The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away

Free expression and democracy require decentralised, federated, open source and secure technology that cannot be captured.

I cannot overstate the massive mistake Musk made last week, and I hope it was a mistake.

By throttling links to Substack Musk violated one of the foundational principles of the open internet: free linking and equal treatment between all nodes on the network, AKA net neutrality. This showed his ‘free speech’ stand to be hypocritical and destroyed a huge amount of trust with users. More importantly, it shows just how far his judgment is off, and how easily threatened he is by a much smaller competitor. Musk denies Substack links were throttled but his ‘stealing’ accusation came after the fact.

He alienated a huge amount of his core supporters, many of whom are ardent Substack writers and fans, and has given his detractors more ammunition.

The reaction was related to Substack’s launch of Notes, a conversation tool that has some similarities to Twitter but is in reality no threat to it. It shouldn’t matter, using quasi-monopoly power to squash smaller rivals in unethical and possibly illegal.

Musk’s violation of free speech principles resulted in Matt Taibbi walking from the Twitter Files. Thankfully Substack is fully restored now.

Much has been said of power relation between Taibbi and Musk. It may in fact be the inverse of what has been suggested, or at least much more equal. Taibbi walking is a major blow to Musk’s credibility. Taibbi’s walking away from Twitter itself would have even more impact.

I have long been saying we cannot rely on tech oligarchs – being willing and able to walk away is critical. Musk’s disruption of Twitter was needed, it has now taken a downward turn. More decentralised, open source, and secure platforms that can resist capture from powerful interests are needed. The challenge is generating the network effects that drive so many users to large platforms. Cryptocurrencies have shown that decentralised network effects are possible, but these need to be made more real in the social media field.

Thankfully there are many more platform alternatives than existed two or three years ago. Building these alternatives was the work I did with EngageMedia for almost 18 years.

Substack has been important for challenging BigTech and corporate media, though all platforms have their biases and should not be relied on long-term, even if they seem allied at this time. I recommend that everyone spread their work and audiences across at least three platforms or more.

Nothing should be taken for granted. The solutions are messy but include a strong culture of free speech that platforms are bound to respect, proper processes and transparency, net neutrality, anti-trust legislation when platforms get too big, decentralisation and open source as guiding principles, and robust competition to ensure a wide variety of alternatives are always available.

Disclosure - I currently work with Matt Taibbi.