NOTICINGS: The question is not to be or not to be, but how to be.
How systems exert power.
I was stopped cold, caught in a fog of horror. I had just read that at a Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement said: “We need to get better at treating [the deportation process] like a business—like Amazon Prime, but with human beings.”
Like a business.
The phrase did what such phrases are designed to do: it smoothed the horrific. It compressed human lives into logistics—containers, routes, throughput. It replaced judgment with efficiency. And once again, I found myself plunged into the familiar morass—not of what choice to make, but how.
Not the old frame: in or out, stay or leave, all or nothing. That worm-eaten frame that promises support it can never deliver. Nor can I leave the world. None of us can. Has anyone ever stopped it and actually gotten off?
When reporting revealed that Substack profits from posts written by Nazis, the instant responses teeter-tottered into a familiar script: stay or leave. Who in the hell wants to hang out with—or materially contribute to—Nazis?
My own response was immediate and visceral. Repulsion. And dread. It took time for that first nauseous surge to loosen enough to get my bearings. Long enough to separate the players on the field into system, scale, and impact, rather than collapsing them into names and numbers on jerseys.
Even though I did not know—until The Guardian—that I share this publishing space with Nazis, I have always known they live in my state. They shop in the same grocery stores. They drive the same roads. They occupy the same weather. Platform discovery did not conjure them into existence. It only stripped away a convenience: the illusion of distance.
The city I live in was a sundown town. Black and Brown people were expected to be gone by nightfall. The promise of “paradise” in Washington was not innocence; it was exclusion—the promise of an all-white state, enforced not only by law but by threat, custom, and silence. This history did not vanish. It settled into the ground. Platform proximity did not invent this reality. It merely disturbed a long-maintained forgetting.
These distinctions are not excuses. They are clarifications. Not to minimize harm, but because failing to see what the players represent—systems, scale, and impact—produces gestures that feel decisive while changing very little. The system is a platform that hosts speech. Substack’s scale is limited, uneven, and nothing like Amazon, Meta, or the state. The impact is real—but not uniform, not totalizing, not identical for every actor within it.
Staying or leaving began to feel like the wrong question.
The more difficult one was this: how to act without pretending innocence is available without surrendering judgment to the comfort of an all-or-nothing answer?
What helped were not answers, but lenses.
As Scott Shapiro argues, we live inside massively coordinated plans. We do not consent to them one by one. We are born into them. Agency does not come from standing outside the plan—an impossibility—but from interpreting it, contesting it, redirecting it from within. Counter-planning, not exit.
Not all systems exert power in the same way. Algorithms are not profits; they are the help—efficient, tireless, obedient. They reward speed, repetition, and agreement. Profit extracts. Screens cancel unpredictability, that awkward requirement of freedom. What appears is lit, final, and correct. Already decided. Next. Our time is their product.
The better question is not How do I remain untouched?, but Where do I add friction, meaning, and memory that extraction cannot digest?
Unpredictability is not chaos. It is the condition that makes revision possible.
Drama, in its original civic sense, was never entertainment alone. It was the staging of the human condition in public—so people could see, hear, and reckon together. Imagine the drama of ordinary lives taken seriously. Policies discussed not as positions, but as lived consequences. Attention changes when bodies are present, when voices tremble, when silence—and thinking out loud—are welcomed to do their work.
This is close to what Simone Weil meant by attention: engagement with the world’s suffering rather than escape from it.
Hannah Arendt was clear-eyed about the real danger. It is not proximity to the abhorrent. The danger is self-censorship. Withdrawal from public speech. Abandoning spaces where plural voices still appear.
This is where refusal begins, and the choice is yours and mine. What Scott Galloway calls Resist and Unsubscribe is not moral theater. It is a pressure strategy directed at systems whose power is scale: Amazon, Meta, Google, FedEx, and media conglomerates. In these systems, engagement quality is irrelevant. They do not care. They optimize. They respond to market loss. Withdrawal functions structurally and is registered quickly by one-percenter decision-makers.
Every calibrated movement is a decision.
But Substack is morally inadequate without being totalizing. It still allows—welcomes!—extended argument, historical memory, and moral complexity—capacities other platforms actively degrade. Personal websites, for all their purity, reach far fewer people unless already amplified elsewhere.
As Timothy Snyder warns, one does not abandon imperfect institutions because extremists are present. One abandons them only when they cease to support truth-telling at all. Self-withdrawal by those who care accelerates capture.
Platforms do not own meaning.
Writers do.
Profit accrues regardless.
What does not accrue automatically is sense. Memory. Awe. A refusal to simplify.
So I name the contradiction. I refuse platform loyalty. I refuse algorithmic obedience. Algorithms do not just host speech—they weigh it, route it, bury it. I try, instead, to keep my work oriented toward human unpredictability, breath, and chorus.
Not purity.
Conduct.
Argument.
And Howl. Unpredictably.
NOTES:
These thinkers are cited not as authorities to settle the question, but as lenses that clarify posture, conduct, and responsibility within imperfect systems.
Heather Cox Richardson
Letters from an American, February 7, 2026.
The Guardian
Reporting on Substack’s monetization of extremist content, February 7, 2026.
Resist and Unsubscribe
https://www.resistandunsubscribe.com
A strategy advocating long-term, voluntary consumer withdrawal as structural pressure on large-scale corporate systems. The plan emphasizes sustained participation over time, allowing individuals to determine what level of inconvenience or loss they are willing to endure. Unsubscribing is framed as a personal decision, without blame or shame. The strategy targets market-sensitive firms—particularly technology platforms and companies enabling state power—on the premise that such systems respond not to outrage or moral appeal, but to market loss. The strategy contrasts with short-term mass shutdowns, which historically dissipate energy without producing durable leverage.
James W. Loewen
Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism.
Documents thousands of sundown towns across the United States—including in the Pacific Northwest—where Black and Brown people were excluded after dark through intimidation, violence, and informal enforcement.
Historical evidence indicates that Bellingham, Washington, functioned as a sundown town through much of the mid-20th century, with oral histories and demographic records suggesting informal racial exclusion into the late 1960s despite the absence of a formal municipal ordinance.
Scott J. Shapiro
Legality. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Develops the “planning theory of law,” arguing that modern legal and institutional systems are massively coordinated plans that individuals are born into and must interpret, contest, and redirect from within.
Hannah Arendt
The Human Condition. University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Between Past and Future. Viking Press, 1961.
Articulates the distinction between labor, work, and action; argues that freedom appears only in public action and plurality, and that withdrawal from the shared world results in political disappearance. Essays on authority, tradition, and the erosion of public space inform this analysis.
Timothy Snyder
On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books, 2017.
The Road to Unfreedom. Tim Duggan Books, 2018.
Warns that democratic institutions fail not only through overt capture, but through self-withdrawal by those committed to truth-telling; examines how pluralism erodes when civic responsibility recedes.