Well, I Guess That's It

After my last note, about 20 supporters unsubscribed. It's the biggest drop this newsletter has seen since it started.

This newsletter has flatlined since July, when it finally crossed the minimum threshold to keep it going and support my family. A nonprofit organization stepped in with $20,000 to fill in the last gaps. Apparently, announcing that to everyone was a big mistake. Since then, I've been losing subscribers with every post. (Or maybe my writing just sucks.)

I'm not sure why talking about giant alien squids and uncomfortable thoughts offends people more than a government supplying real bombs that kill thousands of innocent families a day, while our leaders host superspreader events with a smile. I especially don't understand why someone would sign up for a newsletter about doom and then suddenly break fragile.

Anyway...

This week, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed what we've witnessed firsthand for years now, that the Biden administration has been actively pressuring social media giants to censor information about Covid, even if it's just humor or satire. Zuckerberg clearly has his own motives for revealing this now, but it doesn't change the fact that it happened. And if Democrats were worried about how that could make them look during an election year, then they shouldn't have done it.

Of course, my experiences have aligned with my research, and it all points to an unsettling reality. Soon, they won't even need to censor information anymore. When you can lose 20 subscribers for talking about a giant alien squid attack that never happened, and then saying there was something good about the solidarity inspired by 2020, the people are doing a fine job silencing each other.

To clarify, my last post simply explored the dark truth that sudden catastrophes are, indeed, the only thing that often gets through to people. For a less controversial example (than giant alien squids), see Kim Stanley Robinson's novel The Ministry for the Future, which opens with a catastrophic heat wave that kills millions. Only then does the UN launch a genuine, legitimate effort to combat the climate crisis. We've seen similar events in actual history, with the Great Stink and then the Great Fog of London finally motivating action on sanitation and pollution.

On a broader note, it's been a rough couple of years. Back in 2022, the fine upstanding liberals of Medium decided my work wasn't beneficial to the vibes, and it was time for me to go. So I went to Substack. Things were going well for a while, but between the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Zients working day and night to censor writers like me from both directions, it's been hard to bring in new readers. My newsletter used to get 40 or 50 (free) subscribers a day. Now I'm lucky if it gets five. I'm far from the only writer dealing with this problem.

Last year, I moved to Ghost so that I could at least share my work across social media platforms without X blocking my links. It's also just a better platform, in my opinion. At any rate, that helped, but what I'm dealing with now has nothing to do with platform management or restricted links.

More and more people don't seem to want the truth. They love punishing content creators for saying things they don't like. It's always been tough, but now it's getting impossible.

I didn't want to talk about this, but here we go:

Despite the heavy censorship, some video from Gaza still gets out. This week, some of it happened across my feed. I will never get these images out of my head. I don't want them out. These things happened, and we're better off seeing it than hiding from it, regardless of the pain. That's what I mean when I talk about the region-beta paradox. In Gaza, it's already that bad, but we're not going to have our giant squid moment unless we look at it and deal with it. Otherwise, we're in for a worse wakeup call later.

Anyway...

I'm not going to join the ranks of writers who've sold out and started cheerleading for whatever their favorite politicians decide to do. I guess if this newsletter goes down in flames because I wrote the truth, then so be it. If we're going to burn it down, let's take a little direction from my last post and do it fast, so we can get this over with, and I can figure out what the hell to do with the rest of my life, since being a teacher and a writer didn't work out so well.

Of course, maybe I was always just a bad writer.

Thanks for reading.

Jessica