Hamish, just to be clear, your stance is not a stance on free speech, digital communities, or public discourse. It is using the cold logic of logistics as a solution to what’s being presented to you, rightly or wrongly, as a moral and ethical dilemma.

Substack’s position is far simpler than you let on here or have ever let on previously: Substack is going to engage in meta-moderation, meaning it will do its damnedest to rejigger the structure of a digital space so that people never see content that they might demand be subjected to conventional (content-based) moderation.

Chris didn’t answer the question he was asked to answer in that interview for the simple reason that Substack as a corporation (not as a group of individuals) is ambivalent on the subjects of racism, antisemitism, misogyny, Islamophobia, bigotry against the LGBTQIA+ community, ableism, ageism, and so on. Your plan is to try to corral the racists into a space they have all chosen to be in so that they only interact with other racists and the non-racists never encounter them at all.

Why not just say that?

Personally, I think you won’t do so because to state it outright is to underscore how fantastically unworkable and honestly puerile a concept it is to try to apply to a digital environment. No one with any knowledge of the law, comms, theory, or history would advise you to it.

Whereas the meatspace analogy to the “ideal” (huge scare-quotes) version of what you are proposing is a series of rooms that alert visitors at their doorways to who is or is not likely to feel comfortable inside—signs reading, say, WHITES ONLY or NO JEWS or IRISH OUT—in a digital environment there is no physical doorjamb people can halt at to consider for a moment what misadventures might lie on the other side of it.

Online, we’re like cue balls rocketing toward each other at top speed all the time, never knowing who we will connect with or be struck by.

In that context, what you’re advocating for is anarchy and crossed fingers.

You will not be able to keep the racists and misogynists (et al.) in their highly lucrative (to Substack) digital silos. They will escape and smear their feces all over the walls, all the while carrying banners reading FREE SPEECH. That they do not understand what that phrase means, or its history, or when and how it is applied appropriately according to its meaning and history is less of a problem here on Substack than it would be elsewhere because candidly neither do you or Chris.

You have been told repeatedly that you have no idea what you are talking about on these subjects and you have repeatedly framed attempted instruction by people who do—people who know the law, digital communications, cultural theory, and history—as offering up either emotionalized pap or (as you state outright here) mere pretense.

Good luck with that. Just never say you didn’t know better.