The creation of this blog was inspired by the desire to be in control of the content I produce online. I enjoyed using Medium for the Anti-Content publication (spoilers: I’m going to be cross-posting a bunch of the articles from that blog here), but any website that has ultimate and arbitrary control of the content is a liability.
The current environment online is extremely conducive to making everything political. As a (mostly) a-political thinker myself, this is not something that I want to get bogged down in, and even less something that I want to have the ability to affect my expression. Invariably, every platform that hosts user generated content online (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) is coming up against the necessity to make editorial decisions. They all initially claim to be bastions of free speech; mere conduits of the expression of others, but this is not how society works. They can’t hide behind the “platform” defense any more than a newspaper could. So they take a stance, whether by action (e.g. Twitter) or inaction (Facebook), and jeopardize their stated neutrality.
Recently, Medium has partnered with Colin Kaepernick to create race-related content on their platform. I happen to think that this is a really good idea, and a good fit (considering the general vibe of the Medium audience). And not just in a business context—I think they really care about amplifying voices that wouldn’t be heard without amplification. So I’ve no issues with this particular decision. But the action is political, which means that politics affect the content on the platform. And this I can’t abide by.
Whenever people are happy with “their” chosen representative of the executive branch wielding undue power, they always seem to forget that the next election might put “the other guy” on the throne. In a similar fashion, agreeing with a political decision made by your platform of choice is beside the point. The fact of having made the decision should be enough to alert you, the content creator, that considerations other than purely technical ones are at play.
In the next post, I will document some of the technical hurdles I had to overcome to create this website.
Credit where credit is due—I wouldn’t have made this move without some gentle spurring from Ellen. Thank you!