That is incidentally a big part of the answer for (3). We are very public about how we think about this, and the first of those posts was written before there was any real pressure on this stuff. We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.
> We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.
I'm interested in hearing more, I recently had a Substack recruiter reach out to me and was curious about this because I work at a tech company w/ some internal "activists" (I don't consider them to be activists).
How would you talk about it with them while hiring? It seems like you might need to bring up uncomfortable (and potentially risky) things like politics (?) during an interview?
What to do if your employees start doing walkouts or what not? At the company I work for this happened. A lot of people don't feel comfortable standing up to the ones who are most vocal about cancel-culture (if you disagree with them you may be labeled and considered a "fascist" (ugh) or even worse a "nazi" and your career impacted), I find that most people just stay silent in the face of this and the organizers of these movements seem to rule the roost in the workplace.
Great job either way I'm a Substack supporter! :thumbsup:
It was a well known company where the walkout made the news.
My main thing in stating this is just to say that at this point in time I'm looking for a Coinbase/37Signals style work environment where I don't have to take part in others activism or "be an ally" by doing as told.
That philosophical stance is very common at the beginnings of a platform. E.g., Twitter being the "free-speech wing of the free-speech party". Or Christopher "moot" Poole, who created 4-chan. But over time, tensions develop between the theory and the practice.
So what sorts of things do you folks find personally odious but see it as important to support?
From your terms of service, obviously porn isn't in that category. What about, say, open antisemitism? Will you host and help fund the American Nazi Party or the KKK? How about more borderline actors, like people who promote racist conspiracy theories and ethnic cleansing, but stop short of direct calls for violence?
If your definition of free speech requires that a platform have no rules whatsoever, then there has never been a free speech platform anywhere on the internet, because such a platform would have to accept illegal content and spam, and could never moderate anything.
But that's not my point, 4chan has clear rules that are not about illegal content: https://4chan.org/rules. There are moderators/janitors enforcing thoses rules and a report system. The first rule is:
"1. You will not upload, post, discuss, request, or link to anything that violates local or United States law."
But that's only the first rule. There are 17 global rules, and each board has a few.
Exactly. My point with Poole is that he started a platform that was much more accepting than competitor sites. Eventually he wasn't happy with how it turned out and walked away from it. Easy enough to do when it's a small operation. But with a larger operation like Twitter staff are invested enough that they won't just say "fuck it". So you see stronger TOSes build up over time.
The CPUSA and SWP have been pretty irrelevant for the past couple decades. They're being left out because even hardcore leftist just aren't thinking about them at all. Modern leftists aren't flocking around the organizations that were the extreme left of the 20th Century.
Exactly. I read his response and said, "Wait, did I say anything about the far right?" No, I didn't.
In the US, right now violent extremists are almost all from the far right. At points in our history, we have had violent far-left extremists, so it's not impossible. It's not even inconceivable; given spiking wealth inequality, in some ways I'm surprised I haven't seen any anti-billionaire violence. Ditto climate-change and eco-terrorism. But it's definitely the case that extremist threats here are mostly from the right.
But I do think it's telling that he saw me pointing out the KKK and the American Nazi Party as examples of current violent extremism and thought, "How dare you attack the right!"
Sorry, your comment doesn’t quite have enough Red Menace hysteria. Could you mind dialling it up a little? Ideally, extrapolating from zero people, since asserting “society has a problem” from the political leanings of exactly one person seems almost like rigourous thinking.
You’ve already nailed the misrepresentation of the composition and purpose of an advisory body, so you can leave that part alone; the overwrought hyperbole there is already evident after a cursory check of what SAGE is.
> So the idea that society doesn't have a problem with communist extremism is unfortunately not quite accurate. It's still out there.
It doesn't seem like communist extremism is the problem we are dealing with today. Unless you'd like to argue Putin's GRU lackeys are communists (which they're not, but either were and are nationalists). What you are doing here is essentially a whataboutism. What about the COMMUNIST extremists?! Yeah, well, what about them? They're irrelevant in the current playing field. The danger is coming from the right: alt-right. But either way, we can just call all of them extremists. Just don't pretend its 50/50 extreme left/right cause that's not the world we are living in. Not anymore, anyway.
How are they irrelevant? Maybe it feels that way in the USA but the UK just went through a period of time where the government was officially and formally manipulating the behaviour of the population on the say-so of an actual communist. That seems pretty damn relevant.
You also need to think a bit about this - why wasn't this extremist fired from her position? Well, not surprisingly, it's because a lot of her fellow academics are fellow travellers, as was often made clear by many of their comments. They aren't literally members of the communist party, but they are certainly sympathetic to that way of thinking. I've talked to them directly, the things they come out with are astonishing.
Meanwhile, nobody even remotely right wing has had any influence at all, especially not in recent years. The libertarian wing of the Conservative party, such that it is, was reduced to constantly voting against the government, which always failed because they were supported by Labour. The "opposition" primarily "opposed" the government by demanding it do whatever it was doing, but faster and harder.
You have to actually prove someone is an extremist beyond Communist Party membership. This isn't the 80's, the accepted argument isn't that one proceeds from the other anymore. It's rare that the same organization retains extremist character for generations, I'd expect modern extreme leftists to found new organizations, not join stodgy old Communist Parties.
This is ridiculous. It's like saying membership of a Nazi party wouldn't imply extremism. Of course being a card-carrying communist is an extreme position. Communists around the world have repeatedly established horrific dictatorships that murdered their own people in vast numbers, usually accompanied with mass manipulation of the population through propaganda. If a behavioural psychologist of all people thinks that's the type of government she wants to have, it is de facto proof of extremism, and says nothing good about the people around her who say nothing about it.
Consider how it'd look if she was a member of a Nazi Party. Nobody would accept that. There's no difference.
Believe whatever you want, but that's just not where the shared cultural assumption is anymore. It carries the same weight to someone born after the fall of the USSR as asserting someone must be royalty because of their purple jacket.
Convincing people requires that you work forward from the assumptions they hold toward your views. I'm not sure what asserting that other people actually do hold your assumptions when they keep telling you they don't accomplishes.
You're asserting that the "shared cultural assumptions" have changed, and I'm asserting:
1. No they haven't. Lots of people found Michie's associations unacceptable and astonishing.
2. Anyone who does think that communism is not any longer an extreme position, is simply not well informed. Communism itself hasn't changed. Go look at the state of Xinjiang to see this. It's supposedly full of concentration camps.
>1. No they haven't. Lots of people found Michie's associations unacceptable and astonishing.
Okay, and if you continue to communicate the way you are, those are the only people who will be interested in your ideas. You have to play the same game as your audience if you want to win.
Wishful thinking. The only people who are supporting Putin in The Netherlands, is the alt-right FvD and PVV. We had an alt-right president in USA, who tried to undermine NATO. Finally, it -along with nationalism- is on the rise in general throughout Europe as well as the world, including during the COVID pandemic.
I haven't heard of any communists being deplatformed for like 20 years. So although I hope Substack will treat them in the same principled way as anyone else, it's kind of irrelevant.
Yeah a worker led economic theory vs a racist ideology. Your argument boils down to this: if any country based on a particular ideology did many horrible things, then that ideology should be rejected.
please go ahead and defend your capitalistic gov that exterminated people in vietnam, hired nazis, bombed black neighborhoods, destabilized and created brutal dictatorships in latin america, bombs kids in yemen, enables apartheid..and once you're done digesting that think about the. slave. trade.
This might be the most low effort whataboutism I’ve read in a while. I’m not sure if you even tried to be relevant with your examples. Please put more effort into your comments.
Why would these actors want to publish on Substack in the first place? They have their own platforms already. Alt-right content is highly "meme" based (e.g. the whole thing with frogs and 'Kekistan', or the Qanon LARPing), it doesn't do well on a platform focused on long-form texts with serious intellectual interest.
I'm not trying to promote their blog and am not a fan of it and won't link it, but I know of at least one Substack blog by one such actor who indeed makes their blog highly meme-based. The fact that you can insert arbitrary inline images in blog posts and write whatever text you want near them is pretty much all you need.
One obvious answer is revenue. Getting money in is a real struggle for extremists, who tend to get banned from traditional platforms. Think of it as like paying membership dues.
> Substack’s key metric is not engagement. Our key metric is writer revenue. We make money only when Substack writers make money, by taking a 10% cut of the revenue they make from subscriptions.
I think I'm going to start subscribing to two writers in particular and see how that goes. This is a great model.
I enjoyed these articles, you really nailed it. I think if you ever add podcasts and videos you could be the next YouTube, without the click-maximizing algorithms.
That is incidentally a big part of the answer for (3). We are very public about how we think about this, and the first of those posts was written before there was any real pressure on this stuff. We talk about this with folks we are hiring, and it helps people choose for themselves if the approach we take is something they are excited to get behind.
4. YES!