely cannot abide are the moderates & “progressives” who think the things we should really be focusing on right now are tone-policing, bridge-building, and letting bygones be bygones if someone issues an oopsie poopsie.
Fuck that shit.
Listen, do I wish we could be talking instead about uplifting things, filled with joy and optimism? I do! I really do. It may not always seem like it, but I naturally am a very “glass half-full” sort of person.
But as Internet content creators, we have a sacred obligation to speak truth to power. Perhaps our typical subject matter isn't about anything even remotely related to "politics". Maybe the only thing you ever publish is recipes! Or pictures of the ocean! Or poems about love, or loss, or laughter. Or a software library for converting XML to JSON. Or a game involving clover and corgis.
Whatever it is that you do, I'm not saying you should go out of your way to court controversy and inject political speech into your art. But what I am saying, very emphatically, is that you should stand up for social justice and fight for human rights on any occasion when it might come up. Don't quibble. Don't dissemble. Don't stay silent. Don't provide cover for people who have made mistakes yet not been dealt the appropriate accountability. And whatever you do, please don't victim-blame and tone-police the outrage of those who are being directly harmed (or know loved ones being harmed) by these disgraceful bad actors.
In other words, don't stay in your lane (as the saying goes). Your duty to your audience, first and foremost, is to be honest and truthful about the state of the world. The more that the content creators I follow do to remain silent or "neutral" on the critical issues affecting millions in America (and around the world), the more I wonder what the crossover point is when you've gone from being a creator to a collaborator.
And if you think I'm being dramatic…the 1930s & 1940s were less than one hundred years ago, and as we've clearly seen in recent days, those struggles ain't over yet. I hate that. And hopefully you hate it too.
So fight. Fight with all that you've got. And remember, you're not alone in this. Future generations are counting on you, on us, to do the right thing.
Your metaphorical comrade-in-arms,
Jared
💡 Things that make you think: 🤔
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