85. On finally moving off Substack

Greetings, friends. When I feel the need to write something that I don’t want to write, I am capable of the most astonishing things. Emails get answered. Plants get watered. Chores get done. Anything but writing the thing I need to get out of my head but don’t have the emotional energy for. This post is about a year overdue.

You may remember that I was posting to this journal by the day, right up until I packed the truck and left my mother’s old home forever. Part of it was that I was just exhausted by the experience.

But after taking the second half of 2023 off, I found I had another problem, which was that my journal was hosted on Substack, and they were making money off white supremacist content. They had terms of service but weren’t enforcing them.

Substack, basically, was turning into the punk bar that Michael Tager posted about so eloquently:

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, "no. get out."

And the dude next to me says, "hey i'm not doing anything, i'm a paying customer." and the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, "out. now." and the dude leaves, kind of yelling.

Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, "you didn't see his vest but it was all nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them."

"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."

So Substack’s CEO responded to the accusations of hosting a Nazi bar with the usual “marketplace of ideas” nonsense.

The reason why the idea that “you should let bigots debate you in public” is nonsense is the so-called Paradox of Tolerance: If you tolerate intolerant acts in a tolerant society, you create the means by which your tolerant society can be destroyed. It is not actually a paradox because tolerance is not a moral precept but a social contract. (I promise you will hear more about this from me in the future.)

Instead, the Substack leadership deployed the kind of mealy-mouthed “but wahhhh freedom of speech” defense that straight white dudes use when they don’t want to acknowledge that they’re systemically privileged and definitely don’t want to have to apply self-reflection and adjust their behavior. They made it clear that they would rather make as much money as possible, than have to worry about the harm, either to individuals or to society, their content creators might cause.

Me, I don’t use the word “Nazi” lightly. I take the hazard posed by National Socialism very seriously. I once absolutely yelled at my long-suffering wife for using the word “genocide” in a context that I thought was too casual. (I was wrong; it was not. I apologized.)

But we are speaking here of literal white supremacists who advocate eugenics and wink at genocide and suggest that the overthrow of democracy might not be a bad idea, and by violent means, if necessary. You know, actual Nazis. Right here in the good ol’ U. S. of A, on Substack.

So I meant to sign on to the Substackers Against Nazis open letter, but… Didn’t have the emotional energy. Had seasonal affective blah. Got caught in the ADHD avoidant loop. Wound up posting a whopping three journal entries last year. Let a lot of good stories go to waste, because I just! couldn’t! post! until I moved off Substack!

Needless to say, I finally got medicated for my ADHD, and sat down to migrate this journal to Buttondown within a week and a half. The whole ordeal took 15 minutes, start to finish, including the time it took to go to the fridge for a beverage.

But I digress completely. The reason the Internet is so thoroughly godawful is, as we have been discussing, that the relative anonymity that it permits means that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is not iterative. There is very little cost for being a bully.

Content moderation makes the Internet usable, by creating consequences for bullying and abusive behavior in online spaces. This makes room for everyone to participate. Take it away and you get the sad wreckage that used to be Twitter.

Content moderation is not censorship. Censorship is when the powerful silence the vulnerable. Content moderation silences bullies so that everyone else can have a voice. These two things are not the same, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to get away with abusing their social privilege.

I didn’t want to move off Substack. Quite frankly, their product did exactly what I wanted it to do, which is a rare thing to say of any kind of software. I watched Rick, whose newsletter inspired this journal, rationalize himself into an ethical pretzel. Rick’s argument seemed to be that, since he wasn’t paying for Substack and wasn’t taking paid subscriptions, his newsletter was actually a net negative for their business.

I wasn’t convinced. We all know that Silicon Valley venture capital rationalizes pre-IPO value based on how much money a company could conceivably make. So every newsletter and every subscriber means future money in the pockets of the cowards who run Substack and their investors, regardless of the miniscule drain that our little newsletters put on their servers today.

I guess Rick wasn’t convinced either, as he wound up moving off Substack before I did. As usual, he remains an inspiration.

So, at long last, my journal is not on Substack anymore, either. It’s on Buttondown. Go subscribe if you haven’t already!

Anyway, now the gloves are off. Musk is throwing fascist salutes at European political rallies. Zuck has officially given a thumbs up to calling trans people mentally ill. Bezos is censoring the WaPo’s editorial staff — yes, censoring, you’ve heard of it? It’s when the powerful silence the vulnerable.

Enough of our fellow citizens here in the US decided that they didn’t mind letting Nazis sit at the bar if it meant that the beer stayed cheap. They’re about to find out that they now live in a Nazi bar… and also that the beer’s no longer cheap.

I didn’t want to migrate off Substack, but Substack was never mine to begin with. Fuck those guys.

I’m not migrating out of this country.

Wow, that got dark quicker than Portland at 4pm in early January. Now I see why I’ve been putting off writing this journal entry.

If you’re still reading this, I hope you’re staying hydrated. We’re in this for the long haul. I promise I won’t be offended if you unsubscribe or just stop reading for a while. Ceterum censeo vigilum imperdiet cessandam est.

I also promise I’ll write some lighter entries about things like car accidents soon. Oh wait. Uh, I mean, Kerbal Space Program and aquarium fish and my new job. Right.