In his 2014 book The Revolt of the Public, the CIA analyst-turned-cultural-commentator Martin Gurri discusses the schism between “the old industrial scheme” and, in the new forms of online exchange, an “uncertain dispensation striving to become manifest,” which he calls “the public.” For Gurri, the two schema have such widely different assumptions about what kinds of discourse are acceptable as to create an insuperable divide that has become the defining feature of our era. “The conflict is so asymmetrical that it seems impossible for the two sides to actually engage but they do engage and the battlefield is everywhere,” Gurri writes.

After the 2016 election, the representatives of “the old industrial scheme” decided that the public couldn’t be trusted. Many blamed Facebook and Twitter for the spread of right-wing ideology and Russian disinformation and demanded that they install new guardrails—a task that the social media platforms took to with alacrity, even though it meant jettisoning the old First Amendment-inflected approach. But amid all the recent calls for a kinder, gentler internet, few people have realized that it might already be here.

Substack represents the internet at its best. While the social media platforms have amped up their content moderation and attempted to exert tighter control over speech, Substack has employed a simpler approach: giving users the tools to have a web presence and then assuming that they are grown-up enough to make their own decisions on what content they wish to post or see. It would be a shame if, in the panic over a handful of extremist newsletters, we lost sight of that underlying principle.

[Amen. The best solution for bad speech is more speech, not speech restrictions. — Ed]