As of January 21st, 2024, this substack will be archived.

Reason is simple: too many Nazis.

I had high hopes for Substack.

It was not that different from other places I’ve published (from Livejournal to Medium), maybe a bit more slick, and certainly with easier access to more interesting people. I was glad to be able to fully subscribe to both

Tara McMullin

and

Charlie Gilkey

, two people whose work has helped my quality of life immensely.

OK, I was a little annoyed that unlike Medium, I couldn’t pay one price and get behind all the paywalls. But hey, that’s life under capitalism; the writers deserved to get paid for writing the stuff that I wanted to read, and if I can’t afford it, that’s just the breaks.

Personally I tend to make mistakes about money all the time, like vowing that all the content on this blog would be free, with no paywalled content. This is why I can’t afford to support the other writers, no doubt. But since I have benefited so much from other writers who shared their ADHD experience for free, I felt it was time for me to pay it forward, if possible.

But…then I started finding out all about the whole Nazi problem here on Substack. It comes down to three things:

1. In spite of terms of service that would seem to contradict it, Substack does allow Nazi and white-supremacist blogs here on the platform.

2. In spite of terms of service that won’t allow content that may arbitrarily be determined to be “pornographic” to be monetized, Substack will allow the aforementioned Nazi blogs to monetize.

3. That means that they are making 10% of all the money that writing promoting Nazi and white supremacist beliefs are making.

The leadership is justifying this under a very thin belief in the sanctity of “free speech”, to which I point at the aforementioned ban on porn: so it’s ok to make money from glorifying genocidal fascists, but not from orgasms?

There’s been a lot written about the whole topic, but the clearest overview I’ve found is here by

Marisa Kabas

.

“But a lot of them are staying; why don’t you, Gray?”

Good question. The easiest answer is: I can leave.

I started my substack basically on a whim; I have no income from it, so it’s entirely my choice to stay or not.

I know there are others authors in a much worse dilemma. Some of them found the freedom to write full time about the things they care about — a writer’s dream!—thanks to their substack.

Switching platforms would be harmful, possibly even devastating to their quality of life. I do not envy them; I know some have sunk thousands of hours and dollars into establishing their presence here. For them, deciding whether to stay or go is going to be really tough decision.

But for me? I have my own blog about ADHD, as well as my own CreativeGray space, and long before this I had a pretty robust presence on Medium; it’s pretty easy to go back to those.

I don’t really see that I can say “It’s too hard”.

WWMGD?

Then there’s this guy:

That’s Darryl Miller, a fresh young enlistee in the U.S. Army Air Corps shortly before shipping off to Italy back in the 1940’s.

He was going to, you guessed it, help fight the Nazis, by fixing the bombers that were getting shot up and putting them back in the air again.

He was also my grandfather. By the time I was an adult, he and I did not agree on a lot of things.

But we did agree that Nazis were bad. And while I don’t really believe (as he did) that he’s up in the sky now, looking down at me…I’m pretty sure I know what he would say about me publishing on the same platform that pays Nazis.

I think on the off chance that he was right, I want to give him a reason to be proud of me.

Finally, there’s the shit in the water principle.

See, there I go, talking about making Grandpa proud and then swearing. Honestly, I’m incorrigible.

But it’s a thought experiment, that goes something like this:

There’s always a chance that there’s some fecal matter in your water. Most of the time we are comfortable just assuming that there’s not any, so we drink up.

But if you knew, for a fact, that there was shit in your water…how much shit would be acceptable so you’d be comfortable taking a drink?

What amount of money Nazis are making off a platform is small enough for me to be comfortable writing there too?

AGAIN: this is a personal decision. There’s a whole first-world privilege of clean water involved in the metaphor, and the fact is that most of the world’s population for most of human history has had to drink water with fecal matter (or worse) in it to some extent.

Some people aren’t lucky enough to have the choice.

But I am.

And so I’m choosing to leave the content here through January 21st, when the ADHD Open Space that inspired it will be done. I try to do what I say, and I said I this would be a resource for people interested in that event. The good news is that the podcast, if you’re already subscribed in a podcast app, will just switch to the new host; no need to do anything on your part.

After that date, though, (cue Yellow Brick Road by Sir Elton John), I’m taking my words and going somewhere else.

Hopefully see you there?