Contra Gioia: Political Neutrality in New Media is a Dangerous Illusion

 Part of the genesis of this week’s piece came from getting briefly and unfairly chewed out by a prominent jazz historian, which isn’t something most people can say every day. And while this is probably the most important individual who’s ever had a go at me (Freddie deBoer has popped up a bizarre number of times to randomly be a dick to me about things he imagines I said in articles he didn’t read, but Freddie deBoer has never won a Deems Taylor Award) it was a very short interaction and I don’t want this to serve as a public volley in some tiresome internet beef.

 Not entirely, anyway.

 My issue has much more to do with what this brush with bonkers drew my attention to—the fact that the project of America’s far right to snatch up media platforms is eagerly abetted by “apolitical” agents.

 For example, it kind of passed below the news radar that the US State Department is now broadcasting official state propaganda to the world via Substack. Although functionally this shouldn’t seem that different from government officials releasing their statements on Twitter, intuitively there’s just something off about it. The owners of Substack are much more hands-on and visible to the community than the pre-Musk Twitter was, and Substack is ostensibly an independent writers’ platform. It has an indie community vibe and the site actively promotes individuals.

 The Government showing up on Substack, particularly this government, feels kind of like Saddam Hussein rocking up to a local Baghdad library circa 1995 during your book signing and just staring you down the whole time. Suddenly the vibe is a little different.

 But the open reaction of the site owners, as well as a bunch of people who treat “Substacker” as a core component of their personality (not just blogger, but Substacker specifically) has been somewhere between amused curiosity and outward celebration. Among the latter is, for some reason, the award winning jazz historian and pianist Ted Gioia.

 I don’t have any problem with Ted Gioia, generally. He’s a good writer. A lot of his views align with mine, especially regarding so-called techno-optimism. Oddly, for a world class music historian, he doesn’t write about music much on his Substack publication The Honest Broker.

 Another thing he doesn’t talk about much is politics. And that’s perfectly fine. I don’t think everyone with a keyboard and a working internet connection is obliged to rattle on endlessly about what the people in charge are doing. It’s an important topic but’s not the only thing that exists. In fact, we need a lot of people talking about the other stuff to remind us it’s there, or else we would all go mad.

 Bizarrely, though, once in a while, between his worldly wisdom and musings about the state of culture, he’ll drop a piece that’s just a blunt, soulless advertisement for Substack. Just a random, wholly out-of-character upbeat promotional piece as though he’s secretly writing copy for the company’s PR newsletter but posting mistakenly under his own name.

 It’s so conspicuous when he does this that people will occasionally call him out for it, something which makes Ted—usually a mild and wizened sort—very, very pissed off.  

 It’s this rarely-invoked ire that I unwittingly stirred when I couldn’t help commenting on his most recent cloying puff piece, “Substack Has Changed in the Last 30 Days.” In this, Gioia tries to shoehorn Substack into the famous maxim misattributed to Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

 By “winning” in this context he’s referring to what he sees as recent signs of the Substack PR Department prophecy coming to pass—that the old media establishment will crumble and every journalist and publication and blogger and artist and content producer of any stripe will slouch defeated toward the gates of Substack, grovelling with apology and begging for redemption.

 He chides and mocks the “monopolistic media,” ironically, as he celebrates the building of, well, a media monopoly. But a benevolent one, you see, because Substack is a haven for free speech absolutism, a tenet which is, firstly, not true (visit the Substack subreddit sometime to see just how many writers get banned from the platform for vague or unspecified rules violations—it’s a lot) but which Gioia pretty comically cites as the reason mainstream media hates Substack.

 “That’s when powerful people began attacking Substack,” he writes, “They especially hated the fact that this platform lets writers decide what to write, and readers decide what to read.” Much like the simplistic motives the US Government used to explain Islamic animosity toward the American Empire in the wake of 9/11: “They hate us for our freedom.”

 The part I just couldn’t let go was when Gioia starts talking about how Substack is winning so hard that prominent politicians are now moving onto the platform—including a decent roll call of President Trump’s administrative cabinet. 

 I’m sorry, Ted. That’s where I call time out. Saying that Trump’s official State Department setting up shop on Substack is good for Substack is kind of like saying that drawing Sauron’s infernal eye was good for Frodo because someone powerful was finally paying attention to him.

 The Trump Administration isn’t joining Substack because they share its values of free expression and diversity of views; they’re burrowing into it like a virus infects a cell.

I made this remark. 

This pissed Ted Gioia off, not because he took issue with my argument—which seemed to go over his head—but because he thought, incorrectly, that I was insinuating that he was betraying his principle of political neutrality.

First, this is a little beside the point, but if Ted is going to bizarrely accuse me of lying (which I don’t understand) then I can’t help but point out that he is the one lying in this exchange. He says he has never mentioned Donald Trump in any article, but a mere four days before he published this, he put out a piece called “Welcome to the Worldwide Wall,” bemoaning that every online community is now a walled garden (except Substack!!!!!!!!), and in which he draws a direct comparison with… Donald Trump’s wall.

 I’ll forgive him his lapse of short term memory.

 The point is, I’m not accusing Ted Gioia of speaking in praise of a politician, especially not Trump’s cabinet, because I know very well that he’s not a Trump guy. I haven’t read all of his stuff but I think in private he’s probably a Democrat. In public he’s aggressively Politically Neutral, though, and that’s what triggered this snap.

Unsurprisingly this is the exact same attitude toward ideology that Substack’s management itself has—maintaining the appearance of True Neutral. To say nothing of their dedication to permitting the free expression and even monetization of extreme ideologies up to and including Nazism, their ongoing (and, I argue, futile) project to emulsify contradictory ideological extremes without the platform collapsing manifests the same Ted Gioia style abstract enthusiasm about broad speech diversity. As co-founder Hamish McKenzie said at a recent promotional event, “I love the ratbags from the right, and I love the pugilists on the left. I love the centrists and the nutjobs and the fringe views and the radical voices.”

The problem with trying to express no ideological position is that your personality tends to get thrown out with it and you become a logo in a skin suit. When someone’s selling a product it’s not terribly unusual for their public identity to just be The Product. That’s just sales. Everybody sees right through it, though.

 I’m not even saying there’s anything wrong with that. But there is a difference between being neutral about diverse, even extreme, ideologues using your media platform and being neutral about The Government using your media platform. Especially if that government is an extremely authoritarian one. 

To be completely fair to the management of Substack, there wouldn’t really be anything they could do, as far as I’m aware, to prevent the US Government from embedding itself on the platform even if they wanted to. My appeal is to those who, like Mr Gioia, see this as just another manifestation of viewpoint diversity as opposed to something that actually poses a dire risk to viewpoint diversity.

 Marco Rubio, acting in his official capacity as head of the State Department, is not Just Another Guy With An Opinion.

 Make absolutely no mistake here. None of the people who sit around that long hat-covered table every week lionizing Donald Trump to his face like he’s the God Pharaoh of the Infinite Cosmos appreciates Hamish McKenzie’s dedication to ideological neutrality. 

 Anyone who can’t see that the leaders of the MAGA movement have a well-worn strategy of lying about their appreciation for “free speech” to burrow their way into institutions and capture them is at this point either willingly ignorant or astoundingly gullible. When Trump and/or his senior cronies get a foothold on a media platform, they own it. It doesn’t matter whose name is on the paperwork. There is no recourse against power and money.

 Twitter probably wasn’t the first victim of this but it’s the most prominent case—when they took action against Trump for breaking the platform rules in 2021, Elon Musk simply took the company from its owners, retooled it as a GOP propaganda megaphone, and began blackmailing his and Trump’s opponents with lawsuit threats. Via the likes of Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, he was still able to launder the conspiracy theory of anti-conservative bias as a government censorship issue by claiming, even though Trump was president at the time, Twitter was wilfully jawboned by Deep State Joe Biden loyalists embedded in the federal apparatus.

 Government officials communicating directly to the owners of a social media platform was portrayed as an intolerable affront to the free speech of that platform’s users, but not a peep has ever been heard from Taibbi and co about how this squared with the subsequent owner of that platform, Elon Musk, becoming a literal federal employee operating directly as instructed by the executive branch. Taibbi just peeled off on an anti-vax bent while Shellenberger dedicated his time to the all-important UFO issue, the most pressing political transparency story of 1955.

 Centrists and “apolitical” agents will get duped by this charade again and again and again. This absurd delusion that Trump and his cronies are eager to allow liberals and leftists to speak freely just as long as they do not engage in censorship themselves—an inclination that narrative capture by the right has people believing is unique to the left somehow. In reality, the lesson from Twitter is that, once the American right-wing oligarchs are entrenched on a media platform, the pressure to keep them happy is immense, and it overrides any ideals its owner might have about equal treatment.

 Peel away the exhausting PR façade that salesmen like Ted Gioia and Hamish McKenzie and other “Substacker” identitarians use to portray the site as this plucky little indie startup, a David tackling the Goliath of the mainstream media.

 Look at it this way instead: Dismantling the mainstream media and bringing all media under the umbrella of a single privately owned platform is the freely stated dream of Donald Trump and Elon Musk both, a goal they share irrespective of the battle for the throne they’re currently waging against each other. It’s what Musk wants Twitter to be, ultimately, but any organization that inches closer to that end is ripe for grooming. Substack is drowning in obligations to venture capitalists who are also aligned with Musk and Trump’s vision. And all of Musk’s Twitter Files lieutenants, including Taibbi, Shellenberger, and Bari Weiss—who helped facilitate and launder Musk’s reinvention of Twitter as a MAGA platform—are powerful voices on Substack who drive much of its revenue.

 The arrival of Trump’s Directors of National Intelligence, Health and Human Services, and the State Department staking out territory on Substack isn’t an optimistic sign for its community, at least not the whole community. If and when MAGA decides to collect, I have no doubt that folks like Gioia and others who try to keep out of the far right’s direct line of sight will quite happily be absorbed into whatever the website becomes, but for the rest of us… I’ve said this before: It’s wise to always keep your bags packed.

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