Saying hello

Well, here we are.

Thank you for signing up for this newsletter, which—as I suspect you’ve already seen—I created in a fit of worry over the fate of Twitter, without the luxury of putting much thought into how best to use this space. Perhaps I should be proud that I managed to hold out on the newsletter craze as long as I did. I am not necessarily a fan of Substack, which I have been quite critical of in the past when it comes to their approach to content moderation. (If you’re interested in more on that subject, I highly recommend Jacob Schulz’s excellent essay on Lawfare.) But … any port in a storm, I guess.

Twitter was never perfect. It always had problems. Now Musk seems determined to make those problems worse. It would be easier to wave goodbye without a second thought if not for the fact that, for writers like yours truly, the app represents years of effort building an audience and a regular platform for distributing our work. In this respect, Twitter was both a godsend and a curse. It gave young writers and artists who hadn’t yet established themselves a way to get their foot in the door. (In more than one instance, I’ve had editors at publications reach out to me either over DM or because they were interested in one of my tweets.) It also gave us a way to destroy ourselves: the same personal brand (ugh) that we depended on in order to gain an audience could just as quickly become a liability. I won’t miss that part of Twitter, but I don’t think there was any way to get the first part of the experience without the second.

For writers, MuskTwitter isn’t a particularly pleasant place to be at the moment, but it’s where our audience is. Thus the need to build up alternative platforms (like this one!) where people can still find us and follow our work if Twitter comes crashing down or becomes gradually unusable over time with an accumulation of technical glitches and people who are just plain unpleasant. As far as I’m concerned, the jury is still out on alternative social media services like Mastodon: we’ll see how different communities engage with that platform over time.

For the last several years, I’ve spent most of my time writing in some form or another about democracy and institutions, whether those institutions are the courts, the Justice Department, or social media platforms. Part of my overarching thesis is that we—and by this I mean both Americans and participants in liberal democratic spaces generally—have arrived in a moment where we are desperate for more and better governance and yet skeptical of the ability of those in charge to offer what we need. So it feels very appropriate to be writing this right now because an unaccountable billionaire has purchased a social media platform in order to trash it, precisely because he didn’t like the governance model it had created. And here I am, using another platform whose governance model I don’t really approve of, either. But perhaps we should improve society somewhat.

Right now, my plan is to use this space to let you know when I have a new piece to share. If you want to read more about Trump and Twitter (personally, I wouldn’t recommend it) you can read my latest here, in The Atlantic. And, yes, I am on Mastodon.