This is a post on why I am leaving my substack site. I am publishing it on Substack and here, for users who do not want to contribute to that site’s metrics.
This decision has been a longtime coming. Jonathan Katz wrote about the platform’s Nazi problem over 18 months ago, and while the site does have official language banning hate, it has remained a top location for white supremacists, alt-right historians, and darlings of the trump administration like Curtis Yarvin. Substack has explicitly refused to address these issues and its founders have argued in response to user protests, somewhat incoherently, that “demonetizing publications” won’t “mak[e] the problem go away”. Recently, Substack sent a wide push alert promoting a Nazi blog.
Substack is a startup that relies on user content and promotion to generate (shared) revenue. Many writers have complained that the benefits are fleeting over time. Others have complained about the way the platform encourages different kinds of writing and an emphasis on metrics. I donated any funds generated to charity and have written at my own pace, promoting by half measures. I stayed as long as I did because I liked the format and regretted the idea of giving up a space because it was also promoting horrible ideas.
Open discourse and freedom of speech are wonderful ideals. But our world is far from ideal. What do we mean when we talk about free speech? Ancient Athens offers us parrhêsia, what a modern free speech advocate might call “frank and open debate”—for criticizing your friends in private and also for expressing unpopular opinions in public for the benefit of the state. In addition, “equal access to public speech” (Isêgoria) promises that each citizen be given that opportunity. Both kinds of speech should bring with them responsibility (to speak for the benefit of the people) and accountability (for what the speech does in the world). This ideal also requires that people have common starting grounds in relation to power.
Our recent spate of protests has led to the limiting phrase of “time, manner, and place” to allow University administrations to exert greater control over ideas expressed on their campuses. We should take a cue and apply this to hateful ideas as well: Nazism, white supremacy, and all of the other horrors allowed (or often espoused) by free speech absolutists belong in the past, treated as admonitory, and in controlled circumstances where people are given the option to engage with them.
As anyone who remembers the “cancel culture” panic of yesteryear can attest to, the people who cried most loudly about it, were those whose traditional power was being contested, almost entirely because other people were exercising their freedom. Now that we face an actual canceling of culture in the form of domestic concentration camps, a mafia state onslaught against higher ed, and an expansion of militarized police straight out of dystopian fantasy, those voices are coincidentally, if not suspiciously, silent.
But there is a connection between the attack on education and diversity and the platforming of hate: our power structures are aiming at undermining the thinking and reasoning skills that make it possible to be critical of the non-stop production of bad information. There’s an additional link between these efforts and the support for ‘AI’ and LLM generated pabulum: the intentional deadening of the human heart and mind.
I should have known better and earlier. In my recent book Storylife I call near the end for a major shift in education to address how narrative shapes us
Our vulnerability to narrative is increased when we do not learn about its power, when we are not taught how to engage with it directly. We need to be taught to develop the tools to engage with story intentionally rather than passively allowing it to shape us. From primary school education on, we need to emphasize rich and complex engagement with narrative. This means focusing less on standardized testing and more on reading and discussing stories together. (And “story” here is inclusive of narrative in all its forms, visual, aural, moving, and static.) This means emphasizing media literacy alongside the history of ideas. This means teaching about cognition, psychology, and evolution much earlier in education and framing STEM fields as subject to discourse too, not just as instruments to make us better partners for computers or more effective gears in production machines
We need to be able to exercise the judgment that recognizes that some speech does demonstrable harm to our fellow people and our shared human enterprise. Leaving is an exercise of this freedom. My apologies for taking so long to make this decision. The cause is partly a naïve hope that things would change and a denial that they were as bad as they are. The posts from this site have been downloaded and will be re-released on my old website sententiaeantiq
uae.com book-by-book starting in September. I hope you’ll join me there.
Good for you.
Thank you. You’ll see me there … wherever you go.
The link to your website was truncated on your Substack post, so it goes to an ai startup. Good luck!
If this leftist leaves Substack, it will be Zionists as much or more than Nazis.
And, that said, there’s an argument that Xitter is as bad as Substack. But, you’re still there.
I think this ‘gotcha’ criticism is somewhat fair. The distinction I make is that on twitter I remain mostly a lurker and contribute nothing financially and little to the algorithm. On substack, the platform was getting a percentage of the paying subscribers fees and remaining completely unconcerned about the whole Nazi thing. Further, posts elsewhere (e.g. bluesky, FB) were driving traffic to the site.