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’s Text is king

“Article Armageddon”

The impeachment of President Plump

Mills’ sartorial quest to distance himself from his children, and ’s review thereof.

I didn’t go looking for a fight with Britain’s Online Safety Act. But as the CEO of Substack, an online publishing platform for writers, journalists, and creators of all kinds, figuring out how our company would adhere to the new regulatory measures became part of my job.

Substack has a strong and growing presence in the UK, with independent journalists and major cultural and political figures publishing their work and communicating with their audiences through our platform. So when the OSA came into effect, we set out to comply.

What I’ve discovered as we’ve implemented these rules shocks me.

In a climate of genuine anxiety about children’s exposure to harmful content, the Online Safety Act can sound like a careful, commonsense response. But what I’ve learned is that in practice, it pushes toward something much darker: a system of mass political censorship unlike anywhere else in the western world.

What does it actually mean to “comply” with the Online Safety Act? It does not mean hiring a few extra moderators or adding a warning label. It means platforms must build systems that continuously classify and censor speech at scale, deciding—often in advance of any complaint—what a regulator might deem unsuitable for children. Armies of human moderators or AI must be employed to scan essays, journalism, satires, photography, and every type of comment and discussion thread for potential triggers. Notably, these systems are not only seeking out illegal materials; they are trying to predict regulatory risk of lawful, mainstream comment in the face of stiff penalties.

Once something is classified as potentially sensitive, the next step is age gating. Readers—who in our case are overwhelmingly adults reading lawful material—often must be asked to prove their age through third-party checks that may involve facial scanning, providing identification documents, or financial verification. These measures don’t technically block the content, but they gate it behind steps that prove a hassle at best, and an invasion of privacy at worst. Readers who hoped to engage with the material are deterred from doing so; writers and creators, some of whose livelihoods depend upon getting their work in front of potential subscribers, bear the penalties. The result is that vast swathes of legitimate cultural discourse are swept up, bogged down, and discouraged.

Substack is building an economic engine that supports authorial independence, and as such, we are strong defenders of the freedom of the press, which we believe is essential to a free society.

For me, this belief began early. Growing up, my parents allowed an exception to bedtime if you were reading a book, and I took full advantage. Those books gave me a window into a world far larger than my own Canadian suburb. As a teenager, I explored the wild internet of the 90s, encountering both bad ideas and transformative ones. I found perspectives and cultures that eventually led to my career as a technologist and my life in San Francisco. The opportunity to read and explore widely was essential to fostering curiosity and independent thought, and it’s something I encourage in my own children today.

None of this is to say that there aren’t serious problems that manifest online, or that the government has no role to play in protecting children on the internet. Fighting those dangers with effective state action is important. When it comes to crimes against children, governments have a responsibility to respond with every tool at their disposal, especially vigorous investigations and prosecution of perpetrators.

What the OSA does is something different.

It focuses on speech on online platforms, forcing companies like Substack to build systems that decide when an essay crosses the line from satire to threat, or when photojournalism is too graphic—or tries to predict when a regulator might deem it so.

This would be concerning anywhere, but the UK already has expansive policing of speech. Recent reports suggest that police make over ten thousand arrests each year for online communications offenses, while only a small fraction result in conviction. Now with the OSA, there will be pervasive classification and identify verification, too.

This is how you end up with “papers, please” for the internet.

Substack is bound by the law and will continue to comply with it. We have taken care to implement these measures in the most transparent way possible, and we continually refine our approach to maximize freedom of expression within the bounds of the law. Smaller publishers and platforms, however, may not have the resources to do the same. In those cases, writers, publishers, and readers all suffer.

The Online Safety Act does something different than what it says on the tin. It is not the most effective way to keep kids safe, and it hurts a free society.

If this model spreads, it won’t just block content for children. It will determine whether adults can read, write, and argue freely without first submitting to surveillance. Companies like ours will respect the laws you choose, so please be sure you choose the future you want.

Their power to silence depends on creating fear: We don’t take political positions at Substack, but we do sometimes talk about our principles so that people know what to expect from us. and I wrote about how today’s threats to free speech depend scaring us into thinking they are inevitable — and why that won’t work. (This one is an essay so read it.)

a16z is Moving to Substack: I caught up with , , and about the move, free speech, and the attention economy. (Substack, YouTube)

Complex Systems: a.k.a. patio11 stopped by the Substack office and we took our recording studio for a test drive, talking about epistemic infrastructure, Substack defender, and more. (YouTube, web)

Bonus: we made shiny new badges to set the subscribers apart from the Non-Paying Customers.

About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want. We've learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that's still the one I'd pick. [emphasis added]

—Paul Graham

But what do people want? And what does it even mean, to like, want, man?

I want to sit around and play video games. I want to be a good father. I want a cookie. I want to be healthy. I don’t want to waste my time scrolling myself to distraction, but sometimes—often, if I’m honest—I do. How can these be reconciled? Which are good startup ideas? When you zoom in, the concept of wanting gets complicated.

Can pulling this thread lead us to higher goals?

Lies and delusions

When you build something that people use, you develop a visceral understanding of revealed preference, which is the brute fact that people will say they want one thing, but then choose another when given the opportunity.1

It’s tempting to think this is simple dishonesty: when I say I want to eat healthy I am lying, and the fact that I eat the cookie is the proof. A more sophisticated take is that we’re kidding ourselves, as in The Elephant in the Brain:

We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it. Our brains are built to act in our self-interest while at the same time trying hard not to appear selfish in front of other people.

Yes, people really do lie to others and to themselves about what they actually want. But that’s still not enough to explain the weirdness of wanting.

Consider products that change what you want. Heroin makes you feel great but also, famously, makes you want more heroin. Many people who might otherwise be curious to try it are put off because they, quite reasonably, don’t want to become someone who only wants more heroin. Does that mean they don’t really want to feel good?

Or consider the well-known problem of wanting to lose weight but struggling to diet. We’ve had an obesity epidemic despite the fact that “just eat less food” was a simple, widely known, 100% effective solution. Does that mean people don’t really want to be thin?

Then came GLP-1 agonists like Ozempic that are easy to take and make you want to eat less, and suddenly the problem is solved.

Wanting to experience vs. wanting to become

I would like the experience of eating a cookie, but I do not want to be the guy who just ate a cookie.2 These are two different types of desire that are often in tension.

Great marketing starts with something you want to experience and incepts or even manufactures something you want to become. You crave a cigarette for obvious reasons, but the job of the cigarette commercial is to help you imagine it will make you cool.

Truly great products deliver the goods. They offer a path to become someone greater than yourself, in a package that you can actually choose. This is the good reason to go to college: you can go and surround yourself with an environment and peer group that will transform you into a more fully realized version of yourself. Ozempic really does make you thin.

Dangerous products lure you, by offering an experience you want, into becoming something you don’t. Heroin makes you feel good but risks turning you into a junkie. Slot machines are fun but can ruin your life. We build digital products like this now too.

Building something great in the sense of becoming-what-you-want means skirting danger. The power to change for the better is also the power to ruin, and it’s up for debate which is which.

What should you want? Is it part of a good life to be powerful? thin? on drugs? rich? cool? happy? Now we’re asking for the meaning of life, which I don’t think can be answered by even the best startup advice.

Good, great, and transcendent

This is the domain of culture.

Culture is not just about getting what you want; it is about learning what to want. It shapes our values, beliefs, identity, taste, and how we relate to other people. And in turn, we shape it, when we choose what to pay attention to, what to elevate, what we contribute back. Culture is nothing less than our personal and shared quest for the meaning of life. The networks that support culture should serve the people who live that life.

This makes me think there is a third order of usefulness to which we can aspire.

Good: Make something people want.

Great: Help people become what they want.

Transcendent: Let people discover what they should want.

That last is well beyond what we can expect from software alone. This is what people look for in religion, in community, and in their relationships with each other.

Software is still eating the world. This affords the opportunity to create new ways to do things, and new ways to relate (or fail to relate) to each other. When software first changes some area of life, sometimes the initial merely ‘good’ products succeed at the expense of old systems that had solutions (however imperfect) for the great and the transcendent.

But that is a temporary, unstable state of affairs. People simply cannot be satisfied by getting what they want. This will cause some to resist the new technologies, but it will also create room for a new class of technology that helps people become what they want, and figure out what they should want in their new, changed world.

Predictions

I don’t claim to know what form those technologies will take, but I will venture two predictions about them.

First, they will be products of enduring value as AI sweeps through and changes much about our world.

Second, they will be things that we use together.

There will be an avalanche of single-player products that people want, from cheat-on-everything apps to AI girl- and boyfriends. But the process of figuring out what to want is inherently multiplayer. People who sever themselves completely from humanity will be lost, dead ends.

The future will belong to those who put new technology to work solving the same old human problems: figuring out what to want, and how to live, together.