The end of 2.0. The story went something like this: a small handful of brilliant young people founded a small handful of social media platforms that fundamentally transformed society. The founders of these companies were mostly engineers in the old hacker mold, information jockeys who believed passionately in the progressive benefits of technological innovation, and a free, open internet. Among several historical paradigm shifts, their platforms empowered individuals while eroding institutional gatekeeping. This tracked an old guard media class down a path of obsolescence, and made a permanent enemy of a dying industry. Meanwhile, the mostly-liberal technologists who built the social media platforms found themselves increasingly at the mercy of a small but extremely influential group of low-key literally crazy people they accidentally hired at the dawn of a new culture war. The activists were, and remain, largely obsessed with a socially regressive, quasi-populist, quasi-Marxist, faith-based evangelical ideology — absolutely left, but not at all liberal. Together, disaffected, downwardly-mobile media elites, death cult cultural authoritarians, and a hybrid of the two popularized a “techlash” that ate away at industry morale and, separately, made its way to Congress, where implicitly and explicitly the threat of antitrust legislation was made. This led directly to the top-down, systemic empowerment of old guard “fact-checkers” charged with policing activist dogma, a total mainstreaming of political censorship, and the removal of a sitting United States President from the social internet.

A tale as old as time.

The problem with freedom-oriented people is they mostly treat their antagonists with a respect and humanity they’re rarely themselves afforded, while authoritarians play to win. This means, over a long enough time horizon, authoritarians tend to win power — at least, for the few moments it takes authoritarianism to devour itself, and for its host civilization to collapse. But in the world of technology, there’s really only one rule, which somehow every generation we forget: everything changes, and the change-makers always win. As I noted a few weeks ago in The Sovereign Influencer, companies that focused on creator monetization, creator control, and any kind of alternative, cancel-proof social media this decade all generated trivial amounts of revenue by comparison to the social giants. But they were riding one of the most important trends in technology:

We’re approaching a world of single-man media juggernauts. Where will they bring their audiences? Wherever they want.

Today, as the future increasingly appears to be an information ecosystem dominated by single, powerful broadcast personalities, the target of cultural authoritarians committed to upholding institutional power they now control has naturally begun to shift. Earlier this year the authoritarians came for Clubhouse, a voice-based chat platform. Now, they’ve made their way to Substack, the platform powering the absolutely fire newsletter you are currently reading. Neither company is public. Clubhouse is barely a year old! But both companies are thriving, popular upstarts amplifying new voices far outside the standard, culturally-approved mediocrity we’ve written into internet law. Substack is also cancel-proofing popular writers, and — the real issue — providing them with tools to make money. For someone who wants to control other people, I imagine this kind of freedom is absolutely maddening.

The most recent activist backlash was once again precipitated by criticism of a journalist popular among the blue check media gang. But this time no one in tech was even involved. It was another journalist, Glenn Greenwald, who most harshly critiqued the sacred person, and ultimately dragged an unlikely new player into the ring:

Here, we arrive at our inevitably tedious reframe. The problem isn’t really Greenwald, an influential journalist accurately reporting on another influential journalist. The problem is Substack, the tool with which people like Greenwald make their living. We’re in the middle of a “moderation crisis,” folks. Free Americans are emailing each other without the permission of a disgraced former Buzzfeed writer. Quick, someone call the cops.

If you’re craving a more exhaustive dive into heated journalist infighting, check out Glenn’s rebuttal and summary here. But, for my part, I’d like to get out of the weeds. In the first place, many institutional writers at least somewhat disagree with Broderick.

From Kevin Roose:

Here, I tend to agree, though more broadly, and admittedly with personal bias. Over the last year, many writers have tried to pick fights with my colleagues and I for the attention such feuds tend to generate, which is not at all to say we’re saints. While I like to think of myself more as someone who finishes fights than starts them, the algorithmic pull to war is powerful, and if you were to scour my timeline for bad behavior I’m sure you’d find a few examples. But almost none of this stuff starts in newsletters. The feuds all start on Twitter, the platform where almost all of the most egregious bad faith, and most of the worst reporting, actually takes place. So why are we talking about Substack, or Clubhouse, or for God’s sake Patreon, the twenty-five person backroom internet dive bar? Shouldn’t we be talking about the massive monopoly platform driving our entire cultural discourse, which has baked into its design a relentless pull to 24/7 scorched earth ideological combat?

Next question, do you think avoidance of robust discussion on the topic of Twitter by cultural authoritarians might have something to do with the fact that Twitter, while uniquely toxic, is clearly the social media platform most submissive to cultural authoritarianism?

Who can be sure!

In the piece that precipitated the broader “is Substack actually evil” conversation, Broderick was sure to invoke the nuclear acronym “TERF,” which stands for “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” tapping into a red hot culture war rift between a handful of moderate-left writers and queer activists, thus ensuring, as with thrice the calling of Beetlejuice’s name, the appearance of crazy people.

Let’s talk about the extortion racket our culture has perversely normalized.

Show me the money. One of the things I’ve found most disorienting about our present cultural chaos is the transparency with which activist mob leaders often employ the language of justice and morality in what is otherwise obviously a stick up for cash. Within 24 hours of the ex-Buzzfeed guy’s ridiculous Substack hit the hivemind activated, and a partial list of writers the company allegedly paid to join the platform appeared on Twitter:

The budding story on social media, entirely divorced from reality, became something roughly along the lines of ‘Substack is giving money to Nazis and transphobes, while queer activists doing important queer activism go hungry in the streets.’ Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder and COO of Substack, responded:

You can read his thoughtful piece on Substack Pro, the program in question, here. But thoughtful as it may be, McKenzie should not have bothered writing it. The purpose of mob discourse is not to elicit a reasoned reply, or to engage in good faith dialogue on issues that should by the way never have been contentious. The purpose of mob discourse is to shape a story that feels true to a mass of people in a state of emotional compromise (usually anger or fear), which is almost always technically untrue, in order to forward a political goal that may or may not be worthwhile. Behold:

The first half of this is literally not true. And why does the second half matter at all? No one is entitled to anyone else’s time, no matter what level of queer they are (I myself clock a respectable level 8 or 9, and people ignore me all the time).

“Alt-right.” Another lie, which Chris Best, the CEO of Substack, attempted to clarify here. Bless his heart.

Okay.

On the very short list of writers we know for sure to be involved in Substack’s utterly uncontroversial program there is a clear diversity of political ideology, with — and it is actually insane that this needs to be plainly stated, as if it were ever a serious question — zero white supremacists. Among the ~ dangerous right-wing minds ~ in question: Matt Yglesias, one of the most famous (if tedious) left-wing political bloggers in the country, the above-mentioned Big Bad Glenn Greenwald, a socialist at war with right-wing strongman Jair Bolsanaro, and Freddie DeBoer, literally an open Marxist.

But let’s hop off the crazy train for a minute and take a quick look at what’s really pissing off the activists:

In a world where writers appeal directly to their own readership for subscriptions, popular writers make ungodly sums of money. It also does appear to be true that of the outlier popular writers, no matter how left-wing they are (again, including literal communists), few tend to be cultural authoritarians. This is not because Substack is conspiring against wokeness. This is because untethered wokeness — the authoritarian ideology of identity politics, the regressive reduction of individuals to their race, gender, and sexuality, and the destruction of people for minor, identity-based religious infractions — is unpopular almost everywhere outside of media (where it is probably also unpopular, but dominant, and therefore terrifying). A whole nation of writers over at Vox dot who gives a shit spent the last decade writing niche “everyone is evil” hot takes under the delusion that such things were popular. But they were never popular. They were just impossible to look away from. I am probably always going to click on the latest, unhinged “We Need to Talk About Spider-Man” hot take. But I will die before I pay a man ten dollars a month to tell me my favorite superhero is an example of appropriative, transphobic colonialism, that I am a bad person for liking him, and that my badness is innate. I believe in God, but I gave up the original sin grift a long time ago.

Back in the world of media, an ex-Gawker mainstay (from the nerd vertical that was, I should note, not entirely psychotic) argued Substack is a scam. Genuinely, simply, almost perfectly the position was this: “most writers can’t make money on the platform, and this is immoral.” Oddly, no mention of the fact that most writers throughout history have made no money, and no serious grappling with the question of whether or not a person is owed a salary for producing work no one needs or wants. Then, woven back into the argument, was of course the standard whack-a-mole claim that [thing I don’t like] is paying anti-queer writers to harm queers. It’s not.

The implicit call to action is always the same: a good and decent platform would subsidize the sort of writing activists find important, which no one else cares about, and would deplatform the writers activists don’t like. Implicitly, the suggestion is activists should themselves be paid to police the platforms. In fact, every company should hire activists to do activism. “Work,” what’s that? Across the pro-censorship media, the sentiment is echoed. “You need better moderation” is code for “I’m a mall cop, pay me to do mall cop shit.” But, the thing is, we don’t actually need mall cops. We have never needed mall cops. And within the media environment we’re entering, mall cops will not even be possible. This is fine.

The challenge we’ll face in a creator-centered media ecosystem will not be our dearth of untethered neckbeards screaming at us about our problematic tastes in classic movies or pancake brands. First, we’re going to have a hard time funding solid reporting in a world where likeability and charisma determine a writer’s salary (this is not a dig (okay this is only slightly a dig)). Most great journalists aren’t building cults of personality online. They’re quietly doing their jobs while their louder, flashier colleagues destroy their reputations by relation. But keep in mind we’re already having a hard time funding solid reporting. Media has been hemorrhaging jobs for decades. I do think it’s a concerning trend worth watching, but for now we’re really butting up against another value problem. Most people don’t trust the press, and no one wants to pay for work they don’t trust. Moving forward, one important area of focus for the media might be rebuilding that trust.

Still, I think the greatest challenge we’re about to face will have less to do with what we’re losing than it will with what is now possible. Millions of new voices with new ideas are about to be empowered. Anything will be possible. Maybe everything will be possible, as people retreat into their own, private realities. We’re entering a shared dream world, and a kaleidoscopic fragmentation of the Narrative. On one hand this is great. The Narrative is a rotten lie, and a society that values new ideas, and new growth, is a healthy society. But chaos is an opportunity for all manner of forces, positive and negative, and our popular voices are not only going to be new, they’re going to be newly enormous.

The scale, reach, and intimacy of creator-centered platforms is on track to dwarf anything we’ve seen in human history. There are going to be wonderful new leaders, but we will also absolutely see a proliferation of legitimately mentally ill people with enormous audiences that believe everything their cultish leaders say. Cults of personality are not new. They’re deeply-human phenomena that have been in serious play since technology enabled the amplification of individual voices across whole populations — and I’m talking here about the printing press. But now the cult of personality is going to play out over live radio, email, and decentralized, encrypted communications platforms that live in our pockets. Technology is never simply additive. Every new innovation changes us. The question is only ever, on balance, do we come out on top?

While tedious and at times dangerous, conformist mediocrity has offered our culture some protections. Generally, a well-held center is cohesive. It’s boring, but it’s stable. The problem is our conformist mediocrity is no longer centered in “the center,” it’s hosting struggle sessions on Planet Jupiter. It also no longer matters. The entire mall cop paradigm is burning. Without a center, and with the amplification of a radical new class of internet voices, culture is about to start spiking. We’ll see things we love, and things we hate. We’ll see productive new voices, and destabilizing new voices. We’ll see brilliant new voices for good, and all manner of giant, ideological bogeymen. The question now is just who wins?

Anyway, welcome to my cult.

Join, or die.

-SOLANA