Why I moved this site off of Substack
After a long pause in writing, I've felt a renewed sense of mission for both what I wish this newsletter and its potential offshoots to be. As I've expounded at length about previously, I didn't really see the utility in being a drop in the sea of left-leaning commentators parroting slightly tweaked versions of the same old critiques of capital, imperialism, or the currently reigning American regime. In the spirit of this publication's namesake, I've always wanted to bring unique, more practical advice and tools (not explicitly unique to the American context) to the fore. I've also wanted to impart my unique perspective and skills as a lifelong technologist in some manner.
I won't pretend to a visionary in this regard. I am not a deep well of revolutionary wisdom (hardly at all, in fact); like the majority of disgruntled wage subsisters in this world, I've not really a clue about what to do aside from what I have gleaned from reading and listening to the all of the classical thinkers seeking to answer the age old question of what is to be done, many of whom are providing advice that is possibly somewhat anachronistic to our current condition. If nothing else, my ultimate goal is to create a sustainable feedback loop to spur both myself and you, the reader, to action, so that we can learn through dialogue, engagement, and the creation of new communities, instead of being paralyzed by endless debate, discourse, and cynicism.
This vision is starting to take a more coherent shape, and there will be more to come on these fronts. For now, I'd like to touch upon one of my luminary principles in this new phase: digital sovereignty. What better way to reclaim one's digital ownership than to limit one's reliance on large technology giants? Being subject to the whims and fancies of a platform which boosts Nazi content and has allied itself with Polymarket, one of the top purveyors of America's gambling epidemic, felt morally at odds with running a socialist newsletter.
Alas, with this transition, Praxis is now a fully self-hosted entity. Granted, technically speaking, we don't own the entire stack. After all, we are using a virtual private server and bulk email services solicited by various small vendors. We could've gone the full Paul Le Roux route and built our own ICANN domain name registrar, but that probably would've been a bit excessive at this stage. In all seriousness, by distributing our resources among various small players largely concerned with offering tightly scoped services rather than surrendering our entire infrastructural stack to one big tech platform, we distribute our potential chokepoints and apply greater ownership and portability to our own content.
Additionally, Ghost, the open source content management system we are using under the hood, sports native integration with ActivityPub and a bridge to integrate with Bluesky. These are an open web protocol and an open web platform, respectively, that "federate" the distribution of social media content. Supporting open source and open technology standards is infinitely more agreeable with the political posture and mission of this publication than trying to justify one's participation in a private platform replete with reactionary content. For the less technically inclined: imagine if something like Facebook wasn't one collection of data warehouses owned by a single company, but a complex web of servers owned and operated by independent stewards. Praxis is now a node in that web. In some sense, we gain a little bit of control over our social destiny now, and contributing any exposure to these aspirational tools and platforms seeking to wrest even a modicum of power away from rampant American tech monopolies feels like the right thing to do.
More broadly, I'd been thinking on the utility of participating in platforms stewarded by capitalists and shaped by capitalist interests more broadly. What does it mean for anti-capitalist creators to succeed on platforms undergirded by black box algorithms surely tuned against the interests of labor and victim populations in the Global South? These platforms have demonstrably been vehicles for fomenting passivity, cynicism, and nihilism. Through the dopaminergic wheels which wind their infinite feeds, they have inured people, especially Americans, to the plight of both themselves and the even greater plight of their underclass allies the world over. Even the righteous indignation these platforms can often foment tends to channel that energy into vacuous outlets for it to be evaporated. This, in tandem with a multitude of other factors, has accelerated the sort of malignant degrees of individuality and transactionalism scouring the public social condition. No matter how you engage with these platforms, there is always an invisible hand guiding the most profitable outcomes for their owners (outcomes which are rarely compatible with public interests), let alone the editorial incentives that have become increasingly pronounced in shaping algorithms on these platforms.
In my personal life, I'd recently uninstalled most social media apps from my phone, requiring me to use a desktop computer or other large device to make the act of engaging with social media more deliberate and thoughtful. Like many terminally online young people, the fatal act of doomscrolling had sunk its talons into my already limited free time. The infinite feeds of X, Meta, TikTok, and Substack create a vexing addiction; like a train wreck, they present a veritable disaster (especially given the substance of the content these days), but you just can't look away. Though these platforms have undoubtedly been boons for connecting with me people, educational content, and breaking news, on the whole, they were beginning to feel increasingly paralytic, especially as I was beginning to try my hand at contribution rather than pure consumption and finding myself in conversations that were wholly unproductive.
But what belies the social malaise, the reactionary turmoil, and the disproportionate financial consolidation these tech oligarchies foment is the more nakedly obvious Faustian bargain which we have all learned to tacitly and begrudgingly accept. We have surrendered a disturbing amount of ownership over our digital identities, consumption patterns, and autonomy to these platforms in exchange for cheap or even "free" access to everyday tools like social media and search engines, never mind the unsavory personal data brokerage industry we hardly pay any heed to, as though it were a mere postulate of existence. Even the physical ownership of computers altogether is being threatened by the acceleration of AI development; large corporations are hoarding an increasingly larger share of the finite pool of silicon products in the interest of building out data centers of massive scale to accommodate their ambitious demands for inference and training compute. This is having the second-order impact of making personal computer ownership increasingly inaccessible, accelerating our deferment of all things digital to large, self-interested corporations. If there exists any chance at unraveling this distorted contract, I say we at least ought to try our hand at it, regardless of the regulatory regime and its indifference to these circumstances.
