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.  

How the Culture of the WWE Took Over US Politics

Throughout my career, the Sunday evening work session has become a ritual. I sit down at about four o'clock and start prepping for the week ahead. For atmosphere, I usually have some combination of Law & Order, soccer, or wrestling in the background. Wrestling is actually perfect for productivity. You can focus on your task and mostly tune it out. The crowd and announcers will signal you to tune in for the chair shot, occasional shooting star press, or the finishing move. WrestleMania XXXIX happened last week at SoFi Stadium in LA, so it was my background this weekend. 

Wrestling is theater. It’s a scripted soap opera (in tights) with feats of athleticism and risks that defy common sense. But for a person with my worldview, enjoying the product is complicated. You could build an encyclopedia of the racist and xenophobic gimmicks that have been used over the years (see below). Women’s bodies are habitually objectified. The people in charge of the two major promotions (AEW and WWE) are billionaires of questionable character, both born into wealth.

It goes deeper than that. If you look at their biographies, Donald Trump and Vince McMahon’s resumes are largely indistinguishable up until about 2015. Both inherited businesses from their fathers: Trump a real estate empire, McMahon the then WWF. Both spent much of their careers awash is scandal. McMahon was indicted in federal court in 1994, charged with providing steroids to wrestlers. He was forced to resign as chairman of WWE in 2022, after it came to light that he, like Trump, paid hush money to a mistress. Their lives are intertwined in other ways. Trump made several appearances in the WWE and was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2013 and McMahon’s wife served as a member of Trump’s Whitehouse, as administrator of the Small Business Administration. 

They are basically the same dude and I find both loathsome. I wouldn’t want someone of their character as a colleague at work or representing me in public office. 

Despite this I enjoy wrestling and can largely ignore its excesses because I understand it’s all an act. Everything is scripted, the animosity is a pantomime. The audience is mostly in on the joke. But increasingly, I find myself using the language of wrestling to describe our unfortunate period of American politics. 

When I see conservative culture warriors attacking teachers or the LGBTQ+ community, I see heels generating cheap heat. A heel in wrestling parlance is a villain in a storyline and heat is the negative response they desire from the crowd—bad guys want crowds to boo them—they want to be hated. The “own the libs” aesthetic of the modern GOP is indistinguishable from a heel wrestling promo. Earning the scorn of the establishment, helps them get more over, the wrestling term for gaining popularity, with their base. Why else would we have politicians wearing AR15 pins into congress days after school shootings? It’s heel nonsense, meant to spark outrage.

The more we revile them, the more their supporters revere them.  

The clip above is a masterclass in cheap heat, Elias earning deafening boos insulting a crowd in Seattle on Monday Night Raw in 2018.

The word kayfabe refers to the illusion that wrestling is real, unscripted—that it’s a competitive sport. When we puncture that veneer and address the sport as the scripted drama, we call it breaking kayfabe. The feigned outrages that rise up in our politics everyday feel like kayfabe. Look at events this week in Tennessee: two Black Democratic legislators were expelled from the House for breaking rules on decorum while participating in a protest against gun violence. Rep. Andrew Farmer, who has a voice that is simultaneously reminiscent of Foghorn Leghorn and a plantation owner, condemned their actions in this video.

Farmer, maintaining kayfabe, pretended to be outraged by the protest, treating it as an unprecedented breach of decorum. Rep. Justin Pearson, one of the expelled members, rightly called out the expulsion as what it was—a racially motivated power grab, overturning the will of voters in Memphis. Pearson’s response was a shoot, an unscripted breaking of kayfabe, bringing real life elements into the storyline. Pearson highlighted the hypocrisy of the GOP majority, expelling him while keeping people in the chamber accused of grave misconduct. 

I’m already dreading the ever expanding 2024 campaign that is taking shape right now. Collectively we face a number of overlapping crises and find ourselves in serious times but have a deeply unserious political culture.

But for better or worse, I am an institutionalist. I believe in democratic institutions and that government can help solve problems and make society better. But I find myself caring less and less about US national politics as it becomes more and more like pro-wrestling.

I have more to say about wrestling and politics, in particular about how progressive politicians should embrace the populist message of Dusty Rhodes’s Hard Times promo. But that will have to wait until next week.

A Nation of Accidents

This week, I published a piece with my friends at Teachers Going Gradeless. It’s about my old nemesis the College Board and their gatekeeping function in university admissions. In researching the piece, I learned a bit about the organization’s founding. The College Board’s role as a third party between high school students and universities is not something that anyone in government or in states necessarily planned; it just ended up that way. Like so much of the dumb stuff we do in the US, policymakers couldn’t be bothered to actually make policy. It fits a pattern that I’ve been thinking about recently. Due largely to the dysfunctional nature of Congress in policymaking and the decentralized nature of the US’ system of federalism, much of our most important national practices are really accidents of history:

Why are Iowa and New Hampshire the first caucus and primary? 

Why do we vote on Tuesdays rather than weekends? 

Why are there nine judges on the SCOTUS? 

Why do we treat dental care as something separate or distinct from health care? 

Why are 401ks the primary vehicle for retirement saving? 

Why are interest rates on student loans so damn high? 

There was never a meaningful national debate about any of these—we just ended up like this and we all live with the consequences because of inertia and the inability of our leaders to imagine alternatives.

In the piece, I looked at one of these accidents, the system of employer based health coverage in the US. We’re basically the only country that does this and if you think about it for more than thirty seconds you’ll see why no one chose to follow our lead. For the unfamiliar, here’s where the system came from (from the TG2 article):

It’s an unintended consequence of domestic policy in World War II. During the war, the federal government imposed wage controls which made it difficult for employers to attract workers by offering higher salaries. To compete, many companies began offering health insurance as a benefit. This became more popular in the post-war period as labor unions began negotiating health benefits as part of collective bargaining agreements. 

We stumbled into a system that is inefficient, keeps potential entrepreneurs stuck in jobs they hate to maintain their benefits, and makes life nearly impossible for small business owners. This was never the plan, it just happened but a bunch of politicians treat the model like some immutable sacrement handed down by Hamilton & Madison. It is not. It’s only been with us as long as air conditioning. Tangentially, understanding the employer health care schemes helps us understand why some unions have opposed a national healthcare system like Sen. Sanders’ Medicare for All. 

Another example of this is the state of cannabis laws. We first visited Thailand in 2018 and can see a shift. In 2022, the Thai government legalized marijuana and dispensaries have popped up in major cities, increasing Thailand’s already powerful tourist draw. The government thought legalization was the best policy, they created legislation to enact said policy, said policy was put in place—that’s how governance is supposed to work. Compare that to the sloppy patchwork in the US. Weed is legal in Washington State. It is sold, consumed, and taxed. Meanwhile in neighboring (and deeply inferior) Idaho:

 “Possession of three ounces or less of marijuana is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year imprisonment and/or a fine up to $1,000. If the quantity possessed is more than three ounces but less than one pound, it is a felony punishable by up to five years imprisonment and/or a fine up to $10,000.”

But in both states, it’s illegal under federal law and at any time the feds could bust in the door of every dope shop in Washington, sending everyone working and shopping to prison. The feds choose not to do so because they know the drug laws are idiodic but they can’t be bothered to remove them. Meanwhile, roughly a quarter million mostly poor Black and Brown people are locked up every year for marijuana possessions largely in Southern States [Texas (of course), Tennessee, and North Carolina lead the pack].

If you think about any of this for more than a moment, you’d see red. But most of us don’t think about it at all. 

One of the gifts of teaching young people political science is that they aren’t burdened down with the weight of lived experience. They violently question or openly reject things that we take for granted because “it’s always been that way.” When I explain the extent to which the entire system is made up of historical accidents and held together by norms rather than laws, they give me the most dumbfounded and “WTFAYTATDMNS*” faces. I love them for that. They aren’t jaded or beaten down by the stupidity of it all like we all are. That’s why they’re our best hope.

*WTFAYTATDMNS: What the f*** are you talking about? That don’t make no sense!