Hey CZ

Ania Walwicz:

You big ugly. You too empty. You desert with your nothing nothing nothing. You scorched suntanned. Old too quickly. Acres of suburbs watching the telly. You bore me. Freckle silly children. You nothing much. With your big sea. Beach beach beach. I’ve seen enough already. You dumb dirty city with bar stools. You’re ugly. You silly shopping town. You copy. You too far everywhere. You laugh at me. When I came this woman gave me a box of biscuits. You try to be friendly but you’re not very friendly. You never ask me to your house. You insult me. You don’t know how to be with me. Road road tree tree. I came from crowded and many. I came from rich. You have nothing to offer. You’re poor and spread thin. You big. So what. I’m small. It’s what’s in. You silent on Sunday. Nobody on your streets. You dead at night. You go to sleep too early. You don’t excite me. You scare me with your hopeless. Asleep when you walk. Too hot to think. You big awful. You don’t match me. You burnt out. You too big sky. You make me a dot in the nowhere. You laugh with your big healthy. You want everyone to be the same. You’re dumb. You do like anybody else. You engaged Doreen. You big cow. You average average. Cold day at school playing around at lunchtime. Running around for nothing. You never accept me. For your own. You always ask me where I’m from. You always ask me. You tell me I look strange. Different. You don’t adopt me. You laugh at the way I speak. You think you’re better than me. You don’t like me. You don’t have any interest in another country. Idiot centre of your own self. You think the rest of the world walks around without shoes or electric light. You don’t go anywhere. You stay at home. You like one another. You go crazy on Saturday night. You get drunk. You don’t like me and you don’t like women. You put your arm around men in bars. You’re rough. I can’t speak to you. You burly burly. You’re just silly to me. You big man. Poor with all your money. You ugly furniture. You ugly house. You relaxed in your summer stupor. All year. Never fully awake. Dull at school. Wait for other people to tell you what to do. Follow the leader. Can’t imagine. Workhorse. Thick legs. You go to work in the morning. You shiver on a tram.

Ania was my poetry teacher in 2012 and 2013. No one had more energy and passion for the written word and all its creative potential. She mightn’t explain things like iambic pentameter in the course of a class but she’d convince you that you can make great things. Every student, and every piece of work they shared, was valid and worthy. She loved poetry and, if you spent some time with her, you would too.

I wasn’t one of Ania’s students for that long but she’s left an enduring impression on me as a writer. Every now and then, I question my approach to writing (and to poetry in particular) and I remember some of the comments she made about my work. I feel undefeatable.

Vale Ania Walwicz, 1951—2020.

There’s something hypnotic about watching a room full of about 20 young, white, drunk, shirtless men try to fight a couch. It invites so many questions.

• Why are they fighting the couch?
• Was it planned or spontaneous?
• Why does the couch seem to be winning?
• Why are so many of them shirtless? Did one person decide to take of their shirt and the others follow suit? Did a few of of them, simultaneously yet independently, just lose their shirts?
• Why does every group of drunk young guys seem to have one of those floppy wicker hats?
• Who owns this house?
• There are a lot of other broken chairs on the floor — is the couch fight the last step in a multi-stage war against seating?
• What are they going to sit on after breaking the couch? Is one person at this party constantly trying to get them to stop just because they’re asking themselves this same question?¹

All valid questions, none of which has an answer. But there’s a bigger one to ask: what are we doing, as a society, that leads young men to do this kind of thing?

Yo, let’s headbutt some stuff

r/IdiotsFightingThings is the embodiment of “boys will be boys” energy. You don’t necessarily see that sentiment in the comments — it’s more a “lol really? they did this?” kind of place — but a lot of the things shared to the subreddit are the logical end point of everyone who ever hand-waved away a young boy’s destructive behaviour with “boys will be boys”.

There’s the young guy who walked passed a tree and then turned around to kick it. The guy who, after spilling a drink on someone else’s phone, decided to wail on the phone with this glass. The guy who casually breaks a TV because this team is losing. The guy who repeatedly tried to break a car windshield with his head. The guy who headbutted a bus stop. The guy who tried to headbutt an exit sign in a hotel corridor.

There’s a lot of headbutting in general. It’s a real niche in r/IdiotsFightingThings.

Now, sure, there are a lot of other kinds of idiocy going on in the sub. Some of the submissions are dumb stunts going awry. There are young kids being profoundly uncoordinated. The occasional animal being goofy. But there’s a real through line of young men being casually destructive or violent, usually with someone else’s property, either for a laugh or in response to something not going their way.

Kick it real good

You don’t do any of these things unless you think it’s either a good thing or an okay thing to do. Even if it’s spontaneous and you do it “without thinking”, it only happens because you’ve internalised the idea that you’re allowed to act on the world in this way. It’s also worth questioning how spontaneous or uncontrolled these sorts of things actually are: if this kind of violence is only ever directed at objects men can safely attack, chances are it’s not all that thoughtless.

Let’s be real: these guys aren’t outliers. Chances are, you’ve known at least a few of them throughout your life. And they don’t just happen. These men are raised a certain way. They’ve learned a certain set of lessons, either explicitly or implicitly, that told them that aggression, violence, and destruction are okay for them.

I mean, I’ve been one of these guys before, albeit on a wildly smaller scale. I’ve done some petty vandalism. I’ve once thought about getting into a fight, but didn’t follow through. I’ve hit a robotic toy dog with an acoustic guitar (with the owner’s consent).

Every instance of my behaviour here came from a time that, really, I wasn’t happy with myself. I didn’t believe that violence was ever justified but, in my lowest moments, my behaviour didn’t reflect that. There was a wellspring of aggression inside me. It was usually directed at myself and abstract ideas of “the world” but, in unguarded moments, it came out and was directed at very particular things (and always “for a laugh”).

Thankfully that didn’t become a defining part of my personality. But that didn’t happen by accident. I had (and have) a fantastic group of people around me who have helped me understand the parts of myself I dislike and to reject the worst parts of masculinity.

Unfortunately, a lot of young men don’t have that in their lives. You only need to spend a little while on r/IdiotsFightingThings to see that.

Threes is one of the best games ever made. It’s a puzzle game wherein you match ones and twos to make threes, threes to make sixes, sixes to make twelves, and so on until you run out of space on the board. It exemplifies “simple to start, hard to master”.

I’ve played Threes on and off for about six years now. It’s enthralling. It gets me in the zone like nothing else. This can be a bad thing: I’ve missed countless train, tram, and bus stops because I was playing Threes. I’ve even walked passed streets I was meant to turn down because I was lost in a game.

It’s perfect. And perfection has a lot to teach us. Threes has things to say about a life well lived (and not just “pay attention to where you’re going”, which I refuse to learn).

Threes is filled with life lessons. Here are a few of them.

• It takes less time to think through a good plan than to fix problems caused by a bad plan (or no plan at all)
• That said, you can fix a lot of mistakes if you make it your focus and think a few moves ahead
• All big things happen because of countless small things
• There’s pleasure to be found in tiny details, even if you’ve seen them countless times before
• With enough experience, you’ll be able to pick when things fell apart (but that doesn’t mean you’ll always be able to see it coming in the future)
• Starting with a boost does help, but it’s less satisfying long term
• Luck is as much about putting yourself in position to capitalise on opportunity as it is random chance
• Knowing when to cash out can be as important as building for the future
• If you take risks early on, you’ll have more time and space to fix things if the risk doesn’t pan out
• You can do everything right for a long time but, sometimes, life will just ruin you
• You can get addicted to anything

Jesper (via Michael Tsai):

The Mac gets a lot of flack from people who are nose deep in technical specifications and price matchups. What they don’t see — or aren’t interested in — is the intangible: the culture that people with big dreams and small means have made the unconventional available, the complex seemingly simple and the advanced accessible.

[…]

The culture and the people and the shared values and what it all comes together to produce. That’s why I’m still here. You can live in many houses, but not all of them will ever feel like home. I’m upset with the landlord and the building manager who ignores leaking pipes and oiled floors catching on fire while upping the rent and turning a blind eye to hustlers running Three-card Monte, but aside from that, I love the neighborhood, I love the surroundings, I love that they value the things I do and I love what it can build over time.

Jesper contrasts this with Windows:

Windows is seemingly more stable in this aspect, but while I am able to live in that house, I am not able to make it my home, and it’s not for a lack of trying. Microsoft’s repeated wallpaper-stripping and ever-changing priorities make it feel like an enormous mansion under constant renovation, with uneven floors, studs poking through the walls and fundamental features left broken or half-finished since the last time they cared.

I feel this. My MacBook Pro is on the outs. If it can be repaired, I’ll need to spend a lot of time deciding if it’s worth doing so. I have a capable PC for video games; it, combined with an iPad, handles everything I need a computer to do. I write and edit the occasional photo or video. If I squint hard enough while using iA Writer on Windows I can almost, but not quite, pretend I’m on a Mac.

Outside of a nagging urge to make an iOS app, I have no reason to fix my MacBook Pro. And this hypothetical take on Instagram I might never make isn’t quite a compelling reason to have another computer kicking around.

But here’s the thing: Windows isn’t home. It isn’t as comfortable as macOS or even iPadOS. The software isn’t as nice. I can’t find an RSS app I like. I’m sure there are great Windows developers somewhere but I don’t know where they’re hiding. Windows itself finds a new way to infuriate me every other week (but I’ve made that more manageable by stripping it to the bone). Text just plain looks wrong some times.

I try to be pragmatic. I don’t need a Mac. An iPad Air and a keyboard would do me well. But I want one. I want to go home.

Ah, politics and business. Delicious.

A tech CEO wants to keep politics out of his workplace. That always goes over well.

Coinbase wants to build an “open financial system” that would let anyone access cryptocurrencies, bringing “economic freedom” to the world in the process. Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, wants to keep politics out of the workplace so everyone can stay focused on the task at hand without potential division. He described his rationale in a memo on the company’s blog, supposedly in response to an employee walkout over the company’s decision to not issue a statement after the murder of George Floyd.

The memo itself is unconvincing for a few reasons:

1. It’s not as profound as it pretends to be.
2. It has a useless graphic masquerading as a map of global economic freedom, but it doesn’t have a key so it’s just an oddly coloured map.
3. Armstrong never defines economic freedom despite it being his company’s mission.
4. It seems to rest on the assumption that all his staff lack the emotional maturity to disagree with a colleague’s world view but continue to work with them amicably.

But, worst of all, it wraps up what is, really, a dully pragmatic allocation of resources – “Coinbase isn’t going to advocate, externally, for any issues outside our remit” – into a political statement. All while trying to gloss over the obvious: the work they’re doing has actual political ramifications.

Bad politics

Can Duruk, writing for The Margins, sums it up well:

Suppose I am entirely wrong, and Coinbase is actually about creating an open financial system for the world. In that case, it’s almost farcical to argue that the company that’s now sitting at the center of this new system would not be involved in practically every single political decision in the world.

It goes without saying the main political ideology behind most things crypto is libertarianism and this memo barely hides its author’s leanings. While I don’t generally have favorable opinions of libertarianism, I do respect their proponents’ staunch desire to be wrong at every turn about how humans operate in the real world. What I can’t really handle, however, is veiling one’s own political goals of rebuilding the entire world order, regardless of its plausibility or feasibility and then pretending there’s nothing political about it.

The work is innately political. You can’t around that.

It’s disingenuous to say that employees can only talk about the company’s mission when that mission is economic freedom, even if that freedom is to be achieved or helped with “infrastructure for the cryptoeconomy”. You don’t get to hire intelligent, thoughtful people and then say “nah” when their thoughts walk away from your guardrails.

Especially when your company has benefited from people getting extracurricular at work. Here are two of the ways Coinbase is achieving it’s mission:

Source amazing talent: We create job opportunities for top people, including those from underrepresented backgrounds who don’t have equal access to opportunities, with things like diverse slates (Rooney rule) on senior hires, and casting a wide net to find top talent.

Fair talent practices: We work to reduce unconscious bias in interviews, using things like structured interviews, and ensure fair practices in how we pay and promote.

Awareness of things like the importance of diversity at work and the value of unconscious bias have come from people talking about politics at work, even if they’re not working at a recruitment company (where that would be “the mission”).

Never mind that these approaches are reflected in the mission of Black Lives Matter (the inciting incident of all this): BLM is, in part, about structural racism, which is baked into things like unconscious bias. If people within Coinbase were frustrated by the company not wanting to release a statement about the movement, then the problem isn’t politics.

Signaling is a virtue

That said, there’s value to what Armstrong is doing (even if I think he’s done it poorly). Companies can paint themselves into corners if they don’t think through the longterm effects of their choices and that includes political ones. They need to signal intent here as much as possible, if for no other reason than to let employees make an informed decision about how and where they work.

Ben Thompson, in a recent post on Stratechery [$], talks about a years-old decision to not put R. Kelly’s music into playlists is having ramifications for them now that they’re the exclusive publisher of Joe Rogan’s podcast. They set a precedent with Kelly that employees think is being ignored for Rogan.

Thompson:

The Spotify point is precisely why I think Armstrong deserves more credit than his (many) critics on Twitter are giving him. Leaving aside the rightness or wrongness of his policy, every CEO should be thinking through these questions before they come to the forefront, and making clear to employees exactly how the company is going to approach them. Look no further than Ek and Spotify to see how making decisions in the moment, without a long-term view, can result in long-term problems.

But, really, this is a resources problem, not a “politics in the workplace“ problem. By making it about politics, and by turning it into a public statement, Armstrong has both misread the issue and misread the room.

Every now and then, people tell you what they stand for. They don’t always mean to do it, but it happens all the same.

Twitter does it a lot when it comes to the things they allow on their site. This time, they’ve reinforced who they think is important on their platform.

But that’s not what they meant to say.

Twitter has told people they can’t express hope Trump dies from COVID-19. Here’s Jason Koebler, reporting for Motherboard:

Twitter told Motherboard that users are not allowed to openly hope for Trump’s death on the platform and that tweets that do so “will have to be removed” and that they may have their accounts put into a “read only” mode. Twitter referred to an “abusive behavior” rule that’s been on the books since April.

“Content that wishes, hopes or expresses a desire for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against an individual is against our rules,” Twitter said in a statement.

Twitter Comms reinforced that this rule applies to everyone – not just Trump:

tweets that wish or hope for death, serious bodily harm or fatal disease against anyone are not allowed and will need to be removed. this does not automatically mean suspension.

Of course it does: it’s a rule for the whole platform, after all. But the fact that the rule exists matters less than how it’s applied. Motherboard asked about that:

When Motherboard asked how tightly Twitter will enforce this policy with regard to Trump, it said that it “won’t take enforcement action on every Tweet. We’re prioritizing the removal of content when it has a clear call to action that could potentially cause real-world harm.” It is not clear whether Twitter believes that hoping for the death of the president can lead him to actually die, or where the line is.

That ambiguity is what matters. It turns a hard and fast rule into something amorphous and almost useless in either encouraging the kinds of behaviour you want on a platform or discouraging the kinds of behaviour you don’t want.

Here’s the thing about rules and moderation: they signal what you value. When you’re talking about the kinds of content you’ll remove, you’re talking about the kinds of things you want and don’t what on your platform and the things you do or don’t value. That’s obvious.

But they’re also about the people you value (or don’t value). That’s made explicit when it comes to things like banning people or locking accounts. But it gets more subtle when you start looking at the people you want to protect.

Which lives matter?

Here’s another obvious statement: a whole lot of people have been wished dead on Twitter.

Here are just a few tweets reacting to Motherboard’s article:

Zoë Quinn:

Is it now? The last 7 years of my life would like to have a word with you…

Holly Green:

Two weeks ago I reported a user who told me to hang myself and Twitter never so much as even followed up

Leena:

Literally cannot count the amount of times some sadsack has wished me dead on twitter.

Looked at my Threats File (oh yes, that’s something that women have to do, that’s our price of entry) and I haven’t even recorded “wished dead” because it’s not serious enough in comparison.

Twitter hasn’t removed posts wishing these women were dead. They haven’t suspended anyone for these tweets. And they haven’t acted on people wishing death on countless other women, or black people, or queer people, or trans people, or people belonging to any other vulnerable group you care to name.¹

And this is serious. Telling someone you wish they were dead, or that they should kill themselves, or that they need to die isn’t just an insult. It’s not the same or a more serious version of telling someone that they suck. It’s one person telling another they they’re less important, fundamentally, as a person than others. That they hold less value in the world, that their existence, because of their very being, is so worthless or even destructive to the world and society that they should remove themselves from it permanently. There’s no redemption or getting better. Nothing you can do. Better to check out now before you do more harm.

That’s what you’re telling someone when you say they should die. And, if no one does anything to stop you saying it, then they’re telling you it’s okay to do so.

Why now?

Twitter have chosen now to highlight both the rule and their enforcement of that rule (and immediately walked back their ability to actually enforce it). Why? I can see two reasons:

1. They’ve seen a sizable uptick in people wishing someone (Trump) was dead and can see how that will exacerbate the other problems of abuse and shitfighting on Twitter
2. They value a certain someone or group more than others and now that someone or group are a bigger target for this kind of abuse

Let’s be honest. If Twitter was really worried about Person A that Person B should die then they would’ve acted years ago. They’d monitor their platform more closely. They’d take reports more seriously. They’d do more than this.

What this is – this comment to Motherboard, this reinforcing their rule now – is Twitter telling everyone who has been subjected to death threats (and more) that they’re less important or less valuable than Trump and his ilk.

Yes, the rule applies to everyone. But the enforcement doesn’t. That’s what matters.

Who gets power

Guidelines about what people say aren’t just about what’s said. They’re about the people who are allowed to talk. Twitter has never reckoned with that side of their moderation.

I can’t say why for sure but, if I had to guess, it’d be because doing so would fly in the face of their business model. They need as many users as possible to be successful. That’s the priority.

Twitter is supposed to be the place where everyone can talk and join the discussion (whatever that discussion may be). Since the first part of that – the everyone – is the most important part of their business, Twitter have spent most of its existence focusing their community building and rules on the second – the discussion. They’re trying to shape and moderate what people talk about to keep ”everyone” included. In doing so, they’ve lost sight of the fact that every decision about what people can say is also about who can say it.

When you’re building a community, you need to settle the ”who”. ”Everyone” doesn’t cut it. You can define it however you like: demographics, interests, actions (what people do or don’t do), whatever. If you don’t do anything, you end up chasing your tail when your rules don’t work and you just recreate the power dynamics of the wider world.

And this is totally about power and who wields it. Trump himself has threatened violence on US citizens and Twitter let it ”stay accessible”². His comment wasn’t removed. His account wasn’t suspended. Now, Twitter is rising to say that people hoping he dies – which is abstract, and not an actual threat – warrants removal.

That’s a statement of who Twitter values. Twitter is saying that Trump is allowed to threaten people with violence but he must be protected from people wishing he was dead. But, when men (and it’s usually men) wish women were dead, they’re safe. They’re allowed to do that. And women, or black people, or queer people, or whoever it may be on the receiving end, aren’t worth protecting.

That’s Twitter telling you who matters. Even if they didn’t mean to do so.

Two people are arguing. Person A starts interrupting Person B, refusing to let them make their point. Person A also repeatedly insults Person B. Eventually, Person B interrupts so they can speak. They do so in a way that insults Person A.

If you watched all that unfold and then told someone you watched two people interrupt and insult each other, you wouldn’t be wrong. But the person you told wouldn’t have any idea what really happened.

In the aftermath of the September 29 US Presidential Debate, we saw a string of “both sides“ headlines from major presses, describing what they saw as insults and tirades from both Trump and Biden. This is a debate where Trump called upon white supremacists to “stand back, stand by“ (which said white supremacists saw as a call to arms) and Biden asked if Trump “ever shuts up“ after a stream of rants and interruptions.

But that’s not what some headlines reported. Media outlets resorted to both-sidesism and treated every discretion as equal:

• “Sharp personal attacks and name calling chaotic first debate” – The New York Times (who then changed tack)
• “Personal attacks, sharp exchanges mark turbulent first presidential debate“ – The Washington Post (who also changed their line)
• “Trump, Biden trade barbs in first presidential debate“ – The Wall Street Journal

They missed the context.

Despite being a less-than-ideal way of understanding conflict, it extends to countless other areas. Take Trump himself: he routinely compares people who protest police violence and, in response to what they see as intimidation, throw things at police offers to the officers who have shot at and killed unarmed civilians.

He’s not unique in that. You’ll see it on the news, you’ll hear it from family members. It’s pervasive and often hard to argue against.

In this world view, people who defend themselves become equivalent to people who attack first or respond with disproportionate violence. In a world where so much manipulation and coercion happens with the threat of violence (be it implicit or explicit) – for example, Trump saying that looters will be shot – it makes it impossible for the victims to respond in turn without being labeled as part of the problem. The headline will read that they’re just as bad.

This way of thinking is rife in the world (and it extends far beyond people in the media, even if their commitment to “both sidesism“ is a real problem). And it makes it difficult to consistently point out the problem and the steps required to solve it. It’s held back vital reforms in areas as varied as police reform and health.

False equivalence and violence

Family violence provides a clear, and telling, example of how this approach to viewing a problem limits our ability to understand what’s actually happening. It also illustrates how people can take this misunderstanding, politicise it, and use it against victims of violence.

In her fantastic, harrowing book See what you made me do about domestic abuse, Jess Hill dedicates a chapter to when women use violence. In it, she details a disagreement between two parts of academia: ’family conflict’ researchers and ’violence against women’ (VAW) researchers.

Family conflict researchers, Hill explains, “insist that in the home women are just as violent as men.“ VAW researchers, on the other hand, “rubbish claims of ’gender symmetry’ and insist that perpetrators are overwhelmingly men“.

Both groups, says Hill, point to credible statistics to prove their point. And that there are “respected experts who have come to reasonable conclusions“ on both sides of the debate.

One of the reasons for this, according to Hill, is the way family conflict researchers have collected and understood their data:

Almost all the studies that ’prove’ women are as violent as men get their data via an instrument known as the Conflicts Tactics Scale, or CTS. It asks respondents to answer a series of questions: does violence occur in the relationship? How frequently does it occur? What does it look like?

The survey frames domestic violence as an argument that gets out of control (and thus misses some of the most dangerous examples of domestic violence). It asks if either partner in the relationship has used force to settle a disagreement and, if so, what kind of force. It then ranks “forceful acts on a scale of severity“.

But it’s not interested in why or how an act of force happened. The researcher’s job “is to record and rank each incident according to severity“. Context goes out the window. And that’s a problem when you’re trying to understand violence.

Without context, for example, the CTS gives equal weight to a kick that barely leaves a bruise as it does to a kick that causes traumatic brain injury. The kick whose intended meaning is ’leave me alone’ is registered as equal to a kick that means ’if you try to leave the house again, I’ll break all your ribs’.

This can lead to a distortion of the data and a misunderstanding of what’s happening:

’Those who have perpetrated several violent “acts“ (now matter how serious) and those who have reported committing a single act (no matter how trivial) are both defined as “violent“,’ write VAW scholars Russell and Rebecca Dobash. A woman who tries but fails to hit her partner will be recorded as ’violent’ - just as he will be if he beats her unconscious. According to the CTS, this relationship consists of one violent woman and one violent man in a situation of mutual violence.

Now, researchers who use this approach and end up believing that men and women are equally violent in a relationship aren’t “sloppy“, according to Hill:

It’s because their research focuses on how couples resolve arguments - calmly or violently? From the family conflict viewpoint both the man and woman above chose violence. Even if one of them had a greater impact, both are culpable, because both used violence.

Even the best intentions can have disastrous consequences. Family conflict researchers are clearly stating their goals and their rationale. But it’s still limited and, in many ways, flawed. That hasn’t stopped “men’s rights activists“ from clinging to their results and repeatedly, loudly, and forcefully using them to derail countless discussions about the violence women face in the home and even the smallest steps to address it.

How we understand conflict

There’s a world of difference between violence in the home, conflict in streets, an argument on a stage, and any other example you can think of. And, in each instance, there will be a different mix of things like racism, sexism, misogyny.

This line of thinking, this both-sidesism, exists on a continuum. It applies to the small indiscretions and the most systemic violence. Seeing it in stark examples can make it easier to see how it plays out on smaller stages.

But, throughout them all, there will be a few constants: a desire to control; to influence; to exert power; and to claim dominance. The stakes will change but the intent will remain. It’s important to know how we understand conflict and violence. And it’s important to know how we’re trying to tell others about what happens.

Context will always be important. We can’t reduce any conflict or violence to a simple tally or binary yes/no scale. And we can’t throw up our hands and say “well, they’re both doing it“.

Doing so is tantamount to giving up. It’s a surrender to the status quo. And it tells the aggressor that they’re safe to keep doing what they’re doing.

Another day, another reminder of two things:

1. It’s financially viable — sensible, even — for some journalists to go solo
2. More reporters going solo is, at best, a short-to-medium term solution to the news industry’s woes.

The latest high-profile example is Casey Newton, formerly of The Verge and now of Substack-newsletter Platformer. Platformer will be a continuation of Newton’s work at The Verge, where he covered ”the collisions between tech platforms and our democracy”.

The main goal? “Holding the world’s most powerful companies to account.” Certainly worth a few dollars a month. But the secondary goal is at least as interesting: testing (and perhaps demonstrating) the viability of a market where there are fewer traditional media companies and more indie journos doing their thing for readers that pay them directly.

It’s a powerful proposition. And an even more powerful bit of myth making.

Rogue reporters

Here’s how Newton frames his vision:

But I can’t stop thinking about a world in which we blow up media companies into their smallest constituent parts — individual reporters, aggressively working their beats, for an audience of paying customers grateful for the work — and allow them to rebuild from the ground up. A world where hundreds of new publications are born, and thousands of journalists are once again employed — in jobs that only their readers can ever take away from them.

I’m ready to find out if such a world is possible, and to do my part to make it happen.

To be fair, there’s a lot to like about his thought. And, credit where credit’s due, Newton’s using his sizable platform to articulate, test, and (hopefully) build out this vision.

He also touches on something else important, and currently lacking, about the media:

Platformer is dedicated to the proposition that the world’s most powerful companies — and everyone affected by them — deserve a publication that goes narrow and deep.

Newton is right about the value of ”narrow and deep”. And, unfortunately, specialist journalists were among the first to go as payroll budgets cratered. They’re one of the most important, and most criminally undervalued, parts of a robust news outfit. But they’re also expensive. And, when you’re desperately trying to cover more news than you can afford to, you start to value cheaper generalists over the more experienced, but more narrow, reporters.¹

These journos — the ones who go ”narrow and deep” — are in a fantastic position to build sustainable audiences around their work. They can build passionate audiences in niche areas, some of whom will be willing to splash out a few dollars.

And that’s great — genuinely great. Those reporters can, and do, add tremendous value to the world. But a collection of solo journos doing it themselves for small communities built around shared interest in a niche topic does not a health democracy make.²

There are a few potential issues, though. And only one is financial.

Diminishing returns

Here’s a boring statement: there are a lot of people and services that ask for your subscription dollars. Only so many of those people and services will get them and even fewer will get enough of them to actually make a living.

I do think the doom and gloom around that sentiment is overstated: somehow, against all odds, there are a lot of subscription dollars floating around the ether. And I do think some kind of sustainable ecosystem of subscription publications will emerge (and that it’ll be bigger than people expect).

But, still, cynicism. Those dollars will likely flow on disproportionately to the bigger publications (who can thus dedicate yet more time and resources to their work). And solo publications, by nature, call for more time and more effort to promote yourself and find readers (unless you already have a platform). That means they favour people who are already financially stable, already well known, or can just afford to work what amounts to two or three full time jobs until they can go completely solo.³

There will always be stories of the single parent of two who worked full time at the dead-end desk job but wrote great stories of an evening until they cracked the big time. And there will always be stories of passionate reporters who struck off on their own to build an audience. And there will always be yet more stories of smug young guys who ”did it on their own (just don’t look at the family money behind them)” that are used as examples of the solo model being both possible and desirable.

But all of the above are rare. And they perpetuate a myth that, frankly, needs to die. Especially when it comes to journalism.

In this together

Journalism is a team sport. The best work — the most powerful, the most meaningful — comes when a room full of people or a small team work together to create something bigger than themselves.

Sometimes, that’s a couple of reporters and an editor working together for years to break a seismic story. Sometimes, it’s a radio station pulling shifts to cover a disaster — as a former employer of mine, ABC Melbourne, did during the Black Saturday bushfires.

But they’re just the big ones. The real value of media organisations comes from the grunt work no-one cares about and from the structure they provide to help train new journos.

Hands up if you’ve paid any attention to your local courts lately. Or ever. What about your local council meetings?

Chances are you haven’t. Because no one does. Because they’re boring. In the case of local council, probably deliberately so. But both are vital. And so is sending a journo along to them.

That grunt work — the boring stuff, the court reports and the council meetings — are critical to a healthy media system. Maybe you don’t get a cracker of a story out of them very often but the stories you do get form the basis of the bigger stories down the line.

But who’s going to pay for a newsletter dedicated to your local court system or council? Who’s going to build a viable indie press out of that?

No one. But both are absolutely critical. And both form a foundation for a broader whole that can serve its readership well.

Another thing no one’s going to pay for? The newsletter from a 20-year-old kid fresh out of their cadetship or degree. No contacts, no bylines, can’t tell a lede from their shoes. Those kids need to come up somewhere. And they need to develop the editorial nous required to make a great story from someone.

That’s where institutions excel. Sure, they do foster some bad habits.⁴ But they also instill a lot of the habits that matter.

Gather up

That’s not to say there isn’t value in Newton’s world where ”hundreds of new publications are born” and more reporters take their careers into their own hands. It’s not like there are many big organisations that are doing well by them, anyway.

But his vision does by into this ideal of rugged individualism that, to my mind, has caused more harm than good. It’s the Die Hard of journalism: the lone reporter, surrounded by bad actors and worse business models, strikes out on their own to change the world.

Alright. Cool. Yippee-ki-yay.

Something special happens when a publication shrinks down all the way to a single reporter’s point of view. The publication feels more trustworthy: you know who the writer is, and where they’re coming from.

That kind of approach works great for reviews or opinion pieces. I want and value they kind of long-term relationship so I can contexualise what they’re saying.

But I don’t trust any single reporter more than I trust, say, the ABC here in Australia or The Guardian. Because I know the codes of conduct they’re bound by and I know the editorial processes they go through. And I know that, for a lot of stories — for the stories that matter — that I won’t be getting one person’s view with all the biases, be they unexamined or otherwise, and limitations that entails.

An informed society takes a village. And that starts with the people doing the informing.

Variety, spice, life

Fortunately, the model of journalism Newton’s espousing here will help in that regard in some ways.

Ben Thomson of Statechery explains it well:

Just because this model works for stars like Newton doesn’t mean it is exclusive to folks who could easily have jobs with traditional media companies. Indeed, I expect the greatest societal benefits from this model to be the emergence of more and more creators whose voices would have never been heard previously.

And that’s great. More voices, more thoughts, more potential for great work. Having more people try to make a go of it has a lot of benefits, even if they don’t pan out.

It’s in that doing — of more people throwing their hats into the ring and trying — that little communities of publishers emerge, each feeding off each other and building a place where ideas and skills evolve.

Maybe they’ll even pool their resources together. Maybe we’ll see publishing collectives make a comeback. Not that they ever went away: collectives are nothing new, online or otherwise. But they haven’t held a lot of sway in the public consciousness for a long time.

Artists have led the way: multiple independent artists, each doing their own thing, but operating under a loose banner and sharing resources.

Imagine four or five indie reporters, each from adjacent fields, operating their own publication but banding together to help each other out and share subscribers. They get more than they would individually; readers learn more than they expect (another benefit of larger publications with broader remits). Maybe they can even bring younger, less well-known and experienced reporters into the fold now and then.

Sure, it’s not as romantic or easily mythologised as a solo journo venturing into the world. But it’s the kind of future I’d like to subscribe to.

Microsoft have relaunched their Edge browser and they’d like you to know about it. In addition to randomly launching and pinning itself to taskbars (and being generally gross), Windows 10 is now bypassing your default browser settings for no good reason at all.¹

The Windows 10 start menu has general search functionality: hit the Windows key, type your search query and, in addition to searching your software and files, it’ll also search the internet.

(As a fun bonus, if you search for your web browser the menu will also suggest Edge. Charming.)

Say you decide to follow one of those web searches. Windows won’t launch your default browser. That’d be too obvious. No, it’ll pop open Edge for you. And then ask if you’d like to make Edge your default web browser.

Really don’t see that happening any time soon. Sorry.