I wrote a while back about my complicated relationship with technology. How I love it, feel crushed by it, and I’m trying to carve out spaces that feel good. I ended that post by saying I hadn’t gotten into the other layer yet. The one where it’s not just about attention and noise, but about ethics.
This is that post. Every platform comes with an asterisk now.
The Substack thing
I was on Substack for a while. It’s a good product. Easy to use, nice reading experience, built-in discovery. I moved my newsletter there because the friction was low and the audience potential was real.
Then in November 2023, Jonathan Katz published a piece in The Atlantic reporting that he’d found at least 16 newsletters on Substack using overt Nazi symbols in their branding, with dozens more promoting white nationalist ideology. Some of them had thousands of subscribers. Some of them were monetized, meaning Substack was taking a 10% cut.
What followed was a slow-motion reckoning. 247 Substack writers signed an open letter asking the company to explain why it was platforming and profiting from this content. Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie responded by arguing that removing Nazi publications would amount to censorship and would make extremism worse. Casey Newton at Platformer announced he was leaving the platform, taking one of Substack’s largest newsletters with him.
Substack eventually removed five accounts. They did not change their policy. They did not commit to proactively removing Nazi content going forward.
And suddenly I had to decide: do I care enough about this to leave?
I did leave. I moved to Buttondown, which is smaller, quieter, and run by one person who is very clear about what he will and won’t host. But leaving cost me something. A simpler setup. A bigger potential audience. The knowledge that most people reading newsletters don’t know or care about Substack’s moderation policies, and my choice to leave was essentially invisible. A principled stand that nobody saw me take.
The tax
That’s the thing about trying to do the right thing with technology. You pay for it in friction.
Don’t want to use Twitter anymore because of what it’s become? Your alternatives are smaller and quieter and require more effort to find your people. I’m on Mastodon now, and I like it, but it took work to build even a modest community there. Don’t trust Google with your entire digital life? Hope you enjoy spending weekends learning to self-host. Want to buy music instead of streaming it? Now you need storage, backups, and a system to sync it across devices.
The convenient choice and the ethical choice are almost never the same, and that’s not an accident. The big platforms got big by being easy. They removed friction at every turn, and we handed over our data, our content, our attention, and in some cases our principles because the alternative was just harder.
This is by design. Every feature that makes a platform stickier is also a feature that makes it harder to leave. Your social graph, your content history, your followers, your archives. These aren’t just features. They’re leverage.
The Google problem
I think about this with Google constantly. My photos live there. Decades of them. My email, my calendar, my documents. If Google decided tomorrow to lock me out, or shut down, or change their terms in some way I couldn’t stomach, I would lose access to huge chunks of my own life.
This isn’t hypothetical. Ron Miller at TechCrunch wrote about getting locked out of his Google account for a month. He described it as losing access to much of his digital life, and noted that without journalist contacts at Google to escalate his case, he’s not sure he would have gotten back in at all. Browse any tech forum and you’ll find similar stories from people with no such contacts.
I don’t own any of it. I rent it. And the landlord can change the rules whenever they want.
I know I could migrate. I have the skills. I’ve already started. I’m running Immich for photos, I self-host a handful of services through my homelab. I use Tailscale and Nginx Proxy Manager to access everything securely. I have Pi-hole blocking ads across my network. Piece by piece, I’m pulling threads out of the Google blanket.
But “I could do more” is a sentence I keep saying without finishing it, because each piece is a part-time job that never ends. You don’t just set up Immich and walk away. You maintain it. You update it. You make sure your backups are running. You become your own IT department, and unlike Google, you don’t have a team of thousands backing you up. There’s a reason most people don’t do this. The friction is the feature, in both directions.
The part where I implicate myself
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable: I work in marketing technology. I’m part of the ecosystem I’m ambivalent about. I help companies use platforms and tools that collect data and optimize for engagement and do all the things that make the internet feel the way it feels. I’m not building the machine, exactly, but I’m definitely oiling its gears.
I’ve spent over a decade implementing, migrating, and maintaining marketing platforms. I’ve moved millions of contact records between systems. I’ve configured tracking pixels and built automated workflows that send emails based on behavioral signals. I know how the sausage gets made because I’m the one grinding the meat.
And I genuinely believe most of it is fine. Most marketing technology exists to help companies communicate with people who have asked to be communicated with. The problem isn’t the category. The problem is that the infrastructure it runs on, the platforms it depends on, the data it collects, all of it feeds into a larger system that most of us have complicated feelings about. You can do good work on top of platforms you have reservations about. You just have to be honest with yourself about the trade-off.
I don’t have a clean answer for that. I don’t think there is one. We all draw lines in different places. I left Substack but I still use Gmail. I’m on Mastodon but I also have a LinkedIn. I built my own website but it’s hosted on someone else’s servers. I write about owned platforms while earning my living on rented ones.
Living with the asterisks
The best I can do is try to be honest about the trade-offs. To notice when I’m paying the tax and when I’m avoiding it. To make choices that feel defensible to me, knowing they won’t be the same choices someone else would make.
Some of those choices are big and visible, like leaving Substack. Most of them are small and invisible, like spending a Saturday afternoon migrating photos to a server in my garage instead of just paying Google $3 a month. Nobody is going to congratulate me for running Immich. But I know my family’s photos aren’t training someone else’s AI model, and that matters to me even if it doesn’t matter to anyone else.
I don’t think you can use technology with your eyes open and feel entirely clean about it. The asterisks are everywhere. You just get to decide how many of them you’re willing to read.