Trouble in River City
What to do, what to do?
Hello, Friend,
Happy FriYAY!
Woot.
It appears there’s a fly in the ointment, or a glitch in the matrix, or some trouble in River City. (Insert your favorite ‘issues have arisen’ metaphor…here.) As I have just arrived on Substack and spent considerable time, effort, and energy unpacking and arranging things, I’m not inclined to race off to another location just yet. I knew when I got here that the ‘free speech’ aspects of this platform meant an array of writers from any and all perspectives could and do create publications here. It isn’t a plot twist for me to discover the controversy surrounding the far-right wing publications being hosted here. Yarvin has a Substack, the techie guru I’ve referenced before who inspired the BROligarchs to embrace some of their darkest and most disturbing ideas. I’m not linking to it because…nope.
“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears.”
Nelson Mandela
Life seems to be a bit of a tightrope walk these days. Balancing precariously on the highwire and hoping not to fall. The truth is the world is full of awful people and wonderful people and mediocre people. Open internet platforms, like any public space, are likely to attract an array of humans and not all of them will be good actors. Should online platforms monitor hate speech? I believe that they should. I also know that it’s complicated by the balancing act between freedom of speech and censorship. I think mistakes have been made on this platform, but on my Substack, I will not tolerate hate speech, abusive behavior, or propaganda. Substack is, at its core, a host platform of email newsletters. Subscribe to the ones that interest you and don’t subscribe to the ones that do not. Block anyone that deeply offends you. We are all in control of what we allow in our email inboxes and Notes feeds here, unlike the increasing lack of control we have on social media platforms.
The thing about freedom of speech is this, you are free to say what you choose, but you are not free from the consequences of your speech. Let the bad people reveal their true nature and face the consequences.
Unless they’re a very special orange boy* with a golden toilet and a garbage mouth. Then they get to be president.
Twice.
I’m here because I wanted to find a community building platform with a social media-esque feed, an array of other creatives creating quality content so we could lift up each other, the ability to build a subscriber base that I can take with me if I should leave in the future, some source of potential financial reward for my creative efforts, and the freedom from data mining, microtargeting, sketchy algorithm driven feeds, and the blatant favoring of fake news and propaganda. The internet is a complicated place, but I’ve always tried my best to create a Happy Bubble for my people within it. I tried to leave Meta for years. Getting people to come to a standalone website or blog was impossible. People are very stubborn. Meta made it increasingly challenging to share outside links or even your content hosted on their platform if you weren’t willing to pay to play. Pay once and you begin chasing an ever faster moving carrot on a stick. By the time I left, my public page posts to an audience of over 7000 people were being shown to 13. Seriously. I left because it was no longer possible to pretend one could have a bubble there. The data mining/microtargeting business model meant people about whom I cared greatly were being manipulated without their full understanding of what was happening to them. That is very different from a platform like this where you are in charge of your experience. The platform is not spying on you and gathering information to create a dossier they will sell to anyone willing to pay for it so they can use that information to fuck with your head. It’s one thing to be able to delete, block, exhale and quite another thing to be giving your thoughts, feelings, images, creative expressions, personal experiences, and connections to a corporation that intends sell them to people who intend to use them for nefarious purposes. I own my content here. I did not own my content on META. Their TOS were egregious and excessive.
“The art of decision making includes the art of questioning.”
Pearl Zhu
What to do about the complexities here? I don’t think we can avoid the bad stuff by being chased out of every forum by the bad actors. Leaving Twitter made sense once the algorithm became tuned to amplify hate speech and toxicity. That isn’t what’s happening here. If we’re going to be online, we’re going to have to battle the trolls. I don’t see how one fights the good fight hiding in a cave. I understand hiding in a cave if that’s what you feel you must do to survive and I understand not wanting to ‘be political’ on the internet. Yet, as I said the other day, even not being political is a political statement. You can’t avoid it, not in this exceptional moment. I’m choosing to stand up and speak out, as long as I’m able to do so.
Nothing is black and white; reality is all of the myriad shades that fall in between. There are compromises and considerations to be made at every turn. Sometimes you have to align yourself with less-than-ideal people in order to achieve more ideal ends. Sometimes you need to stand in the shit to grow the flowers. Sometimes our actions and choices have convoluted consequences. This is life, isn’t it? Complex and nuanced and riddled with an endless array of difficult decisions.
Is staying here a compromise I can stomach? Am I still feeding the beast if I stay? Did I just try to cancel deletion of Meta because I thought I should leave just one post there to explain why I left and where I went only to find that the universe has my back and won’t let me change my mind?
Maybe, probably, definitely.
And here we are. We teeter and totter our way through our brave new world reaching out through the ethers seeking connection and comfort and clarity, wanting somehow to feel as if our little lives have some greater meaning beyond a temporary firing of synapses.
“So, we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
All of this is to say that I’m staying here for the foreseeable future. I’m building a happy bubble and you, my friend, and any new friends who play nice, are always welcome to this lady party. We have magic to make and good trouble to spread and light to shine and we will not let the trolls chase us into the darkness.
Forward!
If you dig what I’m throwing down, you can subscribe and get this frippery delivered to your email inbox! You can also pledge to support the efforts in the future, if you are willing and able, but The Lady Party with Margot Potter will always be free!
It takes a lot of caffiene and moxie to throw this party, consider buying a cuppa coffee for your stalwart hostess!
*Thank you, Jeff Tiedrich.
I don't have to like what's being said in order to wholeheartedly support free speech...even if what's being said is odious, I figure. :/. This is still the best option, compared to the Metaverse. (And, honestly, we keep looking for perfection from everything, and yelling about it when things inevitably fall short. Be that services or people.)
You're adding to the good in the world. <3