Digest 02/07/2022

Grace Lavery quits Substack, saying no to the Olympics, Rogan's apology, and more.

This week’s Study Hall Digest feature has been handed over to James Factora, a freelance writer who mostly covers queer and trans politics and cultures. You can follow their work at @jamesfactora. 

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FOR WHOM THE SUB STACKS

Trans writer and scholar Grace Lavery has shut down her Substack, the Wazzock’s Review, just shy of a year from when she signed a contract with the self publishing start-up, and just over a week from the publication of her memoir, Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis. According to a New York Times report from last April, Lavery signed on for a $125,000 advance, to be earned out over the course of a year. As Lavery herself noted in her final missive, published Monday, the offer was a smart PR move for Substack, which was facing harsh criticism at the time for platforming a variety of anti-trans writers. And it’s not as though it was hush money either; from the beginning, Lavery’s newsletter didn’t hold back on her attempts to hold the platform accountable. 

But as Lavery’s final newsletter details, the “shady corporate garbage” and a “repulsive trail of managerial slime” from Substack’s execs proved the final straw. Published on Jan. 26, just five days before Lavery jumped ship, both a letter from Substack co-founders Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, and a Twitter thread from Substack communications VP Lulu Cheng Meservey double down on Substack’s approach to content moderation — which is to say, none at all, in the name of preserving ~ freedom of speech ~. 

While both the letter and Twitter thread appeared to be a direct response to a Daily Beast report that found that anti-vaxx Substackers are making bank, its negligence applies equally to how the platform handles transphobic libel. As Lavery points out in her newsletter, Substack’s own terms of use explicitly ask users to agree that they will not publish “fraudulent, deceptive, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, libelous” content. Its content guidelines also specify that Substack cannot be used to publish hateful content that threatens violence to people based on protected classes like race, gender, and disability. Yet Graham Linehan, who is so virulently transmisogynist that even Twitter put its foot down and banned him from the platform, has consistently published direct attacks on Lavery to his thousands of paid subscribers. Substack’s refusal to enforce its own terms, even though Lavery says she repeatedly told the company directly about Linehan’s libel, is why she left — not out of any desire to “censor” anyone. 

So how does one simply walk away from a six-figure contract from a major publishing startup? 

“I haven’t spoken to anyone at Substack — I just deleted the site,” Lavery told me via Twitter DM. “I don’t especially want to talk to anyone,” she said, adding that it was unlikely that the company would have renewed her Pro deal anyway. 

Lavery also wants to make clear that there is “an important difference between Jesse Singal and Graham Linehan,” namely that the former’s work criticizing the trans movement, while personally disagreeable, is not “strictly hateful,” whereas Linehan is “very clearly motivated primarily and consistently by a lurid hatred of trans women,” particularly trans women attracted to women. 

“I’m not mad that Hamish, Chris, and Jairaj didn’t take my view — they of course must use their own judgment,” she told me. “I was mad because they pretended that everyone criticizing Linehan was doing so on the basis of his ‘controversial’ opinions. So, you know, if people disagree that’s one thing, but when they pretend you’ve said something you haven’t, that’s another.”

Lavery isn’t calling for a total boycott of Substack, though. “I have never received a paycheck where the money wasn’t dirty in some way, and if there are writers who find Substack works for them, they should continue to get that bread,” she said. “On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if other people come to the conclusion that I have, which is that Substack will refuse to enforce their terms of use, and therefore that the platform is not safe for trans people. But I wouldn’t want to moralize about it—it’s a political decision, and if my livelihood depended on Substack, I’d probably eat this plate of shit too.”

“It is one thing to treat Substack as a social network in which there are inevitably bad actors, much as we all use Twitter,” she added. “But it’s another if that network is actually misrepresenting its policies regarding content moderation and falsifying its terms of use. In other words, I don’t think anyone has a *moral* obligation to leave Substack, but I left Substack for reasons that I think anyone should be able to see, so obviously I think it’s the right thing to do on that level!”

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JUST SAY NO TO THE OLYMPICS

Somehow, it is once again time for the Olympics. The 2022 Winter Olympics kicked off in Beijing last Friday, despite widespread “diplomatic boycotts” based on China’s numerous human rights violations and the ongoing pandemic. Even though many of the countries “boycotting” the Olympics are themselves guilty of countless human rights abuses, it’s still worth noting that this presents a rare opportunity in which criticism of the Games is a mainstream topic of conversation, as longtime anti-Olympics writer Jules Boykoff recently argued for Jacobin. 

For media workers, this begs the question: what are our responsibilities in covering the Olympics? Most publications, regardless of political slant, buy into the narrative that the Games are a politically neutral, fundamentally democratic phenomenon. But as organizing collectives such as NOlympics LA point out, the Olympics are a unilaterally destructive force for every city that hosts them, accelerating gentrification, police militarization, surveillance, and more. Plus, there’s the fact that the Olympics have always been racist and exploitative of athletes, and continue to be to this day. To be totally honest, I didn’t realize just how harmful the Olympics are until last year, which I think speaks to how thoroughly most media has failed to challenge Olympic narratives. Considering the growing transnational movement to abolish the Games for good, the Olympics deserve to be more widely examined through a critical lens. Need a primer? NOlympics has a handy guide for journalists. – James Factora

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COMINGS AND GOINGS

— Taylor Lorenz is leaving the New York Times and joining the Washington Post as a columnist.

— Jo Livingstone has left the New Republic as a staff writer. 

— Marlon Walker is joining The Marshall Project. 

— Aisha Gani is joining Bloomberg’s fintech desk. 

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EVERYTHING ELSE

— Spotify removed over 70 episodes of Joe Rogan’s show from the site without comment. This comes after a number of artists and podcasters, including Neil Young and Brene Brown, also said they’d be pulling their content from the platform due to Rogan’s spreading of COVID misinformation. In response to videos circulating on social media (and for, uh, Black History Month???), Rogan apologized for using anti-black racial slurs in the past. 

— Netflix’s content marketing/propaganda journalism arm Tudum pays its writing staff, who are W-2 employees hired through a subcontractor and are mostly white women and women of color, a “starting pay of $50 an hour” along with “40-hour-a-week schedules.” While the editorial leadership are Netflix employees with benefits, the writers – who generally expressed satisfaction with the job, noting the death of journalism as a sustainable source of work – don’t get healthcare benefits but can purchase it through the subcontractor.

— This week saw the launch of Capital B, a nonprofit news organization centering Black voices founded by Lauren Williams and Akoto Ofori-Atta, coming from Vox, Mother Jones, the Root and The Trace and Essence respectively. Initially funded with $9 million in philanthropic backing, the local-national platform will also be funded by a membership program going forward.

— It is time for us to do what we have been doing. And that time is every day, say media organizations working on improving diversity. 

— Financial Times journos in the company’s US division are unionizing. 

— Those monsters at the New York Times are robbing many of the Last Joy Left by purchasing Wordle from its creator for a reported seven-figure sum. The game will, at least “initially”, be outside the paper’s Games paywall.