To Press the Off-Button, or... or What?
Responding to people who deserve no response, but insist on one anyway
Like many people, I suspect, I came to Substack not for the platform per se. It was really Just Another Platform, albeit one singularly geared towards easing the subscription-and-reading process. Rather, the main draw for me was the growing presence of writers (storytellers, musicians, activists, scientists, etc.) whose work — in life, in words, in values — I deeply appreciate. I first wanted to read here, not to write. It all just worked, y’know?
But as a more or less open online venue, Substack can’t retain its (seeming) innocence. All the familiar stupidities and poisons of social media inevitably will show up here, if they haven’t already: trolls, sloppy control of trollishness, flame wars, hurt feelings, genuine threats, the superficialities of what we might call Influencer Culture…
In recent weeks, quite a bit of dust has been tossed into the *cough* Stackosphere about the presence here of writers and commenters freely, openly, and proudly sympathetic to Nazis.1 It all seems to focus on two issues: that very presence, and whether and how Substack should respond to — i.e., moderate — it.
When it comes to Nazism, I think, there’s not really such a thing as a “sympathetic” response for individuals. One can’t be open-minded about such principles and the psychological exhibitionists who brandish them.
The trouble of course is that Nazism is dangerous.
That very danger seems appealing mostly to those who, without a megaphone in their hands to excite them, would otherwise be laughable. Hence, the problem: the availability of Substack, Facebook, X, Instagram, Medium, etc. etc. etc. — megaphones, all.
Here on Substack, the problem is compounded by money. (Money complicates everything.) When a Substacker chooses to set up paid subscriptions, they agree that Substack’s corporate vacuum may skim a bit of cream off the top. And, well, we can easily predict that not all those little clots of sweetness will be added only to the recipes we want to eat: some will go to investments in eco-hostile corporations, some will go to the campaign coffers of politicians who scorn their own voters, some will go into the pockets of the very people who’ve handed the megaphone (the one they themselves built, for crissake) to Nazis and Nazi “sympathizers.”
In response, our natural instinct to point out to the megaphone-builders that they’re enabling awful people. We want them to stop. We want them to plug all the leaks, and remain as pristine as we always imagined them to be.
But see, that’s just it: they never were — could never be — that pristine…
I recently read something which Neil Gaiman shared on Tumblr2; it spoke a quiet truth to me about all of this. And even though the context was TV-watching with kids, not Nazism in the public square, I’m going to quote it here — because the logic not only applies here but is generally unassailable:
The answer is NOT “Ask your parents to make sure you never see anything upsetting again,” because that’s just not possible — and ultimately that would be doing the kid a disservice, since sooner or later he’s going to be out in the world where we can’t control what he watches or reads. That doesn’t mean we don’t try to make sure he’s watching/reading age-appropriate stuff, it just means that’s not the only safeguard he has — and that’s a good thing.
So yes, content creators aren’t your parents and aren’t responsible for making sure you never see anything you don’t like — but also, your own parents should have taught you what to do when that happens. So if they didn’t, take it from me, your internet mom:
Turn it off.
Walk away.
Talk to someone you trust about how you’re feeling.
And leave the person who created the thing that upset you alone.
To which Gaiman responded:
When my oldest kids were small — about 6 and 8 — I bought them a Video (the VCR kind) of John Waters’ Hairspray, a film they loved, and, getting home at 3 am, left it for them with a note. They woke me up the next morning. “It’s not Hairspray. It’s something scary with a car.” Due to a mislabelling error, the videotape was Stephen King’s Christine.
I mentioned it to friends and a day later got a call from a tabloid journalist who wanted to know about this terrible thing that had happened to my family. “It’s not a story, ” I told them. “My kids know where the off-button is and how to press it, and the moment they knew they weren’t watching what they wanted to watch, they turned it off.”
We can organize boycotts and protests. We can pick up our marbles and leave the game. We can respond in any of a dozen ways to express our deep, heartfelt repugnance to Nazism and related principles. But we won’t thereby make it go away; we’ll only be, well, keeping people engaged with Nazis. And Nazis don’t deserve it.
The solution:
Turn off the shit you don’t want to watch. Walk away from it. Because there are plenty of other life-affirming alternatives which use this platform, too. And if they leave, they’ll just go on to other platforms where the problem hasn’t occurred (YET).
P.S. Notice that I didn’t include links to any of the many other Substacks commenting on or embroiled in the whole mess. I agree with many of them. (And, because I carefully curate my own online experience, I can easily say I agree with the vast majority of them.) But on this matter, as I think on many others, it’s up to you to dig more deeply if you want to know more. I refuse to make it easier for the shit to spread.
P.P.S. Also, a reminder: Substack as a platform may be the primary megaphone under discussion at the moment. But every single individual Substack is a megaphone, too. Here, at Running After My Hat, I decline to offer a soapbox to anyone who I think is dangerous or simply too dim-witted to know the difference between a free society and a society which allows any behavior at all.
I know, I know: Godwin’s Law… But this is something else: it’s not just the facile logic of (as the expression goes) reductio ad Hitlerum. It’s the observation, commentary on, and response to latter-day walking, strutting, actual Nazis.
Gaiman didn’t write but was sharing and responding to the original post, from a Tumblr user identified only as “giraffeter.”