Springtime at the end of the world. Winter lasted sixteen months this year, these years, this chaotic decade nested in a minute like a city in a frosted snowglobe. But with the cold weather finally broken, and vaccinations fully in play, America is thawing. Businesses are open, mass-remote work culture is looking more endangered by the day, and awoken like the kraken comes the most powerful force in the world: single people who want to get laid. The mass psychological shift has been almost palpable, and not only in our newly-beloved Lamborghini Kingdom of Quantum Beach Miami, loud and alive and growing in an almost defiant display of celebration. Even New Yorkers and San Franciscans, newly vaxxed and overtaxed, are slipping off their full-body Puritan Halloween costumes and touching each other again. Laying in a field of flowers in Golden Gate Park, light mushroom vibes, we’re licking strangers on the face again, and there’s absolutely nothing Gavin Newsom can do about it. But human happiness, while good news generally, tends to be disastrous for the business of news.

From the largest and most influential media companies to popular fan-fiction networks like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox, ratings have plummeted, and while the most overtly anti-Trump press was hit hardest — with CNN gutted after Twitter’s eradication of their beloved orange bogeyman — the trend away from media fixation appears to be both deep and broad. This is mostly a good thing. It isn’t healthy to spend as much time inside the news as Americans have these past few years, and we should probably all be focused on more important things like spending time with our families and friends and Tinder matches (America has a baby shortage, people, It’s Time to Birth). But while we are finally and mercifully all feeling lighter, I do think it’s worth noting that nothing has materially changed in America other than our vaccination game, which seems to be going incredibly well. Like, while I am genuinely struggling to care about this more than my dating life at the moment (absolutely killing it btw), the last few weeks have been technically quite insane.

The bangers:

If you blinked, you might have missed Joe Biden quietly signal support for the leaked-lab hypothesis, de-politicizing the most important story in twenty years, and hinting at a bi-partisan hawkish shift on China. Over in the ‘Big Tech Censorship’ funhouse, YouTube removed a video of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, in which he was flanked by multiple “experts” all in agreement, for claiming children don’t need to wear masks. Both science and policy on the subject is nebulous, with many “experts” in conflict, but here’s a taste from the other end of the spectrum starring MSNBC’s Joy Ann Reid:

Masks forever. Believe Science!

Back on the ground, an attempt at unionization decisively failed at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama after workers overwhelmingly voted against the effort. It was an embarrassing loss for national labor bosses, their friends in the press, and Bernie Sanders. Despite actually decent reporting on the subject, framing from the New York Times was somehow nonetheless terrible: Amazon, not the workers who voted, defeated the union. Remember, when reporting on a group of ostensibly disenfranchised workers it’s important to minimize their actual stated desires. Meanwhile, in the meta-narrative, Substack drama continued apace as ex-establishment writers who almost no one wants to read, and who no one is willing to pay, continued to attack Substack rather than introspect on the reason they don’t have an audience.

Finally, back on earth, in the world of steel and stone and public servants who seem truly and simply to hate the public, the San Francisco Board of Education followed its All Star year of controversies — from declaring the concept of merit racist to attempting a cancelation of Abraham Lincoln, also for racism, all while refusing to provide a plan for opening our public schools — with a scandal surrounding the actual racism of board member Alison Collins. After a series of her racist tweets resurfaced, and Collins refused to meaningfully apologize, local politicians reached a rare consensus with the public: it was requested Collins resign. By everyone. Collins opted instead to sue both the school system and most of her fellow board members for tens of millions of dollars on grounds that people were mean to her on Twitter.

Is any of this feeling familiar?

Excepting Biden’s slow dance with China, none of these stories are especially new. Our cities, still run by crazy people, are crumbling. The targeting of the technology industry, the most generative area of our economy, continues apace. Industry censorship on nebulous, complicated questions that absolutely no one wants answered, for everyone, by a small handful of out-of-touch rich people? A little worse, maybe, as industry executives continue to do the industry — again, in the crosshairs of both major American political parties — no favors, while the mall cop policing of upstart media platforms, especially communications platforms resistant to political censorship, chugs along like an angry, drunken Thomas the Tank Engine.

The regularity of these stories should be alarming. Our trends toward strong federal authority and local rot are clearly intensifying, and Americans, when they’re paying attention, focus mostly on how to destroy each other while an antagonistic, genocidal nuclear superpower grows increasingly belligerent abroad. But safely beyond the gravitational pull of Donald Trump’s Greatest Show on Earth, all these stories have begun to lose their luster.

And this nice weather really isn’t helping.

I was on a beach in Miami last night, hand-in-hand at the end of a date, when a brilliant, green flash lit up the sky, and an orange ball of fire, growing in intensity as it burned through the atmosphere, fell toward the ocean, a trail of starlight embers in its wake. It was beautiful, and jarring, and then, shaken out of myself for a minute, I realized I was happy.

I don’t want to care about San Francisco’s racist “anti-racist” Board of Education. I don’t want to care about the panicked crying of a failing Substack writer, or the relentless assault on essential American businesses. I certainly don’t want to care about ascendant authoritarianism at home, or China. The truth is I just want to make out beneath the glowing tail of a meteor, and my sense is, after our sixteen-month winter from the belly of Hell, this is where a lot of us are right now. That’s okay. That seems good, even.

But the world is still turning.

Battle line. Back in October, when the New York Post broke its “smoking gun” Hunter Biden corruption story, our social media giants engaged in what was probably their worst act of censorship to that point. Facebook announced the story’s distribution would be “reduced” while “third-party fact-checkers” judged the veracity of the Post’s claims — chief among them, that the stolen laptop containing sensitive material central to the Post’s story ever actually belonged to Hunter. “In other words,” I wrote at the time, “the story was fake.” Concurrently, Twitter escalated, locked the Post’s account, and blocked all links to the story sent publicly as well as privately over direct messages on grounds that any emails discovered on the laptop were “obtained without authorization” (a rule that seemed separately and bizarrely to ban the concept of journalism). “In other words,” I wrote at the time, “the story is true.”

Six months later, we’re still waiting for that “fact-checking” report from Facebook, and Hunter is back in the news. Last week, The Daily Mail alleged forensic experts authenticated the emails on Hunter’s infamous laptop, which no one is really firmly denying belonged to Hunter. The real problem? According to The Washington Post, which provided the initial “fact-checking” back in October that catalyzed the technology industry’s incredible overreaction, the New York Post misinterpreted what they read in Hunter’s emails as indicative of corruption. My thoughts at the time:

It’s clear that even were the Hunter Biden emails verified beyond doubt, editors at The Washington Post would simply disagree with editors at The New York Post about what the emails mean. This is exactly the kind of story that cripples us in 2020: two interpretations of available fragments of information framed as two “truths” on some highly contentious, politically charged issue. There can obviously not be “two truths,” so someone must be lying. Right? But when you really dig into the story, it’s just… complicated.

Setting aside Twitter’s response to the story, which was chaotic and insane, and for which Jack Dorsey has since apologized, there’s the more interesting question of what exactly the typically cautious Zuckerberg was thinking when he led his company into a story so clearly ensconced in ambiguity. The only answer here that makes any kind of sense is Zuckerberg knew he had to make a tactical choice that had nothing to do with the truth: infuriate Democrats in the middle of an historically polarizing election, or infuriate Republicans. Democrats had the greater chance of winning the election. The rest is history.

I have sympathy for Zuckerberg, and for every CEO forced to contend with our elected officials’ bottomless thirst for power. But by engaging in this kind of censorship there was only ever one way this could end. Recent movement in the Supreme Court has almost guaranteed the shape of things to come:

Last week, after the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a lower-court ruling over the constitutionality of Trump blocking critics on social media, a concurrence on the dismissal from Clarence Thomas eclipsed the actual case in importance (via NPR):

“It changes nothing that these platforms are not the sole means for distributing speech or information. A person always could choose to avoid the toll bridge or train and instead swim the Charles River or hike the Oregon Trail,” Thomas wrote. “But in assessing whether a company exercises substantial market power, what matters is whether the alternatives are comparable. For many of today’s digital platforms, nothing is.”

Republicans have been hinting for years that social media monopolies should be treated more like social utilities than private platforms, which would at least in theory limit the ability of Facebook and Twitter to censor political speech. Now it looks like this position has support on the bench. While I find myself inclined to agree with the position, I do think it’s more complicated than generally presented. Social media platforms operate nothing like the telephone, and the amplification and reach of single speakers online dwarfs anything we’ve seen in history, including radio, where by the way — regardless of whether or not it’s right — we prohibit all kinds of speech. Looking forward, I’m concerned about the abstract risk of demagoguery at scale, which is something I write about often. But the threat of political censorship is no longer abstract, so it increasingly looks like we’re going to have to choose between the risk of something unknown and the risk of authoritarianism, which is something we know all too well. Battle lines are being drawn.

As these questions could all come down to our Judicial Branch it’s no surprise we’re now normalizing something as radical and unprecedented as packing the court. Were Biden to add justices to the bench, overtly to “balance” the politics of our ostensibly apolitical court, the left would control every branch of government. It wouldn’t matter what Clarence Thomas had to say, just as it no longer matters that most justices from most ideological perspectives have sharply critiqued court packing for years, including Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Antonin Scalia. Platform censorship would be here to stay. This is a war for power all the way down. It is not going to be pretty, and the technology industry will be absolutely be stuck in the middle. But if we’re going to be the bad guys no matter what, we might as well do the right thing.

Freedom is the right thing.

It’s 81 degrees in Miami today, and there’s a gentle breeze. San Francisco is a little cooler, but Dolores Park will nonetheless be packed this weekend. I get it. Trump is gone, and things are feeling quiet. Even one shot of Pfizer is bringing something like 80% efficacy, which is basically a forcefield in the sunshine (science) and all these cute people are staring at you I get it. It’s springtime. Let’s just make sure we never need another spring so badly.

-SOLANA