No, Substack is Not a Haven for Misinformation

March 5, 2024 by Christopher Chantrill

Back on February 6, 2024 I told a tale at AT about how we were living in the Third Age of Communication, staring with:

The Age of Parchment: Writers write, monks in monasteries create illuminated manuscripts by hand in their monastic cells.

Then came:

The Age of Gutenberg: Writers write, printer’s devils convert the written word into print for mechanical printing presses.

And now:

The Age of Free-for-all: Writers write, and press Publish.

And I described how our illustrious leaders are beside themselves about the free-for-all! Of course, I’m not the first person to suggest that it’s Katy bar the door. According to Benjamin Carlson at The Free Press, it was all predicted by Marshall McLuhan in the Sixties. We are living in the “electric age,” McLuhan said, and

“It has deprived people, really, of their private identity. Everybody tends to merge his identity with other people at the speed of light. It’s called being mass man.”

But suppose McLuhan is wrong, and the Age of Mass Man was really in the mechanical Gutenberg Age of printing presses, cotton gins, and steam railways, when monarchs and latterly dictators controlled the Engineer’s Dials of Politics, intellectuals controlled the Engineer’s Dials of Ideas, and capitalists and then government regulators controlled the Engineer’s Dials of Industry.

Look at Bari Weiss. She got pissed off at the wokey culture at the New York Times, the ongoing ‘civil war" between what she called young "social justice warriors" and what she identified as older "free speech advocate" staffers and went and started her Substack-based Free Press. I’d say she’s rebelling -- against Mass Woke!

The Gutenberg Age was all about mechanical printing presses cranking out books, mechanical armies motoring over the north European plain; mechanical bureaucrats issuing “plans” and “regulations;” mechanical activists all chanting the same slogan.

But you can see, with all the panic in our “six ways from Sunday” Intelligence Community over their faked COVID panic and their faked climate panic, that our mechanical Gutenberg rulers just can’t get their arms around the new Free-for-all Age. Just Press Publish!

And yet, if they had half a brain, they would know that it’s been a century since the mechanical physics of Newton was superseded by the wave function and the probability amplitudes and the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics. Just Press Publish!

It’s been a century since Ludwig von Mises said that socialism couldn’t work because it couldn’t compute prices. It’s been 80 years since Friedrich Hayek said that planning couldn’t work because planners can’t plan. It’s been nearly a century since Stalin’s Five Year Plans failed, and over half a century since Mao’s Great Leap Forward plan failed.

We are in the middle of understanding that our global COVID plan failed, and the farmers are about to teach us that the NetZero plan is failing, and the Democratic Party is in the middle of understanding that its unrestricted immigration plan is failing.

But was Marshall McLuhan right about the “electric age” being the age of “mass man?” I suppose he is, in part, as every teenage girl is getting massified on TikTok into a hellhole of anxiety, depression, and suicide, courtesy of President Xi. But every teenage boy is getting a lesson in war and strategy and teamwork courtesy of Minecraft.

And you and I can read Substack chappies who are living dangerously outside the Overton Window that has been heroically curated ever since World War II by the six-ways-from-Sunday IC guys. Only, oh no! This from Wikipedia’s Substack article:

Some prominent authors accused of spreading misinformation have moved from [social media platforms] to Substack.

Thank goodness! It’s only “some prominent authors!” Imagine if politicians were using Substack, instead of lying their heads off on X/Twitter and Facebook.

Here’s what I think. I think that in the mechanical Gutenberg Age tens of thousands of nobody mechanics changed the world with their textile machinery and their steam machinery and their gasoline machinery and their assembly-line machinery. Meanwhile a few tippy-top intellectuals cranked up the ideas that killed 100 million people in communist Russia and communist China. Experts agree that “some prominent authors” were responsible for the misinformation that led to the two global disasters.

But now, in the Free-for-All Age, tens of thousands of nobody writers are going to change the world with Substack. Of course, they won’t be trying to Change the World like the tippy-top intellectuals of the Gutenberg Age. They will just be trying to solve little problems and hope that it makes a difference. In the new age the tippy-top intellectuals of the old age will fill the role presently filled by First Nations. There will be activist acknowledgements at the beginning of concerts and plays and movies, as in: “this symphony hall wishes to acknowledge that we gather in a sacred place, the traditional territory of racist DEI administrators from the Woking Classes, specifically the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone established by mostly peaceful protesters in 2020.”

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com.