59. Substack, Rhetoric, Nazis, and Money
Or: the internet is full of horrors and fascist fellow-travellers, and I'm not happy about it
It’s become clear that Substack means to profit from Nazis and their fellow-travellers just as much as it has profited from the anti-trans brigade. Substack’s attitude to transphobic and bigoted writers is part of why I turned paid subscriptions off almost as soon as I’d turned them on: Patreon has its own, multiple problems, but it’s… better?
I think so, anyway. For now.
Using the privately-owned infrastructure of the internet is a series of bad compromises. I don’t have the spoons to manage my own website and newsletter solo, so this newsletter will be staying on Substack, and staying, as it has been, entirely free to read. (Aside from everything else, I find myself mostly talking about history, and I feel pretty icky about putting that behind a paywall without a lot more polish on the essays.)
If you want to support my endeavours, Patreon will continue to be the place to do that, at least until Patreon too goes sideways in the way of every useful thing on the internet. Remember Livejournal? (People a little older than me would say, “Remember Usenet.”)