On the Whole Experience and Like Wow Man, That’s So Crazy:

At this point, enough famous boomer musicians have pulled their music catalogs from Spotify for them to form their own “We Are The World” style supergroup and cut a record bringing awareness to vaccine scarcity in developing nations. Maybe they will end up doing just that, but for now, Joe Rogan is still gainfully employed by Spotify to exclusively host his massively popular podcast on their platform. 

As with most high-profile cancelation campaigns, a debate around the concept of free speech has erupted. And in keeping with tradition, most of the popular opinions in this debate are flat-out wrong or missing the point. For instance, here’s something that the free speech absolutists on both the right and some segments of the left may not know: 

Joe Rogan isn't the only person who is guaranteed free speech. 

A common argument made by liberals to defend when major tech companies ban controversial figures from their platforms is that if the government isn’t involved in the censorship then it’s not a violation of those controversial figures’ constitutional rights. To which free speech absolutists will correctly point out that what the government does or doesn’t do to curtail speech doesn’t really matter when so much of the digital public square is privately owned. If the spirit of free speech is to ensure that those in power cannot stifle speech that challenges their power, then replacing governments with unaccountable tech CEOs doesn’t really solve that problem. 

I tend to agree that it's not an ideal situation for private companies to moderate the acceptable bounds of conversation. Especially when profit will necessarily factor into what they consider truth or misinformation. However, how do you rectify that situation? While it may violate the spirit of the constitution for corporations to decide what speech is appropriate for mass consumption, they are essentially exercising their first amendment rights to decide what speech is associated with their privately held platforms. It would violate the letter of the law for the government to compel them to allow speech they would have otherwise banned. 

If your contention is that Neil Young and others shouldn’t be trying to leverage their music in an attempt to force Spotify to cancel Joe Rogan, then you are essentially arguing for limits to Neil’s free speech. If you don’t believe that people should be using their speech to limit the speech of others then it's questionable as to how much of a free speech absolutist you really are. By the way, this doubly applies when talking about the actions of college students protesting problematic speakers. 

I’m not a free speech absolutist. The nature of speech in social contexts is too complex for anyone to make any absolute statements about it. Whether you believe the limits of speech should apply to things like shouting fire in a crowded theater, shouting down conservative college speakers, or calling Peter Doocy a son of a bitch, everyone has their own idea of where the freedom to say what you want should end. 

That being said, the campaign to cancel Spotify and/or Joe Rogan is incredibly dumb and endemic of liberalism's love affair with sound and fury signifying nothing. 

A while back I wrote for Jacobin about how the conspiracy theories surrounding covid and ivermectin were just as much a product of the material realities created by our for-profit healthcare system as much as they were the fault of podcasters like Rogan and the scam-artists he invites on his show. I don’t particularly like what Rogan does with his platforming of idiotic and harmful ideologies masquerading as free-thinking inquiry, but his ability to cultivate and influence an audience that dwarfs the like of MSNBC or even Fox News is due to a cultural context where millions of people from all sorts of political backgrounds have decent reasons to reflexively distrust the mainstream narrative. 

Believing that taking Joe Rogan off of Spotify will have any effect on the number of people who believe misinformation about covid vaccines is like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound and thinking you’ve cured cancer. 

Right thinking liberals might find it disheartening and unconscionable that some people listened to a recent episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, where guest Jordan Peterson presented a piece of brain-meltingly stupid climate denialism and found it compelling. But Peterson’s idiocy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It can’t be ignored that a lot of people’s experience with climate change mitigation consists of increased fuel taxes and plastic bag bans, as capitalism continues to offload the costs of profits onto workers and consumers. 

Joe Rogan is bad for the discourse. His lovable stoner jock persona masks a cavalcade of bad ideas and ideology in the guise of intellectual curiosity. He makes stupid look smart to a lot of people. In the liberal imagination, one’s belief in bad ideas is a result of the information they are exposed to. They believe Rogan is a danger because more people seem to want his bad information than want their correct information.

But that’s just not how people form their beliefs. We live in a conspiratorial milieu built upon decades and decades of our elite institutions lying to us and failing to improve our material conditions. And all the while, cultivating a barely masked antagonism for those who exist outside those elite institutions. Even if the liberal intelligentsia’s response to the pandemic wasn’t littered with false promises, flip flops, and straight-up lies, they had spent the last 30 years (the last 4 in particular) insulting the people they most needed to have the right information. 

Joe Rogan doesn’t insult them. 

You could say that the people who believe the things they hear on Rogan’s podcast are letting their negative emotions get in the way of believing facts and science. And you would be right. But Joe Rogan isn’t alone in pushing false information that results in mass death, including our current president. No one is immune from having their subjective view of the world influence what facts they believe or ignore. 

This is not an argument to coddle people who hold bad opinions. Nor am I trying to insult those who are canceling their Spotify membership. Like I said earlier, that's just part of free speech. I just want to make sure people understand that every other streaming service would have been happy to be the exclusive provider of the most popular podcast in the world, especially when Rogan was only spreading race science and transphobia instead of Covid misinformation. There are no ethical options under capitalism. 

Capitalism has trained us to view the world as consumers instead of citizens. We have limited capacity to think of misinformation as a systemic phenomenon that requires a systemic solution. We can only identify individual bad actors and performatively deny them our hard-earned money. Which is fine, but it’s not going to fix the underlying problem. America is a house of cards precariously balanced on a stack of underlying problems. 

Cancel culture, whether you hate it, support it, or think it doesn’t exist (which I once did) is spectacle. It’s a signifier of change without any material justice or restoration. It’s the NFT of social justice. If you think that big tech companies wield too much control over speech then your beef is with silicon valley’s traditional growth model of building monopoly. Your critical eye should be directed toward the state of antitrust law and perhaps a particular retiring Supreme Court judge and not the individual people exercising the microscopic amount of power they are allowed, to feel the tiniest bit of influence over a batshit world. 

If you are mad at Joe Rogan for all the bullshit he puts in the public sphere, then your true enemy is the social conditions that have made so many people seek out bullshit to explain a world that doesn’t make sense. 

On March 21, 2021, Rachael Maddow said this on her program:

"Instead of the virus being able to hop from person to person to person, potentially mutating and becoming more drug-resistant along the way, now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person. A vaccinated person gets exposed to the virus, the virus does not infect them. The virus cannot then use that person to go anywhere else. It cannot use a vaccinated person as a host to go get more people. That means the vaccines will get us to the end of this, if we just go fast enough."

This was not true, obviously. We knew that the vaccine wasn’t 100% effective, and we certainly didn’t know if vaccinated people were incapable of spreading the virus. Whether it was based on the best available information or a hopeful wish by Maddow, she spoke in very authoritative terms about something that was not true. Which certainly caused some vaccinated people to act irresponsibly and infect others. We did know that vaccines reduce hospitalizations and keep people from dying, but that didn’t seem to be enough for certain people to get them. Perhaps Maddow was speaking in hyperbole to convince people who were on the fence about the vaccine.  

Whatever excuses one may be able to make for the misinformation Maddow spread about vaccines, just know that Rogan’s fans have similar excuses. Liberals aren’t going to stop the spread of misinformation by limiting the reach of shitheads. That only makes the shitheads stronger. You stop misinformation by changing the conditions in which misinformation thrives. 

That’s a harder and much more long-term project than canceling Spotify. But canceling Spotify is relatively easy and provides instant gratification through interacting with the market. Not only does the market allow you to cancel Spotify (for now), but you can also follow Neil Young over to a streaming platform that is run by a company known for its ethical business practices and commitment to humanity, Amazon. 

The market is happy to allow you to choose which streaming company most aligns with your values. The market is happy to help adjudicate what are facts and what are lies, so long as the facts align with their values. What the market won't allow is for us to tax billionaires and pay for universal healthcare. The market won’t allow us to pass laws ensuring that hospitals keep enough beds, staff, and equipment available to accommodate the occasional mass health emergency. 

I don’t have an easy solution for getting people to reject bad information and take a potentially life-saving vaccine. I don’t have an easy solution for combatting the rising techno-oligarchy, ruling a world where your life is determined by algorithms and the truth is measured through quote tweets. There are a lot of problems in this world that I don’t have an easy solution for. All I have is a single plea. Reject the spectacle. 

The spectacle is where the market hides the fact that the capitalism that feeds it is responsible for way more pandemic death and misery than Joe Rogan. The spectacle hides the fact that Spotify is never going to drop Joe Rogan and even if they did they will still sign other venal liars to massive deals. The spectacle hides the fact that every media company supports right-wing misinformation in some form or fashion because it's profitable and the power of your Spotify premium account can't do shit about it. The spectacle hides the fact that as much as the left bemoans Silicon Valley censorship and the coming Dyctator© app by Google, we are completely dependent on Big Tech for whatever relevance we have at the moment. Reject it. We have way bigger problems to solve than Joe Rogan.

Solidarity Forever.