My spiritual life provides a grounding cord so I can deal with life's turbulence (not a rocket ship to help me escape it). The ride has been a little choppy.
I wasn't aware of the situation with substack until reading your post. First of all I want to commend you for thinking this thru, for expressing your thoughts and concerns and for having the patients to wait. With that said, to me one of the most concerning things is the fact that Substack holds space for the White nationalists and Nazis. These is an increasing problem all over the world and many of use are trying to figure out how to handle it. I don't belive in silencing people cause we need to hear, listen and debate. Isolation makes extremism easier. But at the same time making money of this is to me ethically wrong. So the question is, will these groups take over Substack or will they just be there as well. And can we be fine with that, can we even engage in debate and maybe, just maybe change someones opinion. On the other hand why shouldn't Substack have a policy against rasicm and that kind of propaganda, many social media does? Like you wrote, we can't say whatever we want.
To me this whole situation raises another concern of mine, there are a lot of writing about mental health and healing on many of these platforms. I have seen at least a few writers on here as well. But many of them aren't informed and can create harm. Even lethal harm at worst. What about the ethics behind that? I know it might be a bit of topic but to me social media is great at it's best but there's still a wide grey zone and many pitfalls that we as a community or society haven't figured out yet. Especially not with one generation hardly on social media, on that's brought up with social media and one that is inbetween. Not sure if you got any wiser reading my thoughts but that's just my two cents.
Thank you Maia for this post - in some ways as I reflect on the challenges here, it makes me wonder what might happen if the majority of the writers here - who are amazing, talented and doing good in the world - stood together, continued their good work and just ignored those that continue to inflict their one-sided views on the rest of us. While I'm not advocating for putting my head in the sand, sometimes it seems that we do give way too much air time to those who abuse the privilege. I'm only ingesting and reading what I desire and what feeds my soul. I'll stand with you in the quiet of the forest for now too.
I wasn't aware of the situation with substack until reading your post. First of all I want to commend you for thinking this thru, for expressing your thoughts and concerns and for having the patients to wait. With that said, to me one of the most concerning things is the fact that Substack holds space for the White nationalists and Nazis. These is an increasing problem all over the world and many of use are trying to figure out how to handle it. I don't belive in silencing people cause we need to hear, listen and debate. Isolation makes extremism easier. But at the same time making money of this is to me ethically wrong. So the question is, will these groups take over Substack or will they just be there as well. And can we be fine with that, can we even engage in debate and maybe, just maybe change someones opinion. On the other hand why shouldn't Substack have a policy against rasicm and that kind of propaganda, many social media does? Like you wrote, we can't say whatever we want.
To me this whole situation raises another concern of mine, there are a lot of writing about mental health and healing on many of these platforms. I have seen at least a few writers on here as well. But many of them aren't informed and can create harm. Even lethal harm at worst. What about the ethics behind that? I know it might be a bit of topic but to me social media is great at it's best but there's still a wide grey zone and many pitfalls that we as a community or society haven't figured out yet. Especially not with one generation hardly on social media, on that's brought up with social media and one that is inbetween. Not sure if you got any wiser reading my thoughts but that's just my two cents.
Thank you Maia for this post - in some ways as I reflect on the challenges here, it makes me wonder what might happen if the majority of the writers here - who are amazing, talented and doing good in the world - stood together, continued their good work and just ignored those that continue to inflict their one-sided views on the rest of us. While I'm not advocating for putting my head in the sand, sometimes it seems that we do give way too much air time to those who abuse the privilege. I'm only ingesting and reading what I desire and what feeds my soul. I'll stand with you in the quiet of the forest for now too.