On Quitting: Compromises
"Not even in the face of Armageddon."
Dearest readers,
I’m writing to say adieu. Let me explain.
When I was early in my first decade of life, my mother had to keep her head on a swivel. All kids are explorers, but I routinely took it to extremes. Curiosity plus cleverness plus tenacity equals guaranteed trouble. She needed a way to make me quickly cease and desist certain courses of action.
Corporal punishment was a well-oiled tool of her’s, but not applicable in all circumstances. I mean, it’s never applicable, but those were the times. She needed something for when I wasn’t being “bad”, just on a path of potential harm. She had to find a way to get inside my head.
Enter: The television series Lost In Space.
By the time I started watching the show, it was reruns. But mom noticed how excited I’d get when the Robot would warn Will Robinson of impending danger. It was a trope of the show. So, mom started to say “DANGER, DANGER” to me in the Robot voice when I was beelining into potential harm.
It worked. For a time.
Now 2025 looms and my mother’s voice of warning is blaring inside the confines of my mind. Everything is turning into and/or revealing itself as a trap.
In 2019 I deleted all my social media. I’d had enough. Then I joined Substack, which in short order revealed itself as just another flavor of social media. Hotel California, man.
In October of this year I opened an Instagram account. Fear Of Missing Out and mild stalking curiosity were the temptations, even as I understood I was volunteering yet again to be swallowed into the belly of The Beast.
My experience on Instagram quickly turned into this:
And then billionaire-funded Substack announced its collaboration with Bari Weiss’ billionaire-funded The Free Press with much praise and fanfare. This time last year Substack found itself embroiled in another fiasco involving platforming white supremacists and wannabe Nazis.
The denial and excuses and discounting and corporate propaganda fueling infighting between writers was a circus.
I’m not going to get into the details and arguments on Substack’s growing controversies here. Click the above links if you’re curious. What matters is that Substack’s leadership keeps blatantly telling us who they are and what’s important to them. They clearly have an agenda.
[not-so-distant call of danger]
I smell conspiracy.
Conspiracies exist. This is a fact. Yes, we’ve gone quite mad with conspiratorial theory thinking, but that does not negate the presence of actual conspiracies. Reality distortion is all the rage, and billionaires have the resources to pull out all the stops. They are even recommissioning nuclear power plants to solely aid their plans.
[Robot waves arms furiously]
No one needs to be an evil mastermind to unleash this communal harm and destruction. Savior thinking is endemic. Everyone believes they are the good guy. Madness is a built-in feature of modernity. And consolidated wealth of astronomical proportions is the methamphetamine.
It’s the stuff of bad miracles.
But there I go again, explaining and telling. It’s almost an irresistible urge, especially for us White Dudes. Begone, sad specter!
Please forgive me for a few more paragraphs.
What happens when all media is captured? How much agency and a grasp on reality do we have when invisible algorithms, bots, and surveillance constantly mediate and monitor our experience, deciding who and what we see and hear, even as the companies try to convince us of its benevolence or nonexistence? How are we able to discern what is being prioritized and suppressed?
How long are we going to believe and trust tech companies and their leadership/owners/financiers’ words, even when proven over and again, that they are completely manipulating us behind the scenes, testing secret strategies and techniques, only to be fined pennies on the dollar for their crimes when they are caught? If they are caught?
When do we realize how harrowingly fucked this is? When will we acknowledge that tech companies’ promises of, and calls for freedom are actually for billionaire impunity to become masters of reality? This virulent desire is ancient, as old as empire itself. But never before has the technical uncanny valley power and speed to exponentially warp reality at unprecedented scale existed.
[ALARMS BLARING]
I do not believe any company’s rising tide lifts all boats. Especially operating under capitalism. Especially tech companies. I condemn the capture of the masses and commons, the construction of vampiric silos of thought and expression and commerce. Vile is the phantom theft and exploitive recombination of humanity’s flame for personal gain.
I do not believe corporations are people, or worthier surrogates for government. I believe that personal freedoms are irrevocably wed to communal responsibilities and accountability. Where they trespass the whole, they end. I believe the more power one holds, the more transparent one’s actions must be.
I do not need or want surveilled metrics on my readers or my writing. I do not need or want exploitive social spaces based on mysterious algorithmic feeds that pick winners and losers by design. I do not want to be drowned in the gladiator glamour of billionaire sponsored opinion and grift and propaganda.
And I definitely do not want to support their obvious ideological avarice and manipulation in any way.
It’s not about free speech. Never was. It’s about the manufacture of legitimacy and the control of reach via capture. They say they can’t get their’s until you get yours and that’s the lie we keep believing. It’s theater. Prestidigitation. There is no rising tide, just another trap. Billionaires are beyond the confines of profitability. They are free to pursue frictionless power by any and all means.
It’s not a complicated playbook. No need for aliens or engineered viruses or flat planets. Here it is:
Become incomprehensibly wealthy.
Buy entire private and public institutions/industries.
Sabotage them. Deform and mutilate them.
Offer solutions and sanctuaries in the name of freedom that they completely control.
Remake the world into complete servitude.
No thanks. I just want to write. Undistracted. Unmediated. Unmolested.
So, what does that look like? In a world where I had the resources, I’d have a personal website built that follows the same tenets of writer Cory Doctorow’s, which reads, “No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period.”
I don’t have those resources. So I must retreat. I must stop participating in the traps presented as supportive tools and services.
Instagram is deleted. My Substack remains, for now, but I will not be engaging with the site. I will be deleting all my Notes, unfollowing everyone. I’ve already cut about half of my subscriptions. I may still publish via Substack, especially if I announce a move to some other method of distributing my writing, but it will be sparse, at best.
To the newsletters I remain subscribed to, I will work on direct interactions via email if I’m moved or have questions. I will do this without expectations for a response. The intention is to build deeper relationships and the offering of direct appreciation. It requires more intention, hopefully cultivating authenticity and sincere connection.
Please don’t take any of this personally. Perhaps you are more disciplined and able to resist the engineered fishhooks and gamification these platforms feature. I need to build my own writer’s sanctuary. That means refusing the churn of essay writing and Notes scrolling. I will be spending my time on neglected long-term projects that no one will see or know about.
Remember when life was mostly that? No one knew where you were, or what you were doing unless you wanted them to know. Relationships were local and tangible. Deliberate. Valued. Actions were tethered to immediate consequence and accountability. Our lives were not mitigated by screens and algorithms.
Whole generations do not know lives like that. That’s dark. That’s dangerous.
Thanks for reading. I will be publishing one more essay, a farewell for the new year. Something morbidly funny and irreverent and weird. And then I’ll be as quiet as falling snow as I work on fictional world building and screenplays. If anything comes of it, I’ll let you know.
If you are a subscriber, there’s nothing you need to do. You’ll still receive any writing or communications if you stay a subscriber. I hope you will.
Yours in the shitshow,
—C
It's a bind.
Understandable. We navigate a great landscape of treachery. I will miss you here.