What free speech & subway surfing have in common
On Substack and other huge, dangerous necessities.
I’ve been trying to write a letter that my parasympathetic nervous system doesn’t want me to write. To keep myself upright, I’ve been inserting images that delight me into the draft—
Last week I met a man who told me that the night he decided to propose to his boyfriend, he couldn’t stop crying and convulsing, even after he asked, even after the boyfriend said yes. His husband stood beside him, recounting the night from his perspective: “I was like, why is he being so crazy? Oh god he’s going to break up with me. Ugh. Oh well.”
The husband was calm and tall and wearing all white; he seemed to be the epitome of someone magnificently aware of his emotional life, someone whose body might not betray him in this way. But the weepy would-be groom made sense to me. I’m more familiar with moments in which the body calls too much attention to that which the autobiographical self is trying to avoid.
Lately my anxiety has been trying to stop me from writing about how we (or anyone) can answer the question of whether speech counts as action.
In an attempt to write about it anyway, I’ve written 6,000 words I’ve thrown out, and I’ve spent entirely too much time reading about controversies from the last few years at PEN, and the ACLU, and the more recent problem of idealogically dangerous, openly white supremist Substacks on this platform, and how Substack should respond to them. Lacking the calm-husband-draped-in-white-emotional-remove, this endeavor has made me feel exhausted, tense, hyper, and hopeless in a brutal cycle—it seems I am not cut out for reading forty-five essays and articles in a day, nor for sifting through the inane and hateful comments sections on the substacks in question, and I would rather I hadn’t refreshed my memory about the fetid, fascist views and habits of the ultra-right-wing.
In the middle of all this work, my partner suggested we take a break and walk to MoMA1 and when we got there I immediately took him to the cafe where we ate a chocolate mousse, then I was ready for art.
In the galleries, I found some of that calm-husband-in-all-white feeling. Why am I writing about a topic that I so despise reading about? Why am I trying to make sense of one of these think-piece spectacles which so often turn out to be a relatively minor issue2 that extremely-online people tend to exaggerate and expand to the point total moral frenzy, a spectacle that seems simply to be an almost willful distraction from the moral issues (Gaza, Ukraine, the climate, encroaching fascism) which do deserve our immediate and continued attention?
Of course there are many reasons why you might want to work on something that isn’t exactly pleasant. Given that I have come to enjoy using Substack much more thatn I thought I would, the health of this technology has become relevant to me. This latest Substack drama began while I was far from my desk, and in the past month my partner’s father died, so even though some of my readers had asked whether I was going to leave Substack, I only got around to reading about everything now.
In my view, it was a lucky accident that I was late to this particular shit storm, as it seems much more layered than it seemed at first.
(For anyone who doesn’t know: In Decemeber The Atlantic published an article that made it seem like there were tons of strident, productive nazis on Substack and that Substack wasn’t doing anything about it for either financial or idealogical reasons. Many writers banded together to write a widely circulated open letter. Substack responded with a statement which was widely regard as dissastifying and is dissected quite well over here.)
It turns out the original piece in The Atlantic wasn’t particularly fact checked. Though imporant questions have been raised anyway, much of what the Substackers against Nazis letter is based upon is not factual.
Oh god I need another picture—
But despite the fact that there is not an army of self-proclaimed neo-nazis making bank on Substack, it is still true that Substack hosts people who write atrocious things and that some of their readers pay them for those atrocious things. That Richard guy, for instance. (I cannot bring myself to link to him; google “Richard has a racist newsletter” and it will come up.)
Substack has been putting forth the First Amendment as the reason they permit pretty much anyone the right to publish anything on Substack. (They did, however, remove the accounts that were determined to incite violence, though none of those newsletters had “paid subscribers and, in total, [had] about 100 active readers.”) Of course— Substack is a privately held company and not a governemnt agency. They are a business who created a tool and they can legally withold services from anyone.
However, we can assume that Substack, despite whatever they might publicly say, likely has ambitions to become a more massive fixture, one of those digital entities so large that we could make the arguement that they are the internet’s printing press for every newspaper and writer online. If so, their “we’re on the side of Free Speech” arguement would make sense. They’re dressing for the job they want.
So— while I was thinking about this after the musuem, I took the F train back to Brooklyn and while we were between Jay Street and Bergen, the train jolted to halt. Passengers were falling over, smushing into each other. I happened to be in the front car, near the conductor’s compartment and I overheard him saying that someone was on the tracks.
It’s a suicide-y3 time of year, after all. After a few minutes we were told that there was now a police investigation underway, and we would all have to exit the train through the last car, which was not yet out of the station. (After a while, we filed out, and got onto a different train where I stood shoulder to shoulder with a guy talking about longevity start-ups, how 120 was the new 30, how it took he and his wife eight years of trying to have a baby. A very New York day.)
Naturally, this morning, I looked to see if there was any news yet about what had happened on the tracks, whether anyone had died mere meters from where I sat. No news yet, but a good deal of coverage of the surge of teenagers riding atop moving subway cars, most of them motivated by viral videos of other teeangers doing the same thing.
The MTA has been petitioning social media companies to take down the videos that obviously encourage this habit. Five people died in 2023 from the activity, up from about one person a year between 2018-2022. The MTA launched an ad campaign in September 2023; two more teens have died since the ads began to run. Overall, The number of people riding outside trains “quadrupled from 2021 to 2022.”
Though it may seem oblique, this brings me back to the question, again, of whether speech is action and how that question is less straightforward on social media platforms. I’m going to need another photo to get through this—
The question of whether speech is action is not an exact science, which makes Substack’s own enforcement of their terms of service a more complex issue than anyone would like it to be.4 Among other things, you need to know what kind of power the speaker has, what kind of receptivity the audience has to this speech, and what kind of arena the speech is happening within. All of these criteria are complicated by social media itself, which creates a confusing blend of public and private space5 as well as a lack of clarity around how powerful or influential any given voice (or video, or post) actually is.
This isn’t to say that all is well at Substack and that’s why I’m still here; the issues around moderation and misinformation prolifirating online are a total mindfuck. Anyone who suggests it’s all quite simple is just not thinking it through.6
There might be posts on Substack (currently or in the future) that are the equivalent of subway-surfing tiktoks—harmful, misleading content that correllates to real-world consequences. Sure, it’s technically illegal to ride or walk between (or on top) of subway cars in motion, so Substack could easily take down a subway-surfing how-to newsletter under their terms of service, but what about a post that glorified something techncially legal but acutally just dangerous or stupid or something that could be lead to widespread misinformation? (I can feel my blood pressure rise as I even think about how many people were of the opinion that Sandy Hook didn’t happen or that the pandemic was a conspiracy of governemnt control.)
Both separately and paralell to this discussion, writers and media people are often guilty of creating fake problems to distract us from real problems. I see this kind of thing a lot on instagram lately—like when my friend Zoe posted a list of legitimate reasons why she’d not using her account to post about the genocide in Gaza, despite the fact that they oppose it and organize offline against it. One of the reasons that stuck with me was that instagram posts don’t change people’s minds. Of course awareness is important, but shit tons of awareness without any action is just a self-soothing behavior. Surprising no one, Zoe was apparently chewed out by a bunch of people in the DMs for being effectively a “white supremicist” and a “moron.” Regardless of your persepctive on the 26,000 people who have been recently killed in Gaza or the centuries of conflict and violence that have come before it, it is true that just because your rage is real doesn’t mean the way you’re spending it is valid or even useful.
My feeling is that public speech these days—from articles in legacy newspapers to your weirdest relative’s bonkers social media presence—is confusing the parasympathetic reactions in our bodies because so much of it is happening in this murky place btween public and private. We want take action quickly, just as we do when an anxiety attack begins7 but when we do so we often risk compressing an important issue (like how societies use something as complex and dangerous and important as the internet) into something black and white, something good and evil, something completely flat.
A little note: I have un-paywalled this letter for now, and I will likely pause this whole substack (and all payments) a little later this year in order to focus on other things for a little while, but I do still appreciate the paid subscriptions and I am working on an essay about reivsion (at a reader’s suggestion!). Your subscriptions are appreciated, as are suggestions.
BTW, if you live in New York you can get a New York City ID that gives you a free year membership to MoMA and I can’t reccommend this highly enough.
I don’t think the existence of neo-nazis is a minor issue. You would have to read the rest of the piece for this to be put in context.
988 is the suicide prevention hotline.
The people in the position to make these calls have my sympathy! I do not envy your jobs.
Somewhat ironically, the paywall on this letter creates a kind of public-private space that I’ve come to find useful in that it allows me to write with an casual intimacy and a thinking-out-loud tone that wouldn’t be possible if I was being paid to write for a magazine.
However— prohibiting the swastika and symbols like it seems like a good rule of thumb. To put it stupidly, swastikas are a fucking bummer, and let’s at the very least exclude those who want to argue with us about their right to display swastikas. This is not a slippery slope.
The best thing to do for an incoming anxiety attack, I’ve found, is to put your face in a bowl of ice water.