I honestly can’t. Last week, following the firing of Gina Carano for problematic political opinions and the “cancellation” of Reply-All for producing a series about the cancellation of Bon Appétit, our clown car culture couldn’t quit: the British Royal Family, which I’m told our country once fought a war to not care about, was nuked by the press for mistreating a beloved princess, the host of the Bachelor tried and failed to apologize for suggesting someone else embroiled in a cancellation should be shown a little grace, and a tech CEO inadvertently triggered a pile-on when he implied being out of shape impacted work performance. But, fantastically, the week’s most batshit crazy dramas actually had nothing to do with real humans.

Remember a couple weeks ago when we published Sonya Mann’s primer on the furries living at the heart of our culture war? That’s right, folks, we are once again coming at you live from our charmingly dystopian future. I just had no idea these people worked for Sulzberger:

Over at the New York Times Charles Blow, coming in hot with one of the season’s most notable attention grifts, suggested Pepé Le Pew, a 75-year-old cartoon skunk, contributed to rape culture. He further indicted Speedy Gonzalez for perpetuating racial stereotypes. Separately, the internet was divided over the question of whether or not Lola Bunny, a cartoon rodent from 1996’s Space Jam, had been drawn — 25 years ago — in too sexy a manner. On Twitter, Jessica Rabbit was dragged into the mix, and the absolutely vital question presented was thus: were the illustrators of 1988’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit critiquing sexism with their too-busty cartoon femme fatale, or were they just a bunch of perverts? For my part, I think the answer is maybe both, and also this is fine and somewhat funny, and also, quick question, why are we taking our moral cues from writers obsessed with the sex lives of cartoon animals? Don’t get me wrong, my intention here is not to kink shame anyone, I just think it important we remember this is, in fact, a very niche kink.

Elsewhere, from the land of the Lorax, the week’s absurdity came into sharper focus. The problematic nature of Dr. Seuss — and do you ever just feel so tired? — was the wildest story of the arc. Because a large tech company self-owned itself into the heart of the drama it was also, in my opinion, by far the most significant. This fun and flirty culture war journey began when Dr. Seuss Enterprises, the business that oversees the Seuss estate, consulted with an ambiguous panel of neckbeard “experts” and decided not only to take six Dr. Seuss books out of print on grounds of racial insensitivity, but to make a splashy, self-obsessed enormous deal of the decision. An army of Twitter NPCs went to war over the news, and Ebay made the utterly baffling decision to block the sale of the newly banned titles. From here, the story evolved into a now-standard tech culture war drama. The Fox News take was immediately, stupidly, and obviously “Big Tech Bans Dr. Seuss.” From the rest of the media class, the Guardian summed the left’s now-standard pro-censorship opinion up nicely: “‘It's a moral decision’: Dr Seuss books are being ‘recalled’ not cancelled, expert says.” Morality! Cancel culture isn’t real! Experts say!

Now, before you try to delete me from the internet for discussing dramas about other people discussing dramas, or for defending “problematic” material written by now-dead writers from the last millennium, let’s get a few things out of the way: I think some people really are racist, I think some of the material in the Dr. Seuss books really does seem insensitive, and I think the Dr. Seuss estate is perfectly entitled to take its own books out of print for any reason. Broadly speaking, if you find yourself on the side of book burning I do think it’s probably time to do a little soul searching, but I’m not really concerned about a couple woke idiots lording over Lorax IP. What I am concerned about is a giant market platform top-down banning material — sold peer-to-peer! — deemed forbidden by a mysterious cabal of thought police in a world of rapidly-evolving and often incoherent new cultural norms. People will always have bad opinions about Pepé Le Pew. This is mostly just funny, and, when challenged to think critically about a beloved but nonetheless irrelevant old cartoon, we really should just make a habit of laughing. But the new trend of turning ephemeral culture war bullshit into internet law by way of corporate policy is actually, and I think obviously, dangerous.

At the individual level, the lessons online are always the same. If you raise your hand and say “I am bad and need to be punished,” there are never any shortage of sadists willing to agree. If you apologize after being targeted for something you didn’t do, or didn’t realize was “problematic,” you will only be further targeted. The winning move is still just not to play. When you don’t agree you’ve done something wrong, don’t apologize. We all need to get a lot better at saying “no, you are actually just crazy, go away.” But the corporate piece, especially in the context of massive technology platforms, is a different story.

Bravery from our CEOs is not just recommended. When your policy impacts hundreds of millions or even billions of people, standing up for sanity, and here by way of freedom, is a moral imperative. Today, if a man shouts loud enough online he can change culture. Because everyone knows corporations are sensitive to social media hysteria, social media hysteria is presently somewhat rational. The clearest counter-measure is, surprise, more hysterical yelling, and so increasingly when one mob screams, another screams back. This dynamic will never change until the incentive for performative mob hysterics is revoked. Thus, my humble suggestion for corporate leadership: what if, when people hysterically screamed about crazy nonsense, we simply ignored them?

My sense is still virality is a problem we need to thoughtfully consider, but I’m not here for evolving speech codes, or banning books of almost any kind, and I think most people are on the same page. What would happen if Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube enforced the laws that govern incitement and threatening language, washed their hands of the culture war, and stopped banning people for crimethink as determined by the professionally furious furries over at the New York Times? What if Ebay simply… didn’t ban books? Truly, I want you to imagine a world in which we normalized not listening to the actual craziest people alive. What would that look like? How would it feel? My sense is we would all be fine, but it’s not even like we don’t have an example of a CEO who refuses to submit to the Empire. Elon Musk, who is very good at not caring when dumb people say dumb things about him online, is not only the third richest man alive, but the most powerful shitposter in human history. He runs a rocket ship company. He has a child with Grimes named X Æ A-12.

This is the way.

Bluer skies. At a certain stage of growth, when the average person relies in some critical way on a company, a company that engages in cultural authoritarianism becomes capable of subverting individual liberty. In America, there is a complicated legal question pertaining to whether or not such subversion is constitutional, and this is where we tend to lose ourselves in disagreement. But let’s set aside the question of law for a moment. What do you believe? If you value freedom, it doesn’t really matter if the corporate subversion of freedom is, in some narrow academic sense, legal. Companies engaged in cultural authoritarianism need to be replaced. We all need to imagine, build, and fight for a better world. Fortunately, the technology industry is designed for such disruption. In a sense, the cycle of innovation is the industry. The ecosystem supports new companies by way of everything from venture capital and the tradition of equity to culture: we don’t celebrate hundred-year-old institutions that protect the status quo, we celebrate upstarts run by teenagers that alter our conception of reality. Google isn’t cool. Working on the thing that’s going to make Google irrelevant from your mom’s garage is cool.

Last week, I wrote about the exciting newness of our social media environment. I argued social media giants like Twitter were out of sync with the direction of innovation, and were poised to lose their influence over time. About an hour after publication, someone close to the company encouraged me to take another look at Bluesky, what Twitter promises will be a decentralized social media protocol. Until last week, I hadn’t taken it seriously because I never thought it was something Jack Dorsey took seriously himself. But if he does? This would be a huge, bizarre deal, and maybe one of the only compelling solutions to the innovator’s dilemma we’ve ever seen. By decentralizing social media and operating Twitter like an app on top of the protocol, the company would lose power, but it would also gain regulatory cover, and it would make the world a better place. Anakin Skywalker finally comes back from the brink. Third act hero vibes.

This is the way.

I’m not sure if Dorsey can pull it off, but he fortunately isn’t alone. People are building. Bluesky is neither the first decentralized social media protocol I’ve heard of or the first I’ve seen, and it won’t be the last. Decentralization is happening, and some semblance of an open internet is back on the table. Will this fix the information crisis? No. But it could stave off the censorship dystopia. I still think Jump’s the existential danger, but freedom is like oxygen. Without it, nothing else matters.

-SOLANA