So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish

Hello Friends in the Computer,

I signed up for Substack when it was increasingly looking like I was either about to get fired from my job or I was going to have to quit to salvage my mental health. (Technically physical too because the suicidal ideation was getting to be A LOT.) I didn’t ever delude myself that I could ever make my entire living from writing on the Internet, but the easy monetization options provided by Substack seemed like a good way to help stave off foreclosure on my house and supplement the income I could get at bandaid retail jobs while keeping my toe in the professional world.

Almost immediately after signing up I decided that I was not thrilled with some of the editorial and business choices made by the owners - especially because they refused to take ownership of their curation decisions, such as who they paid to publish here - but I was pretty desperate and didn’t have the bandwidth to find another option.

Here’s the thing: there really is no morally unambiguous place to put your content on the Internet that you don’t own. (Pipe down, Mastodon users, I’m not in the mood.) Even if you host your own website, like I do, there’s probably a chance you’re doing business with someone doing something…not in alignment with your personal moral code.

I generally live the Georgia O’Keefe quote: “I have already settled it for myself so flattery and criticism go down the same drain and I am quite free.” Similarly, while I remain intensely curious about the world and existence and how I can work to make both better, there’s certain topics that I really don’t think need to be debated anymore. Not for my edification nor really for the betterment of society as a whole.

But some people, such the founders of Substack, think that all ideas are up for debate and bad ones will be crushed in the marketplace of ideas.

It is my experience that people espousing certain abhorrent views aren’t really interested in testing their ideas or considering alternative viewpoints. They want to recruit, terrorize, and make money. So even if I thought certain topics, such as the basic humanity of large swaths of the population, were up for debate, that’s not what’s going to happen.

(People better informed and probably smarter than me have studied whether or not deplatforming and demonitizing people with certain abhorrent viewpoints works to lessen their impact. It does.)

The owners of Substack have not only chosen to allow people with explicitly racist, antisemitic, sexist, and transphobic views to remain on the site and make money from their content here, but Substack also takes a cut of the profits.

I am generally more lazy than morally upright so I was honestly just trying to ignore all of this and hope it worked itself out but it recently came to a head when a collection of Substack authors created a post asking for explicit Nazi content to be banned. And Substack declined.

(But note that they have made the choice to ban other types of content, such as sexually explicit material made by consenting adults so they can and will ban things when they choose to.)

So now I cannot ignore it or live with myself if I continue to use this site. I do not want to support people who refuse to see that they are complicit in spreading hate. More selfishly, I am horrified by the thought that someone thinks I am okay with arguing out who gets to have basic human and civil rights instead of, you know,

I’m lucky: I never got around to needing to monetize this. I already have a blog. I can clickity clack on a keyboard and do some tech stuff. And it was still a massive pain in the butt to find an alternative.

So, going forward, I will be writing exclusively on my blog. If you are subscribed here, I think I have it set up that you will get an email when I post here. If you decide to unsubscribe, you should be able to after the first email goes out there.

(For others wanting to leave substack, my blog runs on wordpress and I’m using the MailPoet plugin. They have a free tier that has a lot of functionality. You’d be surprised at how many require an initial cash investment.)

So that’s it. I’ve been meaning to do this for awhile and we’re turning a few new leafs over in 2024. I don’t claim to be perfect in my consumption - I go on CRUISES for crissakes - but Substack made it too hard to ignore. Oh, and one more thing, among other things I don’t think need to be debated is my choice to do this.

Be well,

Sarah

p.s. Happy New Year!

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