I'm moving off Substack

and will just email you from a normal email address from now on.

TLDR: I’m stopping using Substack and am just going to email these out. Maybe I’ll use my old blog again ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Expect an email from drytherain@hotmail.com soon.

Hello all,

I know it’s not a big deal as I have about ten people who read this (not that I don’t love and appreciate you all, of course) but Substack has been platforming Nazis for a while and, like a real frog (and unlike the apocryphal boiled frog), it’s time for me to jump of the pan before it gets too hot.

As a bespoke micro-blogging-email platform, Substack is suspiciously overfunded. It has a distincy limit to its appeal and therefore revenues, so why are shadowy investors paying so much for it? Not that I’m saying that it’s part of a nefarious plot to boost far-right content but…

Personal Responsibility

We are constantly told, with our limited resources, that it is our personal responsibility to save the world. Recycle every item! Use an electric car! Don’t buy from x y z (ABC? Alphabet?) company. Is this the morally correct thing to do? Yes.

Does it have any real meaningful impact? No.

Unless you are a billionaire or someone with a billion followers on social media, whatever consumption choices you (I) make as an individual, will have a statistically meaningless impact on the world.

So why bother? Why bother leaving Spotify (like I have), Twitter (like I have) and other technological cesspits? Well, I guess it’s like democracy: put enough statistically insignificant details together and they become statistically significant. Enough drops in the ocean become a sea, or something.

Another thing to note is that the toxicity behind the scenes at these companies seeps into your use of the platform. Substack boosted Nazis to normal people last week. Twitter made it so that the fascists were all you could see. Spotify remains annoyingly useful, for now.

“Free Speech”

As far as I can tell, Substack is framing the Nazi Stuff as a Free Speech issue.

Free Speech is such a nebulous thing.

“Define your terms!”

If you’re a Free Speech Absolutist, you believe that people should absolutely have the right to demand that no one should ever have Free Speech and it should be abolished forever under pain of death. Free Speech is a very broad set of ideas which contains itself and its own negation.

In theory, everyone has Free Speech. I can say whatever I want. Unless I am gagged - or otherwise incapacitated - no one is stopping me from speaking. But they might throw me in jail or punch me. Free Speech Absolutists expect Free Speech to be free of consequences. Some people believe everyone should do whatever they want - "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law" - but these are a small subset of Free Speech Absolutists. The majority still want other laws governing conduct. If, in your Free Speech, you are calling for action you may have physical results in the world. Ones that have legal consequences. That you caused. Speech is not just hot air.

Absolute Free Speech means being able to say, “YOU should kill these people!” and then walking away whistling when people start to die.

I believe there are Free Speech Absolutists. I do not think most people claiming to defend Free Speech really are absolutists. They are merely maintaining their right to do and say whatever they want. Not yours.

So why do they frame this as Free Speech Absolutism? Because they know you care. I care. I want to be able to badmouth the government without expecting a knock-on-the-door. It’s a bad faith argument from the start.

As John Paul Sartre (smartre than Camus*) said, ” Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.”

So - apart from “I should be able to say whatever I want!” - what do Free Speech Absolutists want to say?

I think a lot of the time, it boils down to:

“These people should not be considered as fully human.”

Or if you want to be more nuanced,

“What rights should these less than human people be denied?”

If these are bad ideas, Reason and Logic should be able to debate them down:

In the marketplace of ideas, the good ones will stand out and the bad ones will die.

Do you truly believe that anyone (including me) is not immune to the repetition of ideas? That repetition does nor bestow some level of acceptance and validity of them? That these ideas become part of The Overton Window.

Look out of The Overton Window. Is the view pretty?

Substack’s Responsibility

You might argue that Substack is a mere platform for people to post.

Ask the question:

If they had a newspaper and printed Nazi propaganda, would they be responsible for the message?

If they had a notice board (like one in the supermarket) and didn’t take Nazi propaganda down when they saw it, would they be responsible for it?

A Final Thought

So how do I feel about Free Speech? I don’t know. It’s nebulous. It’s complicated.

How do I feel about fascists? Hate ‘em.

See you later alligator,

JP3

*Not smartre than Camus.