John Gruber

Done with Daring Fireball

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I can’t really imagine he’ll care, but after literal decades of reading John Gruber’s Daring Fireball (I even had two different DF t-shirts back from when I thought he was worth supporting monetarily), the time has come to unsubscribe. (By which I mean, I’m dropping him from my RSS reader. He wasn’t getting money from me.)

I’d been on the fence for a while, thanks to his occasional casual ableism (called out here, and then again here). But it was his recent “actually, hanging out in a nazi bar (X) is fine, actually” post and subsequent “but if I had principles, I wouldn’t have any entertainment” whining (“The Ellisons aren’t much better than Musk. Should I stop watching Warner Bros and Paramount movies, HBO, CBS, and CNN?” and “The principled man has nothing to watch.”) that finally pushed me over the edge.

I’m often disappointed that so many high-profile people and businesses, including many of those that Gruber cites as reasons to be on X, are still (or again) posting there. But if someone I liked in the real world decided they wanted to go hang out with a crowd that I found morally, ethically, politically, and in many other ways reprehensible, that’d be their bad decision, and not only would I not join them, but I wouldn’t see much reason to hang out with them, either. It’s easy enough to do that in the virtual world, too.

There are plenty of other people to read and sources of Apple and wider tech commentary and opinion.

Kudos to the many people who have been pushing back against Gruber’s post, including higher profile names more likely to influence Gruber’s thinking (maybe, hopefully, but I’m not optimistic about it) than I am, like Anil Dash over on Bluesky (first thread, second thread, third thread), Lex Friedman on his blog and with a followup, and a few others I saw pass through my reading but can’t remember exactly who and where at this moment.

I’ve been off X/Twitter for almost exactly four years now, since November 20, 2022, and I haven’t missed it. It’s really not difficult to not hang out with racists, nazis, and pedophiles. At least, it isn’t for me. I wish it were that easy for more people.

Updates:

  • Gavin Anderegg, John Gruber on X: “I’m not angry, John, I’m just so very tired.” (This led me to the following two.)
  • Ernie Smith, The X is Off-Target: “…X is not a welcoming place anymore and in fact comes with more brand harms than brand goods.”
  • Dan Sinker, An Open Letter To The People Writing Lengthy Posts About ‘Why I’m Going Back to Twitter’: “What the fuck are you doing?”
  • Watts Martin, Checking Prior Assumptions: “Prior assumptions checked. You know what? I’m feeling pretty good about them.”
  • Warner Crocker, John Gruber Thinks I’ve Lost My Mind: “…whether you pay for X or just lurk and scroll, you’re giving Musk money to do what he does.”
  • Cesare Forelli: “Picking the week in which the owner of Twitter spent 276 millions to help Republicans – just days after the US president abandoned Ukraine to lend a saving hand to Putin – to write some sort of love letter for Twitter is definitely a choice.”
  • Jeff Johnson: “Gruber’s post, mere weeks before the midterms, with democracy itself under threat from Trump, doesn’t even mention the moral dilemma of supporting the political propaganda machine of the man who paid $250 million to elect Trump, took a chainsaw to our government, and continues to be the biggest right-wing funder in history.”
  • Karl Bode, Casey Newton And John Gruber Slink Back To Elon Musk’s Right-Wing Propaganda Machine: “Tech journalism mainstays are feebly rationalizing their return to a broken, billionaire-run right-wing propaganda website.”
  • Tim Bray, I Wasted an Hour on X: “I dunno, I just spent an hour there and I find myself totally gloomed out.”

Gruber: If I never see it, I don’t care.

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I’ve been reading John Gruber’s Daring Fireball for years. His posts generally fall into one of three categories: Apple and tech sphere commentary that I tend to respect and appreciate reading, even when I don’t necessarily agree; baseball blather that I don’t care at all about; and occasional current events and political commentary that sometimes works for me, sometimes doesn’t.

But last week he surprised me with a remarkably blatant and forthright declaration of uncaring privilege. I’ve let it sit for a few days, but kept coming back to it, so here we are.

In responding to a post by Anil Dash about Substack, primarily advocating for writers to stop calling their posts/newsletters “Substacks” and therefore doing Substack’s marketing for them, Gruber notes Dash’s reminder that Substack has no issues with platforming Nazis and others on the far-right.

And his take is, despite many people whose opinions he says he respects refusing to support Substack because of this policy, he hasn’t personally seen stuff like this, so he doesn’t care. Literally, that’s what he said:

I know a bunch of good, smart people who see Substack like Dash does, and refuse to pay for any publication on Substack’s platform because of their “Hey we’re just a neutral publishing platform, not an editor, let alone a censor” stance. What I can say, personally, is that I read and pay for several publications on Substack, and for the last few weeks I’ve tried using their iOS app (more on this in a moment), and I’ve never once seen a whiff of anything even vaguely right-wing, let alone hateful. Not a whiff. If it’s there, I never see it. If I never see it, I don’t care.

Sure, this is a pretty common attitude to have. But it’s surprising to me to see it stated so publicly and blatantly. Instead of listening to and believing Dash and the other people in Gruber’s circles who have called Substack out on this (and it’s not like it’s difficult to find people talking about this: here’s TechCrunch, The Verge, the New York Times, and NBC News, and that’s just the first four links on a Duck Duck Go search for “substack won’t ban nazis“), he just shrugs it all away with “if I never see it, I don’t care”.

Look, lots of people publish on Substack. Not everyone is going to want to cut it out entirely, especially if writers they rely on use that as their primary or sole outlet. I have a few people I read regularly that still publish on Substack (I just read what I can for free via RSS rather than supporting Substack by subscribing to the paid content).

But even in that case, a thoughtful response would be closer to “I understand and support your choice, though for these reasons, I’m not going to walk away entirely”, not, “if I never see it, I don’t care.”

Just…ugh. Do better.