On June 7, 2021, I left my job at Media Matters for America and launched The Present Age. Three years and more than 500 posts later, I’m still here. I just wanted to send a quick note today to thank you for being a part of this journey.

Your support and engagement have been the driving forces behind this newsletter. It's been a pleasu…

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Hello readers, Parker here.

Yesterday, as I am loath wont to do, I was watching MSNBC’s Morning Joe, when I caught a segment featuring New York Police Department Deputy Commissioner Tarik Sheppard discussing the department’s Tuesday night arrests of protesters on Columbia University’s campus. At one point, Sheppard pulls out a bike lock and a roughly three foot chain and says the following, presenting it as evidence of “profressional” involvement in the protest movement.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI, CO-HOST, MORNING JOE: Tell us about this chain.

DEP. COMMISSIONER TARIK SHEPPARD, NYPD: Yeah, so when we were entering Hamilton Hall, this is not what students bring to school.

BRZEZINSK: Don’t think so.

SHEPPARD: This is what professionals bring to campuses and universities. These are heavy industrial chains that were locked with bike locks. And this is what we encountered on every door inside of Hamilton Hall. And so in order for our emergency services group to enter into the building, they had to first cut through these chains, but also get rid of debris and barricaded doors that were barricaded with refrigerators, vending machines, chairs, you name it, they pushed it up against those doors to try and stop us from coming in. But our guys would not be stopped. They did a fantastic job of entering into that location and taking people into custody without incident last night. They took about forty to fifty people into custody inside of the lobby of Hamilton Hall last night.

Setting aside just… everything else just going on — the protests, the arrests, the war, the local, national, and international politics of it all — I was just not prepared to see NYPD attempt to use the presence of bike locks and chains as evidence of “professionals” — which… again, what is even being said here? Professional whats?

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I saw a funny TikTok the other day from comedian Tom Fell. Okay, like the aging millennial I am, I saw it because it was also posted on Twitter/X/whatever-we’re-calling-it-these-days. Anyway, I thought it was good and funny, and figured that I’d share it with you here:

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The tl;dr of today’s newsletter is that you should consider starting a mailing list, even if you don’t have any intention of starting your own newsletter. You can do this on Substack1 by clicking the button below this paragraph, or you can use a different service (you could do this with a simple Google Form).

Create a Mailing List with Substack

Below, I’ll explain why you should do this, and I’ll also provide a bit of my personal history with newsletters/mailing lists.

This past weekend, Twitter introduced some bizarre new restrictions, seemingly attempting to isolate itself from the wider internet. Glancing over at Bluesky, I noticed several writers expressing their frustrations, rightfully distressed about the continued degradation of a platform that has served, for some, as the foundation of their careers.

In one Bluesky post, writer Nylah Burton wrote, “I’m worried that my freelance writing career is going to collapse without Twitter,” and asked editors looking for writers to reach out to her.

In another, writer Byron C. Clark wrote that had Musk’s Twitter takeover happened a year earlier, he “almost certainly” wouldn’t have become a best-selling author, and added, “Twitter shadowbanning Substack links has made continuing a journalism career difficult since then.”

I get it, I hear it, and I share the frustration and anguish of other writers. At one point, I had more than 250,000 Twitter followers, and the platform played a big role in helping me launch and boost my writing career.

A mailing list as a lifeline.

A few years ago, I started to get worried about what would happen to my career if one day Twitter disappeared, if the list of 250,000 people who had signed up to see my posts and links to my work suddenly evaporated, if I was stuck back at square one. After all, I didn’t (and still don’t) have much of a following on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn (but feel free to follow me on those if you’d like). Could the bottom just drop out?

I started a mailing list and casually dropped links to it in tweets and other posts. I wasn’t planning on starting a newsletter, as I was working at Media Matters and getting ready to cover the 2020 presidential election, but I thought to myself, “Hey, it might not be the worst idea in the world to make some contingency plans in the event of social media chaos.”

In February 2020, Republican mega-donor Paul Singer bought a “sizable stake” in Twitter. You may know Singer, more recently, as Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s billionaire sugar daddy. At the time of his Twitter investment, Bloomberg News reported that Singer and his company, Elliott Management, planned “to push for changes at the social media company, including replacing Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey.”

A lot of the reporting on Singer’s Twitter investment focused on how this could affect the company’s finances. I was more concerned about what could happen if Singer or another wealthy conservative tried to push the platform to the right, turning it into a firehose of right-wing content while suppressing progressive voices2. ( can vouch for this, as I texted him the morning I saw the story.) That motivated me to up my mailing list collection habits.

By the time I launched The Present Age in June 2021, I already had more than 1,000 emails on my list. Being able to start with that 1,000-user cushion helped as I ventured out into the world of self-employment, but would have remained just as useful had I continued working at Media Matters or anywhere else.

As of this morning, I have 33,347 free subscribers to this newsletter. Is it 250,000? No, but it’s something, and with the way Twitter has been going the past year or so, I’ll take it.

Most social media platforms box you in, tying you to the whims of investors and the occasional Elon Musk-sized wrecking ball.

Back in January, I wrote about “enshittification,” a term coined by Cory Doctorow and written about in a brilliant piece on his Pluralistic blog.

The general idea is that every platform — whether it’s Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, or TikTok — begins as a place that is good to its users. Over time, those platforms shift to a strategy of maximizing value for their business partners before ultimately maximizing their own profits at the expense of both users and business partners. Again, I highly recommend checking out Doctorow’s piece on this.

Since taking control of Twitter, Elon Musk has enshittified the platform in more ways than I can list, crushing the things that users liked about it (being able to follow breaking news events and seeing updates from trusted sources) and inventing new ways to make the product worse (prioritizing tweets from paid subscribers over subject matter experts, eliminating the verification process, and limiting the number of tweets you can look at per day). Still, people feel tied to Twitter because that’s where their followers are. The cost of ditching Twitter entirely and rebuilding your promotion feed is high, and it’s what’s keeping a lot of people who otherwise would have told Musk to shove it busily posting away.

Doctorow elaborated on this in another great piece, this one published by Locus (bolded emphasis mine):

When economists and sociologists theorize about social media, they emphasize ‘‘network effects.’’ A system has ‘‘network effects’’ if it gets more valuable as more people use it. You joined Facebook because you valued the company of the people who were already using it; once you joined, other people joined to hang out with you.

Network effects are powerful drivers of rapid growth. They’re a positive feedback loop, a flywheel that gets faster and faster.

But network effects cut both ways. If a system gets more valuable as it attracts more users, it also gets less valuable as it sheds users. The less valuable a system is to you, the easier it is to leave.

When you leave a system, you have to endure ‘‘switching costs’’ – every­thing you give up when you change products, services, or habits. Quitting smoking means enduring not just the high switching cost of nicotine with­drawal, but also contending with the painful switching costs of giving up the social camaraderie of the smoking area, the friends you’ve made there, and the friends you might make there in the future.

For social media, the biggest switching cost isn’t learning the ins and outs of a new app or generating a new password: it’s the communities, family members, friends, and customers you lose when you switch away. Leaving aside the complexity of adding friends back in on a new service, there’s the even harder business of getting all those people to leave at the same time as you and go to the same place.

Each commercial social media service has two imperatives: first, to make it as easy as possible to switch to their service, and second, to make it as hard as possible to leave. When Facebook opened up to the general public — and not just university students — it needed a plan to deal with MySpace.

At the time, MySpace was the largest social network the world had ever seen. It was overly complex, filled with spam, and often joyless, but for MySpace users, it had a major advantage over Facebook: all their friends were already on MySpace.

It didn’t matter that Facebook had a better user interface and more features. It didn’t matter that Facebook promised not to spy on its users on behalf of advertisers (yes, this was Facebook’s pitch in 2006 when it dropped the requirement that you sign up with a .edu address).

Facebook addressed this problem by giving MySpace users who switched to Facebook a bridge between the two services. Simply give this tool your MySpace login and password, and it would use a bot to login to your MySpace account, scrape all the waiting messages in your queues and inbox, and push them into your Facebook feed. You could reply to these, and the bot would log back into MySpace and post those replies as you.

Facebook attacked MySpace’s high switching costs head on, lowering them for users and unleashing network effects and rapid growth.

But as Facebook and Twitter cemented their dominance, they steadily changed their services to capture more and more of the value that their users generated for them. At first, the companies shifted value from users to advertisers: engaging in more surveillance to enable finer-grained targeting and offering more intrusive forms of advertising that would fetch high prices from advertisers.

This enshittification was made possible by high switch­ing costs.

This is where we’re at with Twitter, but it’s happened to every centralized platform over the years. As user numbers go up, the incentives to actually do right by those users go down.

Setting up a mailing list is a good way to say, “Hey, if anything should ever happen to [social media platform], please sign up for my mailing list so I can keep in touch with you and share updates on my work.” It’s a helpful way to avoid losing all the relationships you've built over the years.

Decentralized social networks help address the problem of high switching costs.

If you want to leave Twitter, you can’t just pick up and move your Twitter followers over to Facebook; you have to rebuild the follow list. The promise of decentralization (I’m a tech novice, so I’m sorry if I fail to clearly explain this) is that you should be able to bounce from one decentralized network to another with minimal friction.

Bluesky and Mastodon are (or, in Bluesky’s case, will be) examples of decentralized,3 federated social networking sites. Bluesky engineer Paul Frazee recently shared a thread explaining why he’s so committed to protocols and decentralization:

Products get detached from their users as they settle into being businesses. They start looking for ways to cut costs and extract revenue. This often means losing interest in the day-to-day experiences of their communities. It’s a precarious situation.

We want to do right by yall, and that means being forward-looking. Our culture doc includes the phrase “The company is a future adversary” to remind us that we won’t always be at the helm — or at our best — and that we should always give people a safe exit from our company.

It’s weird at times to frame our priorities as protecting users from us, but that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. The Bluesky team is made up of users. None of us come from big tech companies.

We all came together because we were frustrated by the experience of feeling helpless about how our online communities were being run. We don’t want to give that same feeling to other people now that we’re the builders.

When we build an open protocol, we’re giving out the building blocks. We want to start from the premise that we’re not always right or best, that when we are right or best then it might not last, and that communities should be empowered to build away from us.

Sometimes this can all feel very intangible and abstract, and for the average user the goal is to just feel like a good & usable network. But this is one big reason why we put all the Fancy Technology under the hood.

I think that’s a great strategy, and I’m cautiously optimistic about what decentralization can mean. It just doesn’t do anything to help with the current problems of having large followings on deeply enshittified platforms like Twitter and Facebook. That’s why I recommend, again, starting a mailing list as a lifeline to your social media mutuals.

That’s all for me today. Have a safe 4th of July, everyone.

Parker

Parker here. I hope you all had a relaxing and restful weekend. Today is my 37th birthday.

I wanted to use this opportunity, first and foremost, to express my heartfelt gratitude to each of you for reading this little newsletter of mine. It’s been a lot of fun writing this, and one of m…

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Today’s post will be a short one (I’ve got a couple of others in the queue for later in the week that I’m pretty happy with).

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I thought it might be fun to respond to a reader comment today. This one comes from a reader on Twitter in response to Monday’s TPA newsletter, “Blame Capitalism, Not ‘Wokeness,’ For Changes to Agatha Christie’s Books.” The gist of my piece was that corporate interests drive edits, not “the woke mob” (as many on the right like to say). And in the piece, I made the case that if people actually do care about preserving authors’ and artists’ work in its original(-ish) form, they need to stop pretending that gigantic multi-billion dollar corporations are making decisions based on trying to appease some nonexistent “mob.”

Anyway, to this tweet, who, as far as I am aware, is just some random guy (who I’m not trying to mock or “dunk on,” which is why I edited out his handle):

“If ‘corporations only care about money,’ as Parker Molloy insists here, Marvel & Disney wouldn’t keep churning out lefty, progressive movies & TV shows that people are ignoring,” he wrote. “Business owners also increasingly crave social validation from elites in the media, Hollywood, etc.”

What he is describing here is a pretty common sentiment among the right-leaning commentariat: “get woke, go broke.”

“Get woke, go broke” is a phrase that gets thrown around quite a bit on the right (sometimes phrased, “Go woke, go broke”), and seems to have originated in an “Incel Corner” column on Milo Yiannopoulos’s “Dangerous” website back in 2018. Sci-fi author John Ringo used the phrase to describe a now-defunct industry convention.

According to Ringo, the convention then pushed its conservative members out of its planning committee, attendance dropped over years, and it’s now defunct. “Get woke, go broke,” he says of any organization who bows to SJW pressure.

But… is it true? Well, it certainly doesn’t help that, to the people who use the term as an epithet, “woke” tends to mean “anything I personally do not like.” The logic goes as follows: if a company has a Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion (DEI) program (as… pretty much every major company — including Fox News, for what it’s worth — does), and that company suffers any sort of financial setback for any reason at all, one can chalk that setback up to “wokeness.”

This is what happened after Silicon Valley Bank failed earlier this month. As the bank collapsed following a tech bro-driven bank run, many of the same people who actively participated in the bank run rushed to blame the bank’s DEI and Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) efforts for their own actions. In reality, what left the bank vulnerable to a run was, as the Associated Press described it, “poor investment and risk strategies that left the bank with insufficient cash to weather a mass withdrawal of assets from its largely tech sector customers, who have been particularly hard hit in the current economy.”

It’s obnoxious to blame problems that could be addressed by robust financial regulations (rather than the weak regulations that were implemented following the 2007-2008 global economic collapse and were then weakened in 2018) on diversity initiatives. For one, it places blame where it doesn’t belong; beyond that, by not accurately identifying the problem, it makes it impossible to fix said problem.

Still, “Get woke, go broke!” is a slogan that many people seem to love to latch onto. It’s pretty much its own genre on YouTube.

But let’s get back to the specific point that Twitter made about Disney/Marvel. There’s no evidence that it’s true.

If you think Disney does anything it does for any reason other than bringing in the most money humanly possible, then you’re pretty clueless. Yes, Disney makes movies and TV shows it does specifically to make money.

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Back in March 2004, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote a column, titled, “The Secret Of Our Sauce.” The basic gist of the piece was that outsourcing wasn’t so bad for Americans because [insert obnoxious, patriotic, very American hootin’ & hollerin’ here]. In short, we’ve got gumption, ingenuity, and other such buzz…

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If you don’t know who Santos is, check out this post of mine from last week:

The Present Age

The New York Times Needs To Chill

On Monday, The New York Times dropped a bombshell report about Rep.-Elect George Santos (R-NY), who seems to have lied about… well… pretty much everything in his life ranging from his education to his employment history to his claim that four of his employees died in 2016’s Pulse nightclub massacre…

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3 years ago · 78 likes · 10 comments · Parker Molloy

The soundtrack:

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It’s a conversation space in the Substack app set up excl…

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Just a quick post today with a few updates (stick around for some fun links).

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The Present Age is a reader-supported publication. If you like my work, please consider purchasing a paid subscription if you don’t already have one. Thanks!

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The New York Times asked its columnists to write about a time they were wrong. And given this opportunity… they stumbled. Turns out that when you ask some of the most self-absorbed people on the planet (as columnists tend to be) to reflect on their work in a critical way, you’re going to get the same kinds of answers a narcissist might give to an interviewer who asks a job candidate for their “greatest weakness.” (“Some might say that I just work too hard.”)

While the whole series is hit or miss (Paul Krugman said he was wrong about inflation, Michelle Goldberg said she regretted writing that Al Franken should resign from the Senate, and Gail Collins said she regretted working references to the time Mitt Romney drove to Canada with his dog strapped to the roof of his car), I was genuinely curious what Bret Stephens would say. And here it was:

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The Present Age

The anti-LGBTQ right is going to get people killed

On Saturday, 31 people affiliated with Patriot Front, a right-wing white nationalist group, were arrested en route to an LGBTQ Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The organization had apparently planned to crash Coeur d’Alene’s annual “Pride in the Park” event, a family-friendly LGBTQ get-together put on by the North Idaho Pride Alliance…

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4 years ago · 45 likes · 6 comments · Parker Molloy

You can check out the interview here:

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You can watch the interview here:

You can also listen to it as a podcast wherever you normally get your podcasts:

If that’s of interest to you, please check out some of these recent articles I’ve written about trans issues:

Most recently, I covered the way right-wing groups are targeting Pride Month events:

The Present Age

The anti-LGBTQ right is going to get people killed

On Saturday, 31 people affiliated with Patriot Front, a right-wing white nationalist group, were arrested en route to an LGBTQ Pride event in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. The organization had apparently planned to crash Coeur d’Alene’s annual “Pride in the Park” event, a family-friendly LGBTQ get-together put on by the North Idaho Pride Alliance…

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4 years ago · 43 likes · 5 comments · Parker Molloy

And before that, about how Republicans tried to blame trans people for the Uvalde mass shooting (even thought trans people had nothing to do with it):

The Present Age

Just like they did in 2015, Republicans are falsely blaming trans people for a mass shooting

On November 27, 2015, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, Robert Lewis Dear Jr. walked into a Colorado Springs, Colorado, Planned Parenthood clinic. There, Dear shot and killed three people and injured nine others. “No more baby parts,” Dear told police after his arrest…

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4 years ago · 40 likes · 4 comments · Parker Molloy

National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Rick Scott released a plan for what the party will do if they retake control of the government, and it basically amounts to exclusion of trans people from society.

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Freelancing With Tim

Parker Molloy on surviving — and thriving — as an independent journalist

SALE! From now through the end of May, get 25% off a yearly subscription to this newsletter! To mark the return of FWT, I’m offering a 25% discount on a yearly subscription, normally $60. With a paid sub, you’ll get a second, subscriber-only newsletter every week; invites to subscriber-only events; access to the full arc…

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4 years ago · Freelancing With Tim

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I recently appeared on the Politics + Media 101 podcast to discuss “cancel culture,” Spotify, Joe Rogan, etc. They just put this out, and you can download it at pretty much any podcast streaming service. It was a good conversation!

Below, for paid subscribers, I’ve included a transcript of the conversation. The Present Age is a reader-supported newsletter. If you support my work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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Transcript, Politics + Media 101, February 14, 2022:

Politics & Media 101: This is Politics and Media 101.

Parker Molloy has a lot of incredible thoughts on so-called cancel culture. Like all of our other episodes, this is an edited version of a much longer conversation that was taped live. If you want to join us, ask one of our upcoming guests a question, or hear past episodes, please visit our website PM101.live. Our next episode this Wednesday will feature Eric Erickson, who's a conservative radio host.

But back to today's conversation, as you may have seen in the news, Joe Rogan has come under fire for saying offensive things and also spreading straight-up misinformation about the COVID pandemic. We started out by asking Parker's thoughts on this, on what Spotify's obligation should be as his distributor, and on what, if anything, people are really referring to when they say cancel culture in a contentious political conversation. Without any further ado, let's roll the tape.

What does cancel culture mean to you?

Parker Molloy: Well, that's kind of the question. Cancel culture, in itself, is sort of this buzzword that gets thrown around. And it's one of many buzzwords that get used in politics and media. You've got cancel culture, call-out culture, political correctness. These are all kind of describing the same thing. Woke, wokeness, wokeness run amuck, PC culture gone amok. These sorts of things have described the same kind of phenomenon for decades, really.

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