This is the way. Last week, Mandalorian actress Gina Carano was fired for making a very yikes comparison between the United States and Nazi Germany. The firing was predictable, and I think inevitable. Before this most recent drama, Carano’s social media presence had already been deemed problematic by Disney. In particular, two earlier controversies caught a good amount of internet heat: one over mask-wearing (she was not sufficiently into the concept) and one over voter fraud (she was not sufficiently appalled by the concept). The energy she brought in all three social media controversies was a kind of anxious, low-key paranoid Trump supporter vibe: definitely right of center, and decidedly not woke. This all being considerably far afield of Disney’s present image, the corporate lizard people decided it was best to formally cut ties. Backlash against the firing was as swift and pronounced as backlash against Carano’s offending comments, but while cowardly and hypocritical I do think the decision is basically not that big of a deal.

Disney is in the business of producing stories that transport people to different worlds — this one, explicitly, to “a galaxy far, far away.” For many viewers, what an actor says on social media to some degree informs the way they think about the actor’s character, and therefore shapes the viewer’s experience of a fictional world. All signs indicate Disney spoke to Carano about her social media presence previously, and sternly, and she persisted in posting content with which Disney made clear it did not want to be associated. But dopamine thirst is a powerful thing, and Carano couldn’t stop herself. As Pedro Pascal, the star of the Mandalorian, himself compared America to Nazi Germany back when Trump was still our President, the question of bias has naturally been raised. Are Disney’s social media rules applied equally to actors on the political left as they are to actors on the political right? And what a silly question. Of course they’re not. This is also fine.

Disney is a left-wing company, which is legal, typical (historically speaking), and in my opinion not that dangerous. The house of Mouse is not our government, and it is not a globally-dominant speech platform. Disney is a media company with a perspective on the world. I understand the apprehension concerning broader cultural authoritarianism, and the uncomfortable fact that the Disney perspective is close to universal among elitist founts of media power. But there have always been dominant speech norms. While it’s certainly important to push back against cultural authoritarianism, the essential question we face on the topic of speech is not whether it should be more comfortable to voice dissent — it has never been comfortable to voice dissent. Our most pressing and important question continues to be whether voicing dissent will remain possible. Here, with so many figures working in both media and technology arguing on behalf of censorship, I do think we’re in some considerable danger.

Still, I get it. This ongoing culture war train wreck is a gripping sight to behold, and the stakes are real. I live in a city that just officially declared academic achievement a racist concept. That didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened because our culture is ill, and our online discourse has mainstreamed that illness. Today, at least to some degree, most of us live on the internet, which means these wild, never-ending controversies are also increasingly a part of our lives. They cause a considerable amount of mental anguish, and this seems to be the point. In the case of the Carano drama, the most interesting hits had nothing to do with the actress. The controversy extended, as these controversies always do, to the people discussing the drama.

Jonathan Chait produced the first meaty response to the firing, which dramatically invoked McCarthyism. Notably, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes endorsed the piece, and for this he was ratio’d into outer space. Kat Rosenfield smartly noticed a now familiar dynamic at play:

The worst internet dogpiles tend to be reserved for apostates.

The purpose of the internet mob, in almost every one of its incarnations, and from whatever political pole, is to police a line on cultural norms. The impulse to dunk back is part of the dynamic. We’re not fighting for narrow positions — no one thought they could reverse the Carano firing, for example — we’re fighting for the Overton Window of discourse, and the acceptable bounds of speech and politics. Keyword: fight. We are fighting. The “culture war” is just that: a battle for the shape of our culture. Who are we? At the moment, we appear to be a people in spectacular conflict.

Anyway, speaking of dumb Nazi stuff:

Would Hitler have read Slate Star Codex? No. Anyway, let’s talk about it. Sunday night, I found myself staring at a semi-viral tweetstorm that argued, among many crazy things, “tech bros” (and who are we even talking about with this phrase anymore?) would “rather listen to Nazis than feminists.” The woman responsible for the vitriol was the key “scholar” cited in this weekend’s central drama, a classically-presenting hit piece from the New York Times. The target of the hit piece was Scott Alexander, a thoughtful, rationalist blogger popular in some tech industry circles. You can read his response to the hit piece here. While yet another staggering setback for the Discourse, and a further degradation of the Times’ brand, the story did succeed in provoking incredible outrage. As this was clearly the intent of the piece, it should in this regard, if no other, be considered a great success. My congratulations to New York Times star fan-fiction writer Cade Metz.

The actual substance of the story has been analyzed to death, and, for the most part, along predictable tribal fault lines. It’s the institutional media vs. the media turncoats, the technology industry vs. the industry’s niche press, and the cultural authoritarians vs. the last few liberals in America. A handful of pieces on the story from across the ideological spectrum: Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith, Elizabeth Spiers, and of course, one more time because you really should read it, Scott Alexander himself. While the hit is interesting in its own right, I’m more interested in the broader conflict between the tech press and the tech industry, of which neither, it’s worth noting, Scott Alexander is really a part.

And yet:

“Silicon Valley’s Safe Space,” reads the headline. This is just a screenshot, but on the website you’ll find the Times also took the effort to create a splashy GIF. They put time into this story. Pui-Wing Tam, Cade’s boss, shared it on social media. They’re proud of this story. The image of the man above — a “tech bro,” I think it’s safe to presume — bobs up and down, awash in religious iconography, glowing, and floating in the clouds. We’re invoking two things here. First, what is basically a joke meme about the excesses of unhinged social justice activism (via the “safe space”). The implication is that men in tech are thin-skinned crybabies, which is something Times writer Kara Swisher at least does us the favor of saying out loud. Second, there’s the stereotype, greatly popularized by HBO’s Silicon Valley, of the out-of-touch ‘spiritual’ techie: the rich guy at Burning Man, “you should talk to my shaman,” cuddle puddles not ironically. The purpose is mockery, which, if I’m being real, is on occasion entirely justified.

But after the fun and flirty GIF, it’s back to the standard bag of bad faith tricks: quotes out of context, dishonest summarization, guilt by association, “expert” opinions — (editor’s note: they were not expert) — and fan favorite unfair implications, soft and casual but relentless, of sexism and racism.

There’s the question of what the New York Times is meant to be. Is this journalism? Is this Regina George’s Burn Book? Is this some edgy Brooklyn mix of both? It’s important to get an answer here, because journalists often hide behind the op-ed page. The serious reporters doing serious work don’t hate the tech industry, we’re told, we can trust their professionalism. It’s just their colleagues down the hall who hate our guts. Okay, can we have a list? It would be great to know which reporters, specifically, we’re supposed to take seriously. Then we can hold the serious reporters to a professional standard, ignore their clownish, hateful colleagues, and grab drinks in the park. Problem solved. Right?

I mean, of course not. The story presently under discussion was not an op-ed, it was ostensibly a piece of serious reporting, and if this is what the Times considers serious reporting there follows immediately, necessarily, the question of how the technology industry should be interacting with the Times.

At the end of every dust-up with the press I find my way back to the same, tired platitudes: not all journalists, open discourse, and sure we had a pretty crazy scrap there, and I really was a part of it myself!, but can’t we all just get along? In fact, I concluded with something close to this last week, when I came out against a broad block of the New York Times. The genesis of that block, a sort of movement on Twitter, was reaction to a malicious and inaccurate piece of Times reporting on Marc Andreessen, itself nested in a series of maliciously-distorted reports on Clubhouse. The Times reporter responsible for the offending piece of misinformation has been in hopelessly personal conflict with both subjects for many months. Since the time of last week’s wire, she has begrudgingly retracted her misinformation… kind of. But yesterday she published another piece on Clubhouse, proving that Times leadership sees nothing wrong with their reporter’s open, extremely-public state of hostile conflict with the subject she is meant to be professionally covering.

The piece was, as I’m sure you will not find surprising, awful.

The endless cycle is thus: a hit is published, tech fights back, media fights back, tech fights back, the blue check media gang goes nuclear and accuses tech of targeted harassment for publicly commenting on the actual, literal words they are printing, mea culpa (“we’re all wrong here!”) and a prayer for peace. Then, it’s straight back to the garbage dump.

I hate it here.

We all keep waiting for this warped media dynamic to end, but why would it? The New York Times isn’t publishing one-off hit pieces. At least, in the narrow context of tech coverage, it is obvious many reporters at the Times, and across the press broadly, confuse the attention they receive for provoking controversy with righteous affirmation. They think, in general, they are doing good work — not just well-reported work, but morally good work. Sometimes this is true. Often it is not. Nonetheless, Times reporters are allowed to lie about their subjects on social media with impunity because Times leadership believes, in general, even their most egregiously bad actors are on the right side of history, and all is fair in love and war. And for them, this does appear to be war. Given what they think about industry leadership, per actual reporting on the topic and — yes — published opinion, I really can’t blame them.

The relationship between the technology industry and the press is hostile because the press believes the technology industry is full of psycho evil people. Literally they think some of our most celebrated leaders are Nazis, or at the very least Nazi sympathizers. This is the entire “newsworthiness” justification of the Slate Star Codex hit: there was a community online, hidden from reporters, where powerful tech leaders happily held court with actual Nazis, with whom they sympathize, but not, under any circumstances, people who care about social justice. Is this true? Of course not. Do they believe it? They clearly do. Because they think the industry is full of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers they see Nazis and Nazi sympathizers in every story. We demand a good faith conversation and they laugh, because of course they would. I would too. Would you attempt a good faith conversation with a Nazi sympathizer? I think the fuck not.

There’s no concluding mea culpa this week, as there’ve been too many mea culpas to pretend they’re any longer meaningful. The press is in an antagonistic relationship with the technology industry. At the higher level, I think some degree of antagonism from the press is probably healthy, and it’s certainly typical. The political press covers our more powerful politicians with roughly the same skepticism as the tech press covers our most powerful companies, and that level of power should absolutely be scrutinized. But at every other level? In the coverage of startups, and young founders? In the coverage of companies in beta, just out of the seed stage, and venture capitalists, or angel investors? In the coverage of the Gen Z mafia, a gang of teenaged engineers on Twitter, are you kidding me? When the tech industry isn’t beating back outright misinformation, it’s being hit with scorched earth bad faith straight down to the roots.

And fine, whatever, we’re in fight. We’re fighting. But let’s call it that.

There’s still room for civility in conflict, and while I no longer expect good faith reporting my inbox is always open, and I love to be surprised. I also think there’s something interesting in open conflict. Separate from the more malicious stuff, there actually are interesting points of disagreement rocketing through the social media firestorms, and under pressure I find thinking on a subject is often deepened and improved. There’s no dancing around it anymore, many of us, on core values, just fundamentally disagree. So let’s dispel with the bullshit “objectivity” frame and robustly, openly disagree. We want different things, so what? You think you maybe kind of hate me, okay. Just do me a favor and tweet it. It’s good to get this stuff on record.

Oh, and leave the kids out of it.

-SOLANA