Fog

(meandering about it all)

(fog is hard to photograph, so have some nestlings)

The morning is filled with fog today. We get a lot of fog here in my little region of the world, mostly in the winter and early spring, and right now we’ve had days of it.

I love fog. I should love sunshine and clear skies and a declared and straightforward kind of weather, I suppose, but I love fog. It feels like this slightly spooky yet comforting blanket. You can’t see very far, even though you know there still is world out there. Maybe not! Maybe the world has been eaten up by monsters like in Stephen King’s The Mist.

I don’t know why I find the fog comforting. I find forests comforting too, being swaddled inside of trees. My mother? She loved big wide open flat lands where you could see what’s coming. I preferred places with nooks and crannies. Two different weather loves, two different trauma styles?

I just like fog because I think it’s beautiful. It’s also kind of amazing to be…sort of…in a cloud? Inside water that you can breathe? It settles down and you wait for clarity to come. And it does.

Ah, a metaphor.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole Nazi/Substack deal. We made the New York Times! By now, if you haven’t heard about this conversation and debate and challenge I don’t know where you’ve been.

To recap, The Atlantic published an article about the problem with far-right writers at Substack.

Some Substack newsletters by Nazis and white nationalists have thousands or tens of thousands of subscribers, making the platform a new and valuable tool for creating mailing lists for the far right. And many accept paid subscriptions through Substack, seemingly flouting terms of service that ban attempts to “publish content or fund initiatives that incite violence based on protected classes.” Several, including Spencer’s, sport official Substack “bestseller” badges, indicating that they have at a minimum hundreds of paying subscribers. A subscription to the newsletter that Spencer edits and writes for costs $9 a month or $90 a year, which suggests that he and his co-writers are grossing at least $9,000 a year and potentially many times that. Substack, which takes a 10 percent cut of subscription revenue, makes money when readers pay for Nazi newsletters.

Marisa Kabas published an open letter signed by many of us simply asking some questions of Substack leadership-Not to ban the accounts in question, but to ask questions about why those were monetized and uplifted by leadership and the also.

The Atlantic article’s author, Jonathan Katz, also published about this letter. He’s also had to publish some rebuttals, against those who are basically calling him a “tireless busybody.” Lord.

Eventually Substack leadership responded? Sort of? For a while they individually “liked” posts in support of their stance. They boosted a piece by another Substacker that didn’t even address the things we called for addressing. They’ve commented here.

There have been a LOT of pieces written about why having far-right and authoritarian platforms on your site is not a good thing. There are ample examples given, and numerous very logical and cogent arguments made for how we’d be better off to deplatform Nazis. My two favorites right now are from Joshua P. Hill and Ken White.

From Joshua’s excellent piece:

So again I tell you this stuff is not theoretical. Fascists’ ability to spread their message on a mass scale is not an academic question. We see, far too often, a theoretical free-speech discussion that holds up an ideal while refusing to engage with the real. And there is no divider, there is no magical separation between millions of people being exposed to genocidal ideas and the promotion of violence on a large scale, and people enacting that violence. We know that the right has an alarmingly powerful radicalization pipeline. We know that people see seemingly innocuous memes or videos or articles and that before long they can be led down a path of real danger and real fascism. We know that numerous mass shooters, for example, have gone down this path.

And from Ken’s:

Site managers make choices too. What ethos do we want to signal, and what crowd will that attract, and how much money can we make from them? If we moderate content, will it turn into an expensive, thankless, all-consuming task? Will moderating some people (like Nazis) result in constant demands that we moderate a huge array of things that make people angry (like, say, posts that are either too supportive or not supportive enough of Palestinians)? Will it attract more people than it alienates? If we don’t moderate will the place turn into a notorious sewer? What’s our moderation brand?

That’s what Substack is up to: branding. They’re betting they attract more people than they repel with the “we don’t believe in Big Tech choosing what you can write or read” brand. They’re betting that the “we are the intellectual and moral superiors to the woke left” brand is profitable — and it is. They calculate that getting involved in constant disputes over what content is acceptable on their site would be a big waste of time and money and focus. Maybe they’re thinking that the Overton Window has shifted such that a substantial portion of mainstream American thought is kind of Nazi these days and that they can’t afford to lose that market.

Are they wrong?

No. As a matter of marketing, they’re not. The brand is effective and lucrative. The “we’re the noble defenders of civilization, upholding free thought from the onslaught of the woke hordes” sells these days. It sells even when free thought is actually under more profound assault from cynical and powerful and absolutely not woke forces. It sells even though — as I will get to in a minute — there’s a difference between tolerance and platforming.

This piece could go on quoting and quoting and justifying, but really that’s already happening so follow those links and read on.

We know how this pattern goes. The folks worried about authoritarianism post reasonable things, then are basically accused of wanting to do the things that the authoritarian wants. Loads of bad faith arguments. Loads of “we are just debating these ideas” when the ideas are basically whether or not the people being debated are even human and deserve rights.

I’ve been online since about 1994. Happily. I’ve been, generally, an early adopter of new platforms and have loved meeting people and connecting. And even, gasp, talking and debating with people who’s views are different than my own. I even ran moderation for a few years at a website focused on men’s goodness, which I believe in, and saw with my own eyes how not moderating allowed for more and more extreme views to populate the site and how those views pushed the site farther towards that extreme. Whoo boy, we had a time of it. Moderation is hard work and I found myself often having long, drawn out conversations with people who had views I found abhorrent. They were human beings, and I had no idea how they got to have those views, and I tried to connect? And eventually that didn’t work at all, and they’d say horrific racist, xenophobic, sexist, anti-semitic things and things would get terrible.

Those seem like canary-in-the-coal-mine times. There was a lot of focus back in the mid-aughts about clicks-per-view and ads and making money. So, the more engagement, the more money might be made. I found that to be a dangerous way of managing things so I left. So far as I know all those folks with the views about how Jewish people, and Black people and women and everyone but straight white men, just kept on arguing and saying really mean and ugly things.

And I suppose it’s their right to say mean and ugly things. But the actual platform is not the public square, it’s a business.

Except, that perhaps these platforms have become public squares right? Because we gather here, on the internet on sites like these. I am not having these kinds of debates down in the town plaza. No one seems to be doing that. Which is kind of the problem, in part.

When I was in college, in my very last quarter, I needed one more elective. I chose a class on the Holocaust in the Religious Studies department. The first third of the class was focused on all the cultural and political and religious dynamics that lead up to the Holocaust itself. I think the history part began far far back into the middle ages, and then focused on the 20 years prior. Then the second third was about the Holocaust itself, and the world’s response (including some very damning facts about the U.S. Then the final third (a short third really) was about other genocides that had taken place in the 20th century, with a focus on Cambodia. All the things.

Dehumanizing people. Propaganda about groups of people, religious or otherwise. “Debating ideas” about equality. “Just asking questions.” A propensity for authoritarian rule in areas where the oppression was happening. Economic instability leading up to the authoritarian rule.

A few years after the class, came the Rwandan Genocide. I watched it unfold on cable news. I recall just feeling like my teacher was some sort of Cassandra, because he could see the dynamics leading up to it, hell, he could have screamed about it from the rooftops, and no one would have stopped it. I mean people did try.

My mother grew up during the Great Depression and we talked often about that class I took, and her experience of watching things unfold. She was probably 12 -14 during that time period. She was a great study of history and no doubt she’d find what’s going on to be a real problem.

History repeats itself, it is said. It rhymes. Things aren’t entirely repeated, but there are themes and fugues and fogs. Christine Langley-Obaugh, a therapist, said “We repeat what we do not repair.” And human beings seem really prone to just not repairing the whole of things. Maybe that’s because we are so short lived and each generation only has a few years to pass on some little bit of wisdom, and then the generations below are like, “Oh come on! We have figured it all out.”

Only they haven’t, not all of it.

Or maybe the human animal is simply prone to violence after periods of peace. Or prone to the great desire, the near addiction to power. Like, say what you want about The Lord of the Rings, but man that RING! “I can handle it!” says everyone and like NO one can handle it. Power. Profit. PROFIT. Power.

Here we are again. We have, I’m afraid, a wave of fascism moving about the globe, looking for a place to settle in. We have economic instability. We have four years of a plague disrupting supply changes, and health, and lives and it ain’t stopping anytime soon. We have (had and may again) political leadership in this country that wants to be a dictator, and there are a lot of folks, it seems, that are ok with that.

Just on day one. Just a dictator on day one. Ok, Jan.

We have seen progressive progress for human rights and now we see a push against it. So I take the incursion and encroachment of far-right and authoritarian voices seriously. It appears that the leadership here at Substack either doesn’t take it seriously, or takes it seriously in a way that I find disturbing. I’m not asking for these accounts even to be banned. Just moderated with the same vigor they might moderate porn (ah lovely sex, sex is so much better overall than violence). I’m not interested in my subscribers’ money paying for those bigger far-right accounts to be promoted which is why, right now, I won’t charge anyone.

I’m still a little unclear about what to do, right? There’s that metaphor again, fog? The fog is lifting though and things are clearer. I am not a huge platform, more like a little ledge on the building where the platforms are located. I have 132 lovely subscribers and most of them are people I know personally. I have no influence really and no one here would notice if I left so I have little to lose in moving. I also am not hip to all the re-platforming processes that it will take to move, which is like..ok, more learning opportunities I suppose.

I came to Substack originally because of how it felt so much more like a community. Like blogging and connecting. And in great part it still feels like that. But in this huge system we are in, with the aforementioned dynamics leading us down a garden pat towards something very dark and venemous, guarding against that feels far out of our control. Of my control at least.

I suspect I’ll take that control and move, especially where I know people are going. I’d like to think “staying and fighting” is a thing? Who knows. We stay and fight while Rome burns.

Authoritarianism is cruel. It tortures, it kills, it debases and demeans. It delights in these things. Its power turned into and onto itself and no one can wield it and come out unscathed. It’s not just “debating.” That is an insidious seduction. We cannot tolerate that level of intolerance without ourselves winding compromised. I have no idea why it’s attractive to some. I don’t. I don’t get it, when we could be having so much more love and peace and delight.

That’s all I got today.