Post #2105974

Folk here really hate Substack, and I think the way they hate it is some of the most American shit ever, which is funny because a lot of the people doing it live in Europe. But you have to understand: from my perspective, as an Indigenous person, the Fediverse looks less like “the good internet” and more like a settler-colony established by the Empire. The move is familiar. The old place is corrupt. The old place is captured by capital. The old place is full of bad people and bad relations. So citizens of the Empire leave. They go make a new place. They call it cleaner, freer, more ethical, more democratic. Then they treat inhabiting that new place as political virtue. But that is not decolonial. That is the settler move. Patrick Wolfe’s point was that settler colonialism is a structure, not an event. It is not just “some people moved somewhere once.” It is displacement, replacement, and legitimation. Clear the ground. Install yourself. Tell a story where your presence is natural, necessary, and morally progressive. That is what I see in a lot of Fediverse culture. Not because every Mastodon user is evil. Not because federation is bad. Not because corporate platforms are good. Because the social form is settleristic. People flee the harms and obligations of the world they materially live in, then use the wealth, infrastructure, education, and technical capacity produced by those harms to build an imaginary outside. Then they call that outside the future. That is the American frontier myth in protocol form. And this is why the Substack discourse bothers me. The claim is not just “Substack is bad.” Fine. Substack is bad in many ordinary platform-capitalist ways. The stronger affective claim is: “do not go there; it is contaminated. Come here; this is the clean place. Speak here, among the people who already know. Keep the settlement pure.” That is not propaganda. That is in-group reproduction. Propaganda is communication organized around effects. It goes where it can change attention, change common sense, change what people think is possible. Posting anti-corporate propaganda only to anti-corporate people in an anti-corporate enclave may be morale, but it is not agitation. It is the food co-op version of politics: handing out anti-Walmart leaflets to people who already shop at the co-op, while congratulating yourself for never setting foot in Walmart. And the palingenetic part matters here. Palingenesis means rebirth. In fascism, Roger Griffin names palingenetic ultranationalism as the fantasy of national rebirth after decadence. But the move is not only available to explicit fascists. Settlerism also has a palingenetic structure: leave the ruined old world, found the purified new one, become reborn through settlement. That is the Fediverse fantasy at its worst. A new territory. A better people. A cleaner culture. An exportable future. And yes, this is also californication. A structural contradiction (corporate media, platform capitalism, the collapse of public discourse) gets converted into a personal lifestyle obligation: be the kind of person who posts in the right place. The political problem becomes a consumer-ethical identity. The crisis becomes affect management. The platform becomes a wellness practice. Tuck and Yang warned that decolonization is not a metaphor. I am saying the inverse too: settlement is not only a metaphor when the same structure keeps recurring. If your politics is “I will escape the contaminated relations I am responsible to, build a better place elsewhere, erase the people who made that elsewhere possible, and then export my improved culture back to the world,” that is settlement. And I think a lot of anti-Substack moralism is citizens of Empire refusing even the civic duty their own liberal democracies claim to require: stay with the people you live with, argue with them, cooperate with them, labor to change shared institutions, and be accountable for the harms that made your comfort possible. Instead, they run away from harm and obligation into an imaginary frontier. Then they call the frontier “community.” And then harass the people who were here first, if we dare step beyond the borders of that community: threaten us with exile, essentially, and somehow *still* don't see that they've basically come to believe "Make Microblogging Great Again" to be the highest political good this territory can achieve, fully realizing its position as a colony to the Web-Empire.