Time to find a new home
in other words fuck substack lol
I've never been fully comfortable with Substack as a host for this newsletter, but for a long time the feature set, ease of use, etc. won out over the certainty that the free market libertarianism and free speech absolutionism of the platform’s founders and owners would eventually cause a dumpster fire that would spread far beyond just the dumpster. I suppose the fact that I haven't updated this thing in a hot minute helped me feel like I didn’t have to put a lot of thought into it.
Well, it’s happened. The dumpster has indeed caught fire, like we suspected it would.
Earlier today, Hamish McKenzie announced that Substack will not remove or demonetize literal Nazi content. This isn’t a particularly surprising turn of events — McKenzie and the platform’s other founders have long been proponents of a absolutist version of free speech that says that all ideas are welcome in the marketplace. The worthwhile ideas will rise to the top and the bad ideas will simply disappear overtime. As he says in his statement, “open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power.”
Of course, this isn’t how marketplaces actually work — neither the marketplace of ideas nor the supposed free market of capitalism.
In McKenzie’s view, it is wrong to censor any speech, because “history shows that censorship is most potently used by the powerful to silence the powerless.” Not only this, McKenzie writes, “we don’t think that censorship (including through demonitizing publications) makes the problem [of Nazis] go away — in fact, it makes it worse.”
Exactly how is never elucidated.
It is entirely unclear how censoring white supremacists, Nazis, and other extremists silences the powerless, particularly considering what history actually shows is that as soon as those groups are in power, they will actively and aggressively censor other viewpoints. On the other hand, deplatforming Nazis takes away their power — it prevents them from using platforms like Substack to materially harm marginalized people and greatly reduces the ease with which they can recruit others to their cause.
But in the marketplace of ideas, it’s not actually the best ideas that win. Instead, it’s the loudest. It’s the most insistent. It’s the ideas that are most aligned with the powers that be. Because not all ideas are equal. The fundamental inability to see this, to see that free markets are incapable of actually being free, that treating everyone the same means absolutely nothing when some of those people have wealth and power along with their bad ideas — this is the fundamental failing of libertarianism. It’s why free speech absolutism isn’t free speech at all, and in fact shuts down speech, creating a de facto censorship for marginalized voices.
(It’s worth noting at this point as well that there are plenty of things that Substack has no problem moderating, such as pornography.)
So this will be my last post on this platform. Let the TERFs and Nazis have it. I am no longer willing to support it in any way. I will be cancelling all of my paid subscriptions and in the coming days or weeks I will be looking for a new host for this newsletter. I don’t expect that you’ll need to do anything; I will hopefully be able to just import my list and go from there.
There’s some big news coming next year that I’m really excited to share with you all. Hopefully the process of moving to a new host will be fairly painless so that we can hit the ground running.
In the meantime, if you feel like throwing your money at a worthwhile cause, the Bump in the Dark Bundle for Teen Mental Health and Housing is live now on itch and is already 90% of the way to our first goal. The bundle features over a dozen supplements for the game — as well as the game itself, in case you don’t already have it — all for only ten bucks.
Let me know if you have any questions or concerns, but I imagine this is all pretty straightforward.
Wishing you a happy solstice, and looking forward to the shorter nights and longer days.
jex