This Alex Pareene newsletter post is in part a dig at people like me, Substack bros. (Inspired by the more successful ones rather than me, I’m sure, but it’s a category in which I’m frequently placed.) There’s so much fucking metadiscourse about independent publishing and the supposed insincerity of those within it already that I’d like to wash my hands of it all. But the fact remains that there is very little space at all within traditional media for those who are critical of establishment liberalism and the Democratic party, other than Republican shitheads like Bret Stephens or Jennifer Rubin who are disdained by regular conservatives. (Breitbart et al. are their own separate world, a deeply unpleasant one.) The claim that writers like me are just in it for the money inevitably redounds to the benefit of the gatekeepers of progressive media, who I am confident Pareene does not support. Pareene is also himself writing from Substack, which makes it more interesting. But among other things he’s certainly alleging insincerity, the notion that people with politics like mine writing for newsletters like this one are in on some sort of con. And this is the only one of the common insults that bugs me at all, in part because for like a decade the book on me was that I was annoyingly sincere. So let’s just dive in, with the caveat that I understand that it’s a little nutty to write a direct rejoinder to something like this.
I know nothing about Alex Pareene but I will say this: I grow weary of all the (often warranted) criticism people so freely toss out (and the criticism of the criticism) that is rarely accompanied by definitive statements about what the speaker is actually for. I find this to be true on social media generally, even among so-called micro influencers. Whenever I ask a direct question about a stance or what a policy idea might look like, I get platitudes or ignored.
See "Syndication" on the Internet only works if you put EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE, and the news wires knew that equalled death - if Freddie could go to Site #1 and read every single article of the 40K the AP had, he'd never go to Site #2, and AP would have one syndication customer.
They needed it to be like newspapers with physical space limitations. The internet has no space limitations.
Basically, all we need is a simple re-architecture of news link domain resolution.
Morgan can choose The Canton Repository or the Austin Statesman or the Palm Beach Post, and every single article that Pareen or FB or Twitter links to from the AP or Reuters etc -when Morgan clicks it, he reads it as his local paper of choice.
Overnight, all readers "Read Local" they are essentially donating their eyeballs to the local paper, and this density of local interest and endless daily traffic gives the papers immense leverage vs advertiser networks. Advertisers can't suddenly find you at 100 sites, they can find you only at 4.
Anyhoo, I described it more in-depth long ago. These days there are even more ways to really stick it to FB and Twitter. BUT they all let conservatives run take back their slice of the Internet and that freaks media guys out.
I think almost none of this was directed at you fwiw. Seems very much like a roast of Yglesias, Nate Silver, and Bari Weiss for her constant "I'm getting messages from parents at Columbia that are terrified". I think I mentioned this before, but one of the people she covered that way was pretty clearly a well funded right wing campaign.
Anyway I've my disdain for those people clear here before, so I will take this opportunity to post my free speech rant, which should resolve all future free speech wars, then we can all move forward in agreement.
Oliver Traldi had an article a while back [1] where he said the "line drawing" argument was nonsense, and I think he's right! As a state policy, there is no way to draw boundaries that don't just enforce the rules of the powerful.
The problem is that Traldi and Greenwald and whoever else constantly use these arguments in spaces where we have explicitly agreed that we want boundaries to be drawn! People hang out on Twitter specifically because it is moderated. There is a reason that most of us don't spend our time on 8chan, and speaking for myself I prefer not to come across random gore, racism, whatever when I open my phone. Taken to its logical conclusion, the Traldi viewpoint means that no one can ever have a moderated gathering of people. You must always invite a Holocaust denier to the party or else you are suppressing free speech. It's literally just Alex Pareene's If You Truly Care About Speech, You Will Invite Me to Your Office to Personally Call You a Dipshit.
One response to this is well these social networks are monopolies, it's effectively restricting free speech. Okay, well we're not really talking about free speech then are we? We're talking about the power of technology companies, who are motivated by nothing other than money. They moderate for a reason. People are not going to use an unmoderated platform. If Twitter let loose and stopped banning people tomorrow, what do people think would happen? That the fucking discourse would thrive? It would immediately be taken over by paid spammers, accounts funded by oligarchs, trolls, gore, nazis, whatever. And a new space would rise to take its place where NY Mag can talk about how mean substack writers are to them.
Anyway, the point is that moderated spaces aren't affront to free speech. If anything, they are an expression of the right of "people peaceably to assemble". You want to make it more free? Then give the workers and the users some control of the company (don't even get me started on the free speech debates in the workplace, we know where the power lies). Funny how the Traldi's and the Greenwald's never mention that idea.
It's funny, I got this email as I was reading Ross Barkan's post quoting Tom Lay (the Defector's EIC) who argues that people subscribe to Glenn Greenwald and Bari Weiss for "virtue signaling" purposes and not because they actually like to read those newsletters. So apparently, the subscribers are also insincere. I don't know why it's so hard to believe that some people genuinely have different opinions.
You do not need to defend yourself to this blowhard. It's so high school, isn't it? They're angry that there is one site that isn't under the grip of their mass hysteria purge factory and it's getting more and more popular. They have to gather their flock for one more flail in hopes of using public shame to control people. It's so gross. And so sad. By the way I think it might be Alex Berenson more than Nate Silver. Banned from Twitter but a growing community here at Substack. I legit do not what I would do without Substack. Not from a writing perspective, although that has been helpful, but more from a reading perspective.
To you especially I say: Planet of Cops helped me feel less insane. It was the moment I realized: wow, I am not imagining things. This is really happening. It has only gotten worse since then. Also, you help redirect my thinking in a way I appreciate because you haven't gone completely away from your own principles. I have a hard time with this because my own hatred and resentment of the "left" grows daily. But I have to check myself and remind myself: what is it I actually believe? What do I care about? Your newsletter often helps to remind me of that. So thank you.
I am going to leave this here and not go find this person and scream at him. I think that is progress.
you know you have a good thing when you have haters.
He sort of won this round because he provoked you and it worked and that kinda brings you back down to his level. I'm not usually good at this stuff myself, but I would probably ignore this crap in the future. Its just a sign that what you are doing it working.
...."a state of jaundiced exasperation"... Man, you sure hit the bullseye from time to time. Glad you found a home in substack so you can continue to write.
The whole "grift" thing seems really immaterial. Intentions matter in some cases, like I think it mattered that Trump didn't really care about the working class, since it impacts what policies he would enact. It also matters if the person is your friend. But, otherwise, the grift thing is unfalsifiable and doesn't even matter.
Let's say it is a grift, and deBoer is just writing these articles for the lucrative Genetic Impact on Educational Outcomes lobby, does that the arguments any less cogent? Let's go a step further. Let's say deBoer doesn't exist, a monkey just grabbed a keyboard and has happened to smash it and such a way to create coherent English sentences. Again, the arguments made within them don't change.
I think it comes down to people treating political disagreements as personal. They want to expose the bad boyfriend or whatever rather than debate the merits of arguments.
In terms of the term woke don't end up like Rod Dreher and have woke come to mean anything you personally dislike. Ketchup on hot dogs? Woke! Walnuts in brownies? Woke!
Thanks for being the disagreeable and principled asshole that inspires all those pieces. It's inspiring to those of us that are afraid of conflict and unable to express ourselves in writing well.
I have no idea what an Alex Pareene is and, although I never read Gawker, I've read enough of their alumni to know that I wouldn't find anything useful to learn more about this person. But I really appreciated this article nevertheless.
I find the contrarian/grift/you changed bullshit so eye rolling. I never read Freddie prior to this year but I've read a lot of the archives and it's pretty clear he's someone with a consistent moral and political framework. How the fuck is a materialist leftist gifting? Trying to get in the pocket of Big Marx?
I read Greenwald and Taibbi 15(ish) years ago. Then I came back to reading them in the last couple of years and they're rocking the same intellectual framework as they were then. I rarely read Yglesias anymore because I got bored with his (almost certainly sincere!) schtick a decade ago. But he's writing the same stuff! None of these people have changed.
I remember in 2013 saying to a buddy of mine that I couldn't articulate it but I felt like the Democratic Party was leaving me behind. I was a mainstream, Obama Democrat in 2008. The only significant changes in political views I've had since then were towards the left. And not even the hard left. And yet from 2014 on I was completely alienated from the party. I had to stop using social media because it was just a deluge of awful opinions from friends and people I worked with.
I gained NOTHING from that. My career was vastly more benefited from being a Democratic Party functionary than it was from being outside politics. And I'm just one random, completely unimportant dude. You're telling me Greenwald wouldn't be better off financially writing stories about how he was against surveillance of Muslim terrorists but we need it now for the real threat of domestic terrorists? That Taibbi wouldn't have made more money going on MSNBC as a Russia expert who could really talk about how they were controling our country? That Freddie couldn't be writing magazine cover stories about how we need to abolish the police to stop trans genocide?
Either these people are fucking stupid or they're the contrarian grifters. Either way I do not trust them.
To me, an actual materialist world view cannot square with civil libertarian arguments as they are incoherent. For example, a society where means of communication are privately held and moderated cannot have any free speech at all as it is all determined by the rules and whims of whoever controls the means of communication. Material politics is about power.
I'm all over the quasi-sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek, cynical, smarmy take writing.
Maybe because I am older and used to be a sarcastic asshole. Today's sarcasm is rarely ironic and usually a not so veiled attempt to avoid engaging with difficult issues while trying to appear "relevant".
It cannot stand sincere efforts at communication, which is what I think this era needs and sorely lacks. It's why I subscribe to this newsletter and not others.
There is no need for you to apologize for or justify being a great writer (as well as prolific - such a bonus!). As far as I am concerned you should make as much money as possible. There are more than enough apologists in this world making so much more; they sleep comfortably at night knowing they serve their masters well and how.
> there’s a whole lot of liberals now who never really come out and defend the excesses of woke politics... They are instead just anti- the people who are anti- those things.
This has been disturbing to me to see among my friends and ostensible comrades. It's clear from their pattern of posts that the most salient question in any news story or controversy is whose team the internet assumes it benefits, not actual values or who might actually suffer. I saw this with takes on writing, where I was the only person I knew explicitly saying that rioting was wrong. I saw this with takes on street violence by antifa-ish people, which often seem to me to have no actual purpose besides the chaotic desires of the almost entirely White men brutalizing strangers on the basis of their presumed political alignment. I know many parents who send their kids to private schools that routinely exclude students for misbehavior or poor academics; but those same parents would vehemently oppose a politician who proposed the same standards for public schools. I've gone to police-community meetings in Brooklyn, and met a police precinct chief, trying to get the police to do what Black people in the community wanted, and there's a huge gap between what that actually is and what my White progressive friends assume it is.
I consider myself a passionate political progressive, but I want a strong, deeply rooted progressivism that challenges itself to be practically useful in the quest for justice and redistribution of power. Instead I see a thin veneer of progressivism, a cowardly, opportunistic progressivism that quickly shies away from taking a stand whenever there's the slightest hint that it might be unpopular.
I know nothing about Alex Pareene but I will say this: I grow weary of all the (often warranted) criticism people so freely toss out (and the criticism of the criticism) that is rarely accompanied by definitive statements about what the speaker is actually for. I find this to be true on social media generally, even among so-called micro influencers. Whenever I ask a direct question about a stance or what a policy idea might look like, I get platitudes or ignored.
Pareene's "AP" is a great segue to the technical solution to actually save local news (and fuck FB and Twitter) etc.
But you gotta kill the Associated Press (news wire business model). Note Freddie, I only figured this out bc I was so tight with Andy Breitbart
https://www.morganwarstler.com/post/46946948582/read-local-how-to-save-local-news
See "Syndication" on the Internet only works if you put EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE, and the news wires knew that equalled death - if Freddie could go to Site #1 and read every single article of the 40K the AP had, he'd never go to Site #2, and AP would have one syndication customer.
They needed it to be like newspapers with physical space limitations. The internet has no space limitations.
Basically, all we need is a simple re-architecture of news link domain resolution.
Morgan can choose The Canton Repository or the Austin Statesman or the Palm Beach Post, and every single article that Pareen or FB or Twitter links to from the AP or Reuters etc -when Morgan clicks it, he reads it as his local paper of choice.
Overnight, all readers "Read Local" they are essentially donating their eyeballs to the local paper, and this density of local interest and endless daily traffic gives the papers immense leverage vs advertiser networks. Advertisers can't suddenly find you at 100 sites, they can find you only at 4.
Anyhoo, I described it more in-depth long ago. These days there are even more ways to really stick it to FB and Twitter. BUT they all let conservatives run take back their slice of the Internet and that freaks media guys out.
I think almost none of this was directed at you fwiw. Seems very much like a roast of Yglesias, Nate Silver, and Bari Weiss for her constant "I'm getting messages from parents at Columbia that are terrified". I think I mentioned this before, but one of the people she covered that way was pretty clearly a well funded right wing campaign.
Anyway I've my disdain for those people clear here before, so I will take this opportunity to post my free speech rant, which should resolve all future free speech wars, then we can all move forward in agreement.
Oliver Traldi had an article a while back [1] where he said the "line drawing" argument was nonsense, and I think he's right! As a state policy, there is no way to draw boundaries that don't just enforce the rules of the powerful.
The problem is that Traldi and Greenwald and whoever else constantly use these arguments in spaces where we have explicitly agreed that we want boundaries to be drawn! People hang out on Twitter specifically because it is moderated. There is a reason that most of us don't spend our time on 8chan, and speaking for myself I prefer not to come across random gore, racism, whatever when I open my phone. Taken to its logical conclusion, the Traldi viewpoint means that no one can ever have a moderated gathering of people. You must always invite a Holocaust denier to the party or else you are suppressing free speech. It's literally just Alex Pareene's If You Truly Care About Speech, You Will Invite Me to Your Office to Personally Call You a Dipshit.
One response to this is well these social networks are monopolies, it's effectively restricting free speech. Okay, well we're not really talking about free speech then are we? We're talking about the power of technology companies, who are motivated by nothing other than money. They moderate for a reason. People are not going to use an unmoderated platform. If Twitter let loose and stopped banning people tomorrow, what do people think would happen? That the fucking discourse would thrive? It would immediately be taken over by paid spammers, accounts funded by oligarchs, trolls, gore, nazis, whatever. And a new space would rise to take its place where NY Mag can talk about how mean substack writers are to them.
Anyway, the point is that moderated spaces aren't affront to free speech. If anything, they are an expression of the right of "people peaceably to assemble". You want to make it more free? Then give the workers and the users some control of the company (don't even get me started on the free speech debates in the workplace, we know where the power lies). Funny how the Traldi's and the Greenwald's never mention that idea.
[1] https://www.city-journal.org/the-debate-about-free-speech?wallit_nosession=1
Isn't that edutainment hack Malcolm Gladwell?
It's funny, I got this email as I was reading Ross Barkan's post quoting Tom Lay (the Defector's EIC) who argues that people subscribe to Glenn Greenwald and Bari Weiss for "virtue signaling" purposes and not because they actually like to read those newsletters. So apparently, the subscribers are also insincere. I don't know why it's so hard to believe that some people genuinely have different opinions.
https://rossbarkan.substack.com/p/the-defector-model-works
You do not need to defend yourself to this blowhard. It's so high school, isn't it? They're angry that there is one site that isn't under the grip of their mass hysteria purge factory and it's getting more and more popular. They have to gather their flock for one more flail in hopes of using public shame to control people. It's so gross. And so sad. By the way I think it might be Alex Berenson more than Nate Silver. Banned from Twitter but a growing community here at Substack. I legit do not what I would do without Substack. Not from a writing perspective, although that has been helpful, but more from a reading perspective.
To you especially I say: Planet of Cops helped me feel less insane. It was the moment I realized: wow, I am not imagining things. This is really happening. It has only gotten worse since then. Also, you help redirect my thinking in a way I appreciate because you haven't gone completely away from your own principles. I have a hard time with this because my own hatred and resentment of the "left" grows daily. But I have to check myself and remind myself: what is it I actually believe? What do I care about? Your newsletter often helps to remind me of that. So thank you.
I am going to leave this here and not go find this person and scream at him. I think that is progress.
you know you have a good thing when you have haters.
He sort of won this round because he provoked you and it worked and that kinda brings you back down to his level. I'm not usually good at this stuff myself, but I would probably ignore this crap in the future. Its just a sign that what you are doing it working.
...."a state of jaundiced exasperation"... Man, you sure hit the bullseye from time to time. Glad you found a home in substack so you can continue to write.
The whole "grift" thing seems really immaterial. Intentions matter in some cases, like I think it mattered that Trump didn't really care about the working class, since it impacts what policies he would enact. It also matters if the person is your friend. But, otherwise, the grift thing is unfalsifiable and doesn't even matter.
Let's say it is a grift, and deBoer is just writing these articles for the lucrative Genetic Impact on Educational Outcomes lobby, does that the arguments any less cogent? Let's go a step further. Let's say deBoer doesn't exist, a monkey just grabbed a keyboard and has happened to smash it and such a way to create coherent English sentences. Again, the arguments made within them don't change.
I think it comes down to people treating political disagreements as personal. They want to expose the bad boyfriend or whatever rather than debate the merits of arguments.
In terms of the term woke don't end up like Rod Dreher and have woke come to mean anything you personally dislike. Ketchup on hot dogs? Woke! Walnuts in brownies? Woke!
Thanks for being the disagreeable and principled asshole that inspires all those pieces. It's inspiring to those of us that are afraid of conflict and unable to express ourselves in writing well.
I have no idea what an Alex Pareene is and, although I never read Gawker, I've read enough of their alumni to know that I wouldn't find anything useful to learn more about this person. But I really appreciated this article nevertheless.
I find the contrarian/grift/you changed bullshit so eye rolling. I never read Freddie prior to this year but I've read a lot of the archives and it's pretty clear he's someone with a consistent moral and political framework. How the fuck is a materialist leftist gifting? Trying to get in the pocket of Big Marx?
I read Greenwald and Taibbi 15(ish) years ago. Then I came back to reading them in the last couple of years and they're rocking the same intellectual framework as they were then. I rarely read Yglesias anymore because I got bored with his (almost certainly sincere!) schtick a decade ago. But he's writing the same stuff! None of these people have changed.
I remember in 2013 saying to a buddy of mine that I couldn't articulate it but I felt like the Democratic Party was leaving me behind. I was a mainstream, Obama Democrat in 2008. The only significant changes in political views I've had since then were towards the left. And not even the hard left. And yet from 2014 on I was completely alienated from the party. I had to stop using social media because it was just a deluge of awful opinions from friends and people I worked with.
I gained NOTHING from that. My career was vastly more benefited from being a Democratic Party functionary than it was from being outside politics. And I'm just one random, completely unimportant dude. You're telling me Greenwald wouldn't be better off financially writing stories about how he was against surveillance of Muslim terrorists but we need it now for the real threat of domestic terrorists? That Taibbi wouldn't have made more money going on MSNBC as a Russia expert who could really talk about how they were controling our country? That Freddie couldn't be writing magazine cover stories about how we need to abolish the police to stop trans genocide?
Either these people are fucking stupid or they're the contrarian grifters. Either way I do not trust them.
To me, an actual materialist world view cannot square with civil libertarian arguments as they are incoherent. For example, a society where means of communication are privately held and moderated cannot have any free speech at all as it is all determined by the rules and whims of whoever controls the means of communication. Material politics is about power.
I'm all over the quasi-sarcastic, tongue-in-cheek, cynical, smarmy take writing.
Maybe because I am older and used to be a sarcastic asshole. Today's sarcasm is rarely ironic and usually a not so veiled attempt to avoid engaging with difficult issues while trying to appear "relevant".
It cannot stand sincere efforts at communication, which is what I think this era needs and sorely lacks. It's why I subscribe to this newsletter and not others.
There is no need for you to apologize for or justify being a great writer (as well as prolific - such a bonus!). As far as I am concerned you should make as much money as possible. There are more than enough apologists in this world making so much more; they sleep comfortably at night knowing they serve their masters well and how.
> there’s a whole lot of liberals now who never really come out and defend the excesses of woke politics... They are instead just anti- the people who are anti- those things.
This has been disturbing to me to see among my friends and ostensible comrades. It's clear from their pattern of posts that the most salient question in any news story or controversy is whose team the internet assumes it benefits, not actual values or who might actually suffer. I saw this with takes on writing, where I was the only person I knew explicitly saying that rioting was wrong. I saw this with takes on street violence by antifa-ish people, which often seem to me to have no actual purpose besides the chaotic desires of the almost entirely White men brutalizing strangers on the basis of their presumed political alignment. I know many parents who send their kids to private schools that routinely exclude students for misbehavior or poor academics; but those same parents would vehemently oppose a politician who proposed the same standards for public schools. I've gone to police-community meetings in Brooklyn, and met a police precinct chief, trying to get the police to do what Black people in the community wanted, and there's a huge gap between what that actually is and what my White progressive friends assume it is.
I consider myself a passionate political progressive, but I want a strong, deeply rooted progressivism that challenges itself to be practically useful in the quest for justice and redistribution of power. Instead I see a thin veneer of progressivism, a cowardly, opportunistic progressivism that quickly shies away from taking a stand whenever there's the slightest hint that it might be unpopular.