Hamish McKenzie Probably Isn't as Stupid as He's Pretending to Be

He dislikes what you say, but he'll defend to the death his right to monetize it.

A co-founder of Substack just made an argument so stupid that I tend to imagine it was stupid on purpose, and loathe as I am to engage with it, it’s worth refuting.

First, the easy parts:

Platform moderation isn't the same thing as government censorship. Substack doesn’t have prisons or police or courts. Platforms can act as the public square in some ways, but that’s like, an analogy, not an actual equivalence. There are sensible (as in, non-libertarian) reasons not to let the government outlaw Nazi ideas outright. But that makes it more important for non-government actors to tell Nazis to fuck off.

Substack isn’t a moderation-free, no-rules space. When they take the position that Nazis are welcome and sex workers (for example) are not, they’re taking a position: the wrong one, obviously. There’s no way to be value-neutral and position-free, to stay ever-suspended in a wizened state of utter ataraxia. For the platform to function, there have to be some rules, and those rules will inevitably reflect the subjective moral and political judgements of the people making them. Which is to say that:

Making your space welcoming to anyone other than bigots necessarily means making it unwelcoming to bigots. No space can be for everyone. You have to choose between bigots and the people they’re bigoted against—which should be an easy choice, unless you’re sympathetic to the bigotry in question. Which Substack manifestly is, and for intensely obvious reasons:

Nazis are helping Substack make money, and Substack is helping Nazis make money. McKenzie’s post sort of treats monetization as the natural state of all content, gesturing at the possibility of “demonetizing” the Nazi accounts without acknowledging that Substack consciously chose to monetize Nazism in the first place. This allows him to wriggle out of having to defend his company’s decision to (again) monetize Nazism, which is what we were supposed to be talking about, I’d thought.

There are no high-minded ideals here. Substack isn’t taking a principled but problematic stand, like the fucking ACLU. They’re operating on equal parts avarice and cowardice. No more, no less.

As such, I think McKenzie is being just the tiniest but disingenuous when he says that “it’s important to engage with and understand a range of views even if—especially if—you disagree with them.” He doesn’t actually think that the Substackers Against Nazis are asking for every opinion they disagree with to be expunged from the platform. That’s such an obviously silly straw man that it borders on being a non sequitur.

As is always the case with this line of argument, the implication is that we, the newsletter-reading public, need to hear Nazi shit. That we’re dangerously underexposed to Nazi shit. That, to the peril of our very democracy, there’s simply nowhere, online or off, to hear Nazi shit.

But, if I may go out on a limb here, most of us have already heard kind of a lot of Nazi shit, especially lately. We understand fascism and eugenics perfectly well. These are old-as-dirt, inert, long-ago-debunked ideas. There is no groundbreaking, challenging, innovative new work being done in the field of racism.

And if you haven’t heard about Nazism, or fascism, or eugenics—everyone has to hear about something for the first time sometime—then, if I may go out on an additional limb here, the single worst way to learn about those things is from a Nazi.

Maybe Hamish McKenzie earnestly, disastrously, spectacularly misunderstands all of this. Maybe Hamish McKenzie is a credulous little bantling of a man, a mark, a rube, the smolest of beans, reader of no books. Maybe.

But I suspect he just wants the Nazis making him money to keep making him money.