So long, and thanks for all the bile
This was my last post on the Substack platform (it was originally published here). If you received this in your email inbox, nothing will change other than the sender info next time round. If you’ve followed a link, then the destination URL will be different. But that’s it! My hand-wrung words will still flow onto your glistening screen.
“Why are you even telling me this?!?” you 100% legitimately ask.
Well…
I guess one of the themes that’s emerged since I started writing regularly is a fair degree of scepticism around big tech: the companies and individuals behind the software we all use to do our work and manage our lives.
Substack falls into this category – not (yet) asserting the dominance of Meta, or X, or ByteDance, but growing in influence and very much on an upward trajectory.
I’m as guilty as anyone (probably far more guilty) of falling hook, line and sinker for new tools and tech without giving much thought to potential wider implications, particularly in the early days of social media.
But as time has moved on – and attitudes, tone, and tolerance have shifted – it now feels appropriate to be digging a little deeper.
Hiding in plain sight
Substack are exceptional at marketing their product as revolutionary, but underneath all the froth is an email delivery mechanism and some accompanying web content, which have been around since the Internet was in short trousers.
Lots of other newsletter and blog options exist, many offering slick features and paid subscriptions, and switching to a different provider can be remarkably straightforward (case in point: it literally took me ten minutes to set up a buttondown account, and ten minutes to import my small-but-perfectly-formed group of subscribers and archive over to it).
True, the advent of Substack Notes, podcast features, and now going all-in on video shows they clearly have eyes on bigger prizes – but is that functionality really what people are after, or more about satisfying some old skool venture capital ‘growth at all costs’ model? More on that below.
For those of you who don’t follow the minutiae goings-on of digital platforms (and why would you?) the publication of Jonathan Katz’s article in The Atlantic Substack Has a Nazi Problem and his follow-up post has given me the kick I required.
Coming hot on the heels of my recent venting about Spotify, I feel I can’t really justify my use of Substack while it does nothing to tackle people espousing views that encapsulate the very worst humanity has to offer.
And the truth is I should have acted sooner. My very first post highlighted one of Katz’s earlier exposés; I mouthed off on Twitter and LinkedIn after Substack CEO Chris Best’s cringing, mealy-mouthed handling of Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel’s perfectly valid questions; Anil Dash has consistently called out the issues; and as far back as 2021 Jude Doyle was pointing out Substack was not a neutral platform.
But I got seduced by Substack’s hype machine: the great writers, excellent publications, and critical thinkers who’ve all been drawn to the platform, the hubbub around it (they’re leaning into politics dontcha know), the community that’s starting to knit together on Notes. And I guess I had a thinly-veiled hope that things were changing.
As yet though, no tangible sign. Katz has been pushing the Substack founders on this issue for months, others have reported posts brimming full of hate speech where no action has been taken. I expect the noise around Katz’s piece will force some sort of public reaction from Substack, but given the evidence to date I’m not convinced it’ll result in a meaningful pivot, so I’m voting with my feet.
In Substack’s case I think it’s worth stating that this isn’t simply a content moderation issue – it’s the active promotion, courting, and likely monetisation of extreme right-wing views.
The KitKat problem
The reality, of course, is there are no neutral platforms; almost every player in the field has practices and policies that don’t look wonderful under the microscope.
Questions of morality, of ethics, of what’s ‘good’ and what’s ’bad’ are trickier than ever these days. Monolithic companies, both tech and non-tech, permeate everything we do so if you spend time overthinking these sort of things (as I clearly do) you’re constantly having to consider where to draw your lines.
In a digital era, that’s hard. Because it’s not just about selecting whether to use one tool or another, the network effect can impact a wide range of connections on both a personal and professional level.
I’ve read so many posts, articles, and laments in the last year about people’s difficult decisions to leave Twitter. To an outsider this may look like a binary choice, but to those who have immersed themselves in Twitter culture, often over many years, it means giving up friends, daily habits, and the way they orientate themselves in the world.
Taking decisions on principle used to be simpler. When I was growing up, my family avoided – and continue to avoid – Nestlé products as much as possible (I won’t go into Nestlé’s many heinous activities here but check out the ‘controversies and criticisms’ section on their Wikipedia entry if you have the stomach for it). As consumers we have choices, and the choice to not fill the coffers of a company doing so much harm is a simple one.
Bypassing the occasional KitKat, box of Shreddies, or (most difficult for me) can of Sanpellegrino might occasionally involve some social awkwardness and inferior breakfast cereal, but the net effect doesn’t impact my ability to interact with the world.
Giving up on a Facebook, a Google, an Amazon or an Apple – particularly if you’ve become intertwined with their ecosystem – is a challenge of much greater magnitude: taking a principled decision risks losing your whole community.
Changing the model?
In a recent newsletter Dan Hon wrote an eviscerating piece on Substack, opining that the tens of millions of invested venture capital dollars would inevitably lead to an erosion of the user experience. Money’s gonna have to be clawed back from somewhere, ergo we race to the bottom.
So far, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) have pumped around $80 million into Substack, via two funding rounds. The fact that it’s the company Marc Andreessen co-founded leading the charge – the very same Marc Andreesseen whose recent techno-optimist manifesto laid bare his principles – is telling.
With Substack we once again have a prominent, growing-in-popularity service that’s steeped in the worldview of Silicon Valley men-children. Which means all the usual tropes about protecting free speech and upholding the First Amendment get pumped out, and very little (or none?) of that *vast* investment goes towards building and maintaining adequate guardrails or curtailing abuse.
It’s so tedious, so disingenuous, and such a wafer-thin veneer for protecting commercial interests – show me an example of any libertarian tech bro convincingly speaking out against the US’s wave of book banning and I might take their free speech argument a tiny bit more seriously.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have some more social and communication channels not being driven by idealogues? To put some serious upfront funding into tackling perennial problems like moderation and tempering hate speech? To really engage with the communities who are underrepresented and all-too-frequently the target of online bile? But nah, easier to spaff a few million on yet another video-sharing feature.
Author and activist Cory Doctorow, who originally coined the term “enshittification”, has written extensively on the downward spiral and vested interests of the modern Internet. His piece from last month, Don’t Be Evil, is well worth your time, delving into the nefarious behaviours of the tech giants we know and love.
It ends on an optimistic/defiant note that I thought was worth quoting to round things off here:
“A new, good internet is possible and worth fighting for. After all, the internet is a powerful and crucial force in our lives, a single conduit for free speech, a free press, free association; and access to education, family, civics, politics, health, employment, romance, and more.
The enshittified giants of the internet may be beyond redemption. Perhaps they have become so corrupted, piled up so much sin and callous disregard for human thriving, that all that is left is to burn them to the ground.
Make no mistake: there are plenty of people within those institutions who pine for a new, good internet, an internet that is a force for human liberation.
To help those people win their arguments – to win the arguments with them – we need to make sure that their point is never merely “this is wrong,” but also “this will cost us more than we can possibly gain from it.””
👋 Hope to see you on the other side.
