In Spite of the Nazis, I Chose Not to Archive the ADHD Open Space Substack
There is no ethical performative self-sabotage under capitalism.
On January 7th, 2024, I took careful aim and prepared to shoot myself in the foot by writing a post about taking my nascent blog(s) off of Substack as a protest against the Nazi presence here. It was a sad and introspective post, and I invoked the memory of my grandfather, a man who literally fought the Nazis by way of fixing bombers in the Army Air Corps in Italy.
I kept writing, mainly on Medium, but the decision felt…Pyrrhic. As in, yes, I knew it was a righteous decision…but it didn’t feel like the right one.
For one thing, I still read Substack blogs — especially of people I like (such as
) and of people I like to occasionally disagree with (such as ). I love my Medium, but the fact is that I found the quality of writing and discourse on Substack higher — and so even if I wasn’t payin for any new subscriptions, I was still hanging out there.In the “Nazis at the table” metaphor that people like to use so much, I wasn’t sitting at the table…but I was standing awkwardly close to it, because the non-Nazi conversations were so damn interesting.
I also felt a bit cheated.
The thing about Substack that had brought me here in the first place was the simple fact that many of those same writers that I admired were making bank.
Deservedly so — I will never regret supporting
— but there was a part of me that watched the subscriber count grow in my “always-free” Substack here and also in my “might make money someday” Substack over at and couldn’t help but think of the numbers game:Sure, out of 70 subscribers only one paid to be a Founder of the ADHD Open Space (thanks, Kevin!) but that means that there might be two if I got 150 subscribers and maybe even one or two supporters of the project…
I haven’t ever been good at money. I seem, at times, to actively run away from it (as evidenced by promising that all the content on this newsletter would be free). So I tend to listen when people who I respect and who are much better at the hyper-competitive content-creation game talk.
One of them, Alexandra Snow , is not only hyper-successful in her adult-industry niche but also teaching others — and I read a particular thread on X (which I unfortunately can’t link to here since X is pretty much down the tubes) where she was addressing a similar situation in the adult industry — namely, there was a call to boycott a certain platform because they’d done some unscrupulous things.
Alexandra’s response was pretty cutthroat and direct: are you running a business or performing it? If it’s the latter, by all means, rage-quit with a final, poignantly sad post (ahem, why you gotta @ me, Alexandra?). That will be the end of the business, most likely, but you will have the satisfaction of an authentic performance.
If, on the other hand, you are running a business, you have to make decisions based on the business, not on your feelings. That doesn’t mean “anything for profit” but it also doesn’t mean all the decisions will be comfortable.
I’m not going to keep paraphrasing her since I don’t have access to the original thread, but that’s what I took away from it, along with the admonishment that holding all businesses to the same ethical standard was equality but not equity — and that’s a problem throughout our capitalist culture. Telling everyone they had to quit Substack was not fair — especially if their quitting would be personally destructive and publicly irrelevant.
But what would Grandpa say?
In my “I quit” essay I speculated that Grandpa would have objected to my making money on the same platform that had made money from the Nazis. But there was a particular flaw in that argument: my Grandpa and I had never been really close. We’d never really talked about things like capitalism and any part of “right or wrong” beyond his belief that I needed to be a good Mormon Father with a Forever Family and anything else was wrong.
I decided to talk to someone who knew him much better: my father. I laid out the reasoning I’d had in the essay, I explained my doubts, and asked him point blank: “What do you think Grandpa would think?”
He thought about it for a while. Then he said, “I don’t think that Grandpa would think you were sitting at the table with the Nazis. He’d probably say it’s more like you both have offices in the same neighborhood — and as long as you don’t have a sign in your window saying “This way to the Nazis!” you should keep writing what you need to, and benefiting as much as you can.”
A thought occurred to me. “So…maybe write so much good stuff that nobody has time to go read Nazi posts?”
“…sure?” My Dad has a particular tone when he doesn’t necessarily understand one of my comments but doesn’t want to derail it. I love him for that.
That’s why I’ll keep writing here on Substack. As always, this blog, ADHD Open Space, will be free, to help people the way other content has helped me — but you’re welcome to support the work, because while words are free, coffee is not.
I may not be able to out-fight the Nazis…but I’ll do my best to out-write them.
Great writing Gray!