Being Choosy About Online Spaces

Over the last few years I have grappled with the size and scope of my digital footprint. I had more than a few “Nate, you’re better than this” moments while reading two books in particular. No Filter by Bloomberg writer Sarah Frier, got me off of Instagram and now I avoid the entire Facebook Suite of apps. Although, leaving WhatsApp while living overseas is nearly impossible because of how integrated it is into commerce here and because family back home seem disinclined to learn how to navigate Signal.

Frier came on the podcast and I found the truthpaste she squeezed undeniable. Her book and our conversation came down to three key points: 

• Algorithmic social media gives us each our own version of “the truth”, feeding our egos, biases, and prejudices;

• This is contributing to political polarization and escalating political violence, undermining our democracy and fraying the fabric of our society; 

• We have no idea what the long-term implications of any of this are—it is unprecedented in human history—but all seems quite bad.

A fourth point that I walked away from our conversation realizing is that our continued use of these platforms makes us complicit in the societal havoc they wreak.

A little later, I read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. She built on Frier’s ideas as part of a larger critique of post-industrial, late-stage capitalism. While Frier’s book was largely about the societal harm that algorithmic social media heaps upon us, Zuboff leaned into privacy violations and how our data is sold by and to some of the worst among us. I was struck repeatedly by the idea there’s a whole segment of bad actors who produce nothing, but make billions serving up data on our private comms, movements, and purchases to the highest bidder.

It was after finishing Zuboff’s book that I left Twitter for the first time. It was after Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform that I left for good and started writing this newsletter. 

Defenders of Musk say he’s a champion of free speech but that claim doesn’t stand up under scruitiny. Musk’s vision of free speech is a limited one. He doesn’t mean the freedom to criticize him—that can get you banned or your verification revoked. He doesn’t mean the freedom to build competing platforms—that can get your API access revoked. He doesn’t mean the ability to organize online anti-fascist networks—that can get you exiled to Mastodon. He, like many on the online right, see free speech as a one way street—a guarantee they and people they like can say whatever troll-y nonsense they want no matter how racist, vile, or bigoted it is.

It’s these issues of free speech and platform choice that I want to center today. 

I chose to write on Substack because I didn’t want to be on a platform that I felt was a Nazi Bar. I wouldn't go to a bar that knowingly served Nazis. I wouldn’t go to a church that knowingly welcomed Nazis. I wouldn’t work at a school that knowingly hired Nazis. This made the decision to leave Twitter and write here an easy one.

But this week Substack introduced their Notes feature and… oh, boy.

Substack pre-Notes was a business product. They, the service provider, distribute the newsletter. I, the writer, am responsible for the content. If you, the customer, find my takes unacceptable, you can unsub.

But Notes is different; it is a Twitter clone, another network with an algorithmic timeline. With that comes the need for robust content moderation. I get this. You probably get this but somehow the folks at Substack don’t. 

This week in an interview with the Verge, Substack co-founder & CEO Chris Best fell all over himself trying to answer very basic questions about what kind of content they’d allow on Notes. 

The question “hypothetically, can someone promote genocide on your platform?” shouldn’t be a hard one, but for Best (and too many tech bros) it is. 

I found this really disappointing. This week, a handful of subscribers asked if I will be using Notes. My answer is “nope.” I am not excited about the Notes product. Most of you read the newsletter in your email inbox, the old fashioned way (I get great data on this). You all don’t generally use the Substack app and I don’t plan on using Notes until they can prove it won’t be a Nazi Bar.

One way of reading all of this is that “Nate’s just fragile” and is seeking or creating bubbles or safe spaces. That framing is juvenile AF. It’s not about fragility, it is about being discerning with the company you keep and places you give your time and business.  

In Defense of Gatekeepers and Screaming Loudly at Bigots

Sometimes I think the internet was a mistake. 

On its surface, the internet is a very silly concept. The idea that I, a curmudgeonly high school teacher, can have an audience the size of a newspaper or TV station in a mid-sized city is insane. I don’t think anyone deserves an unmediated channel to the entirety of humanity. The negative incentives and temptations are too enticing. Human brains and our ethical development as a species are too primitive for that much power. I have thought this for a while but ignored my inner-monologue for years.

I once had a full-blown panic attack and had to be talked down by a friend, when I saw that some ungodly number of people were viewing my tweets on a monthly basis. I didn’t take Twitter seriously—I still don’t. To me, it’s a glorified group chat, (with an audience). I often had to restrain myself (sometimes unsuccessfully) from making fart jokes. I always thought the idea that my tweets were generating interview requests from NPR and speaking invitations to be preposterous.  A sizable percentage of my tweets had typos. It became a running joke in my house, with my friend group, and the name of the new newsletter. I decided to walk away from Twitter (for the second time) on Halloween: Takes & Typos was born in November.  I think I am better for it and I am glad you’re along for the ride.

In the 90s when the internet hit the mainstream, there were a lot of breathless opinion pieces celebrating the “rise of the citizen journalists,” “the democratization of media,” and “the death of gatekeepers.” Each of those has yielded mixed, at best, results. Many of the “citizen journalists" are cranks, conspiracy theorists, or worse. The “democratization of media” has given scammers, propagandists, and fabulists massive platforms to grift or “monetize” their followers. “The death of gatekeepers” is similarly going poorly. The intervening thirty years have shown us that we need better gatekeepers—not their abolition. Gatekeepers kept schmucks and fascists on the fringes. What we needed in the 90s was someone to send Thomas Friedman or Ruth Marcus out to pasture, but what we got was Alex Jones’s InfoWars and anti-vaxx crunchy mommy blogs.

Another way the internet is a mistake is its ability to elevate bad faith arguments into the political mainstream. There is currently an ongoing, disingenuous public spat over the “free speech crisis.” Possibly the most tedious salvo in this discourse was  this unfortunate letter in Harper’s crying about the current “stifling atmosphere” regarding speech. Ask yourself, in the year of our Lord, two thousand and twenty-three, do you think people being unable to share their (terrible) opinions and beliefs is really a major societal issue? Do you feel censored or silenced in your life? That doesn't pass the smell test for me. 

The people crying about speech are what I term opinion elites: people previously able to opine on newspaper opinion pages and in university lecture halls, without any real rejoinder. But an upshot of the aforementioned “democratization of media” is that now when they publish nonsense takes (pick your poison: race science, transphobic TERF-ery, anti-immigration sentiments, or other reactionary apologetics), they get an earful from people they perceive as below them. They are unaccustomed to being told “sir/ma’am, your takes are abhorrent and here’s why…” en masse. This is the core of the speech crisis. We have a cadre of elites conflating people telling them "I don't like you or what you're saying" with "you don't have the right to say it." Speech is a two way street. Yelling “shut up you noxious bigot, you’re not welcome in this space” is impolite. But the right to do so is as sacred as the right to pen cornball columns in the paper of record.