The Silicon Valley Insurrection: Take Back the Internet

First of all, some news: This column and newsletter are now also being mirrored on Ghost, a rival service to Substack.

Many Substack users will remember Ghost as one of the major alternatives that several big-name writers such as Ed Zitron and Platformer moved to earlier in the year out of protest and frustration at Substack refusing to remove or limit or really in any way moderate white supremacist and Nazi content.

I believe in freedom of speech and I also abhor those creatures and I’m not the kind of person who thinks their right to have and to express monstrous and incorrect opinions means that we all have to join hands and sing kumbafuckingya with them and listen to their stupid shit, so I support those writers and readers who abandoned the platform. Lately the American election has brought out a resurgence in toxicity that is making it difficult for people to support my work.

I am not making any plans at this point to leave Substack. Nothing is changing for anybody, all subscribers, free and paid, will continue to receive this newsletter as normal.

However, current or future paid subscribers: If you prefer that none of your money goes to Substack, then you can subscribe to the Ghost version of the same content. If you are fine with keeping your subscription exactly the way it is, I’m fine with that also. I just want to give my supporters more control over where their money goes.

I do not believe this violates any terms or conditions as I do not believe either site has any kind of exclusivity clause over what I decide to publish of my own writing. There are, however, rules against me offering content on this platform in exchange for payment made outside of it. Therefore, subscribing to the Ghost newsletter will not get you a comp subscription to the Substack version, nor, unfortunately, can I offer any perks here such as a comp subscription to The Poolish. I have slightly reduced the price over there to compensate.

The Ghost newsletter, at this stage, is for paying subscribers only, just to keep things uncomplicated. It will be the same content, the only difference being, maybe, I’ll change the wording of stuff over there when I’m talking about Substack.

You might ask, why Ghost? And why am I running this on two platforms instead of just switching over? Why do this so messily? I have answers to all of that, and I will get to them later in this essay.

I’m going to start with some dark shit, friends, just to get it out of the way right off the bat, but I’m going to work up to some optimism today. If you’ll bear with me, I hope that the optimism will outweigh the rest.

I’m writing this piece unsure of what the temperature of the room is going to be when most people read it. Paying subscribers see this four days before the thing happens, and free subscribers see it three days after. You know what the thing is that I’m talking about.

So it’s come to me to figure out what I can write about to stretch over the thing that won’t require extensive rewrites.

If America chooses wisely on Tuesday then it still hasn’t beaten fascism. It’s the beginning of a long and potentially violent power struggle. If their coming campaign to undo the result of this election by laundering lawsuits through corrupt judges, fraud, and conspiracy doesn’t work, then they will be faced with a final decision—if they ever want to hold power again, then they will either need to  abandon and reject their current failing ideology and go back to following the Process, or abandon the Process and take power with conquest.

If America chooses poorly then you need to consider the very real possibility that you’re not going to be getting a proper election in 2028. They’re not going to want to go through the stress and expense of this again. Maybe in 2032 or 2036 they’ll get sick of governing because the sport has gone out of it and they might loosen their grip a little.

I have my doubts about their loyalty to the game this time around, though, because this is a different kind of American Republicanism than we’ve seen before. They have the rallies and the rhetoric and the aesthetic but they’re a product of a new generation. Donald Trump is already a decrepit fossil of German authoritarianism whose final task is to pass the torch.

The first Trump presidency of 2016 was shepherded in by the Old Fascism of Steve Bannon but that was nearly a decade ago. The culture has already changed. Bannon, I think, doesn’t even realise that he’s extinct.

This will be remembered as the Silicon Valley Insurrection.

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