Regulation and chill. Last week, days before the most polarizing presidential election in decades, and with the unprecedented censorship of the New York Post on the mind of every Republican in Washington, the U.S. Senate called a tech hearing to discuss Section 230. While Google’s Sundar Pichai and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg both testified, it was Twitter’s bearded, world-weary, positively Gandalfian Jack Dorsey who took center stage and captured the imagination, if not the heart, of America. Mercifully spared by congressional Democrats from this summer’s tech hearing, this was Dorsey’s first, public trial. It was his opportunity to provide clarity on his thinking concerning appropriate forms of censorship, to defend a history of decisions he has presumably made, and to forcefully defend Section 230. In each regard, his performance was unsuccessful.

A rough summary for those of you wise enough not to have wasted your time with yet another morning of Senate grandstanding:

In questioning, Democrats first argued this hearing should not be happening, and spent considerable time making this case. As far as they were concerned (along with, it must be noted, most of the mainstream press) it didn’t matter that a story about a presidential frontrunner had been censored weeks before an election. It didn’t matter that Twitter was still, two weeks later, censoring the media company that had published the piece. In fact, none of this was even censorship. This was only commonsense “moderation,” and — at least according to Tammy Baldwin, who all but asked Dorsey to delete the president’s account — it hadn’t gone far enough. Once they ventured beyond this initial grievance, Democrats mostly divided in two camps, torn as they were between congratulating tech companies for censoring their Republican opponents and admonishing them for making money (the next four years are going to be wild, folks). Republicans, on the other hand, came focused. In lock-step, they told a breathless story of outrageous censorship, and collusion among Democrats and a nefarious, leftist “Big Tech.” In particular, Ted Cruz woke up looking to murder people. Rebuffed by Zuckerberg, who eloquently made the case for Facebook’s handling of the Post disaster, he turned to Dorsey, who collapsed under fire.

Dorsey seemed neither prepared for questioning on his company in general, nor for deeper questioning on the details of the Post story in particular, which, given the drama leading up to the hearing, was fairly surprising. I mean, who didn’t see this coming? When asked why the Post was still being censored given the fact that they were no longer breaking Twitter’s rules, he seemed confused. All the editors had to do was delete the Post’s tweets, he said, with no apparent sense of the outrage and confusion this utterly nonsensical, obviously punitive step had caused. Delete them why? Furious, Cruz ignored Dorsey. “Why are they still being censored?” he insisted. Dorsey was speechless.

There are compelling, bullshit answers to this question. The contrivance of forcing the Post to delete their tweets is ridiculous and yes, sort of offensive. But, in terms of rhetoric, the position could have been defended. Dorsey could have expressed frustration with the Post, actually!, and implied the editors of the Biden story wanted this drama… at the expense of our Democracy. Mere weeks before an election — and “as an American,” Dorsey could have said, “I’m furious!” He also could have thrown whoever it was from his company who made the original, atrocious Post decisions under the bus, as it is now abundantly clear Dorsey not only had nothing to do with these decisions, but still seems not to fully grasp the details of what happened. Indeed, at first, he didn’t even seem to realize the Post was still locked out of its account, or why this mattered.

Two days later, after tremendous public embarrassment and, separately, a twenty point drop in Twitter’s stock price, the Post was finally set free. If this was always going to be the outcome, why not release the Post before the hearing? Each public loss Twitter took starting from the moment they blocked links to the Hunter Biden story could have been avoided, and all of it could have been put to bed at any moment for almost three weeks. More than a moral failure, this was really a failure of leadership. The censorship didn’t benefit our discourse, and it didn’t protect our election. But it also wasn’t good for the company. What was any of it for?

In stark contrast, Zuckerberg demonstrated an impressive command of his company’s approach to censorship, as well as the thinking behind his decisions, and a deep thoughtfulness on the many high-level questions in play at the hearing. He also came with an argument for what he wanted from leadership in Washington, rather than simply a defense against what they might want. But there, he also came with clever strategy.

Yes, he came to say, we are doing our best to navigate the complexities of openness and security. Yes, Silicon Valley leans decidedly to the political left, why would I lie about something so verifiably true? Yes, we wield tremendous power, and yes, there should be some check on our power. YES, regulate me, please — tell me what to do in this impossible situation. And finally, there was just the faintest hint of: I sort of dare you to try. Why are we relying on the CEOs of three private companies to regulate the news on behalf of three hundred million people? The burden of balancing speech and security surely belongs to our government — specifically the legislative and judicial branches of our federal government — and if they can’t come to agreement on how to moderate, how can anyone expect Zuckbererg to provide a “common sense, obvious” solution to the problem of misinformation (or “hate speech,” another totally ambiguous and by the way quite aggressively legal thing).

One interesting note, it became clear at the hearings that Facebook was influenced by the FBI in advance of their decision on the Post story. Zuckerberg was under the impression, per federal intelligence, that America was being hit by a major Russian disinformation campaign, which the Post story could have been a part of, and which we have still not heard about from the FBI.

Why weren’t they at this hearing?

As yet, the question of whether or not the Hunter Biden emails are part of any such Russian disinformation campaign is still wide open, as Glenn Greenwald succinctly argues, which really can’t be blamed on Zuckerberg, who had been given just enough information to corner his company into a no-win situation. Either he acted, and infuriated Republicans, or refused to act, which would have resulted in further furious accusations of Russian collusion from Democrats. He opted ultimately to reduce distribution of the offending piece, rather than totally censor it, and, at least he says, submit it to third party fact-checkers (who we have still not heard back from). It was an imperfect decision. I would have opted for a robust defense of free expression, and if I ever bump into the man in an elevator I’ll encourage him to do just that moving forward. But this entire situation was, admittedly, a shit show, and really what I want for Mark right now is a tropical vacation.

Speaking of that Greenwald story:

Interception. Over the weekend, Glenn Greenwald resigned from the Intercept, the media company he founded in 2013. He alleges fairly straightforward political censorship, and an out of control editorial team that prohibited him from critiquing Joe Biden, the frontrunner presidential candidate, a week before the national election. The critique was explicitly in response to the Hunter Biden email story that catalyzed the now much discussed New York Post censorship catastrophe, which was likely the primary drama. Most journalists have deeply internalized a sense the emails are fraudulent. As the only (thin) evidence we have seems to indicate the opposite, Greenwald justifiably moved ahead with his reporting and analysis, where, in my opinion, lies his only point of error; I’m not convinced of anything other than the fact that Hunter Biden was a drug addict doing drug addict things while trading on his father’s name, and Hunter isn’t running for president. The dearth of evidence linking Joe Biden to any kind of corruption would impede me, personally, from casting aspersions on the man until, if ever, we learn more. But this is a difference of opinion. This is also the kind of conversation an editor at the Intercept could have had with Greenwald publicly, which Greenwald invited them to do in the spirit of press freedom. They opted instead to try and silence him like cowards.

In response to Greenwald’s allegations, Betsy Reed, editor-in-chief of the Intercept, pathetically accused Greenwald of “throwing a tantrum,” and called it a day. This is all just another version of the same story we’ve been telling for years now: cultural elitists blinded by a politics as faith acting insidiously in the name of some abstract, ever-shifting good, and the systemic rot of our “neutral,” Twentieth Century framework for engaging with the world. In our current social media environment, media neutrality is incredibly difficult, if not impossible, and it is certainly impossible to market.

And so the veil is lifted.

In response to all of this, Greenwald launched a subscription-based newsletter, which is actually the real story. Substack has become the extra-institutional home for writers burned by legacy media companies, and at least for now it’s censorship free. Sunday evening, Hamish McKenzie, the founder of Substack, gave us all reason to believe this is how it will remain for the foreseeable future:

Among the tech commentariat, excluding reporters who don’t want to face the trend, it’s almost a truism that an influencer model of subscription is the future of journalism. Now, Greenwald is pegged to this trend, and we all think duh, this is where the whole thing’s going. But our examples for why the model works are always writers of roughly the same kind. It’s Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan. These are smart, fearless writers for sure. But they were also all relatively famous before they jumped ship from the world of hip, Brooklyn-based media battleships to this sexy new technology the kids are calling “email.” Most great journalists don’t have fans, and, I’ve been wondering, do people even follow Greenwald for his journalism, or do they follow him because they like him — the persona — and especially on Twitter? Socialist vibes for sure (and okay yikes), but he’s sort of the Dark Knight of free speech, for which he wages public war on a daily basis. And that’s just, as they say in the biz, good television.

Every facet of contemporary life increasingly runs on personality-driven drama. This is all reality television, now, from the scale of our little internecine, industry conflicts all the way up to the American presidency. It’s a celebrity economy, and in the world of celebrity outliers dominate. In journalism, celebrities have existed, but they have never comprised the bulk of reporting. How many beat reporters can you name? How many beat reporters can you name who cover topics even so obviously vital as the pandemic, or China? Historically, we followed the Times, or the Post for current events, not Betty Flick from Queens who covers City Hall, who isn’t famous, and who very few people are willing to pay on a subscription basis. But speaking as a San Franciscan, living in a city currently crumbling while our politicians do everything in their power to accelerate the damage, we need to know what’s going on at City Hall.

Is the future a world of subscription for every beat? Or is the future a rebundling of individual newsletters? Will people like Greenwald start commissioning pieces in a variety of fields? And isn’t that just another media company? In terms of design, even, doesn’t that just look like a blog?

Newsletters are going to play a vital role in media over the next decade, and I have no doubt Substack, which has by the way personally enriched my life, will be a massive company — especially when syndication pops off. But lone wolf writers aren’t replacing the New York Times. Substack is a pressure release for a separate, wilder dynamic, which is the total and open politicization of media over the last decade under Twitter, which there is no undoing. Because there’s no internal diversity of politics at most legacy media companies, their internal Overton Windows have shifted to the extreme left, and their cultures have begun policing any opinion, or even impulse to cover stories, beyond that very narrow band of acceptable thinking. Celebrity writers who aren’t into the 1984 vibes are acting rationally, and predictably. They’re jumping ship to capture the value of their audiences, unmediated by management at their often hostile workplaces, while writers without an audience are stuck in the belly of the old media beast because there’s nowhere else to go. This doesn’t really indicate the old institutions will completely vanish, it mostly just seems to indicate there’s a market for media companies dominated by new political and cultural perspectives. Once they exist, writers will seek them out. But, at every media company, some clear, sharp perspective or other — and nothing so soft as “openness” or “integrity” — will dominate.

Unless there’s some massive technology shift that replaces our standing social media companies, we’re headed back to the days of intellectual aliases and the Hamiltonian dueling press. Paid newsletters will exist for the most popular writers, many of whom will naturally start to build new media companies with very clear political and cultural bias. The most popular standing media companies will persist, and their overt partisanship will become more pronounced. No company will be “unbiased,” and all of them will be at war.

There are frankly pros and cons. Pro: in a world where everyone is clearly biased, we’ll treat every piece of information with healthy skepticism. Con: imagine Twitter but louder and constant and explicitly the place we go to battle, now — a place we also low key live inside. Healthy? I don’t know. But I can guarantee you’ll be glued to your newsfeed.

Mass murder, but in a cute way. The authoritarianism we’re seeing in our newsrooms is nothing compared to what we’re seeing in local politics, and especially throughout the Pacific Northwest. I’ve written at length about San Francisco, but today the city of Portland is on the brink of electing a mayor who appears to be literally a Stalinist. “I am Antifa” says Sarah Iannarone, and at some point I think we’re going to have to start listening to these people when they tell us what they believe. Sarah’s lead in the race significantly weathered after her now infamous support of the politically-motivated rioting, arson, and murder we’ve seen in Portland and Seattle these past five months. But then came Bernie “it’s not socialism, it’s Democratic Socialism” Sanders with an endorsement of a politician who appears to be an actual Communist. In polling, she’s now tied in the lead for the race.

Controversy erupted last week when an old ballot of Sarah’s resurfaced, depicting protest votes for Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedung, Fidel Castro, and Ho Chi Minh, men directly responsible for the most devastating political killings in history, which left around a hundred million people dead. More recently, Sarah appeared publicly in clothes depicting several of these same dictators. She has since hedged. The ballot was a joke, we’re told. The dress is art, we’re told. Even had she not called herself the Antifa candidate, and were Antifa not obsessed with Marxist imagery and language, my sense is no one would really believe Sarah wasn’t somewhat serious. Would they?

We know this dynamic. We’ve all seen it before. It’s twee dictator shit, a kind of cutesy normalization of mass murder in the name of open class warfare. It’s part gallows humor, and part earnest, heroic, messianic depiction of Che Guevara on a t-shirt. It’s the stuff of college town coffee shops, and neckbeard grad students talking about economists they’ve never read between sips of their nine dollar lattes. One reading of the behavior is it’s all just anti-establishment. None of these people really want to put gay men in concentration camps as did, for example, their hero Fidel Castro. Then, read as an ignorant cry for attention from an adult-sized child with daddy issues, it’s hard to really care. But from the lead candidate for mayor in a major, American city? Has our bar really sunk so low? This isn’t a child. This is a grown woman telling us what she thinks about the world, and she wants to be in charge.

Marxist ideology was stained by its abysmal human catastrophe in the last century. But as adherents still cling to the faith, it’s been in need of rebranding. This is the kind of thing I would chat about with Marxists back at 19, when I myself was briefly a member of the cult. Posters, videos, charming spokespeople. How do we make the murder stuff less scary? The Revolution will be Instagrammed, and if you walk the line cautiously enough the mainstream press will launch you, and your message, into stardom. The next piece of strategy is brazen gaslighting, and the insistence that there’s nothing wrong with your mayor rocking a portrait of the greatest political mass murderer in history. There’s nothing wrong with Marxism, either. A few mistakes were made, but the message is good. You’ve simply been programmed to hate the stuff. Anyway, was it really mass murder? “Let’s unpack this.”

“The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

But not even Orwell saw this carnival coming. The drama surrounding Sarah’s candidacy seems to have propelled her to a meaningful shot at victory. She’s good at attracting attention. So is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So is Donald Trump. Loved, hated, it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. All that matters is we can’t look away. Welcome to the Twenty-first Century. Attention is the only rule.

Are you not entertained?

-SOLANA