Values Make Decisions, Decisions Make Values
I’m starting to believe in gravity a bit more these days.
Over a few hours last week, my wife Kristen, our friend Millie, and I were trading messages (across text, email, and Messenger, as seems to be the norm these days) about whether we should postpone the student showcase of our most recent introduction to improv class at Highwire Improv.
There were tons of reasons to push forward:
- This was a special group of students who bonded over the past six weeks.
- This was our first time collaborating with the Baltimore cultural behemoth that is Creative Alliance.
- We’d have to tell 35+ people the event was cancelled with just a few hours of notice.
- We’d lose momentum with the group until 2024, no chance of rescheduling this year.
- Decades of ‘the show must go on’ programming in the culture.
…and yet I knew where we’d end up. We postponed until the new year, and I am so proud of our young non-profit — we’re living our values of Safety, Community, Transparency, and Action.
What does this have to do with gravity? I could feel the pull of those values as we messaged across blue, green, and black and white bubbles. The pull existed because we’ve been steadily adding to the mass of those values over the past few years; we state them at every community meeting, we refer to them when making decisions, we hashtag them in social media posts, and they have become part of the capital-C Culture of Highwire.
The Values made the Decision.
Today, I’m starting the process of moving my (admittedly fledgling) newsletter content off of Substack and onto Medium (and maybe a few other places in due time).
Plenty is being written about Substack’s decisions around content moderation, monetization, and amplification of various very bad content (read: white supremacy views and actions). In years past I might have just let other people write about this stuff rather than dive in myself, but I’m trying to work on being more vocal about important matters, which for me means working on my conflict avoidance and my default to comfortable silence.
As someone who spent a few years working on content moderation and trust & safety at Spotify, some of this stuff truly is nuanced. There are dozens of deeply researched papers that try to understand what actually works to reduce radicalization online. Some of the conclusions are surprising:
- Deplatforming harmful content and creators can have a positive impact on the given platform, but create smaller, more toxic groups in places with less oversight and regulation. (The Conversation)
- Deplatforming harmful content and creators can embolden them to collect more money from close fans, increasing their resources. (Princeton University)
One of the great things about ‘decentralized moderation’ is that different communities can set their own standards and values. But those values are not neutral — making money off of (some) hate content and banning other hate content is not a hands-off decision. No content moderation policy is truly hands-off.
And so I can understand a platform like Substack deciding that banning certain types of content is not the right move. If their decision was based on upholding values through a utilitarian lens, I might support them. But their decision rests hypocritically on a concept of free speech that consistently gets misinterpreted, and attempts to absolve Substack of the responsibility of taking money in exchange of platforming hateful views.
So today the Decision makes the Values — I’m moving my content here. I’m adding a little more gravity to my personal values, which will hopefully make my future decisions a little bit easier.
