By Charles C. W.
Cooke
Monday, January
31, 2022
Since Neil Young announced that he
was pulling his music off Spotify in protest of Joe Rogan’s having a podcast on
the platform, figures favorable to the move have been busy mining their
thesauruses in search of synonyms for “good.” Thus far, I have seen Young’s
decision described as “moral,” “empowering,” “brave,” “ethical,” “inspiring,”
and even “imperative.”
I have a word to add into the mix:
“Intolerant.”
Neil Young doesn’t like Joe Rogan’s
podcast. So what? Is it really now Young’s standard that if he dislikes what
another person says in public, he won’t share a library with
that person? What, one must wonder, does Young believe is going to happen if he
hosts his music on the same streaming service as people he personally disdains?
Does he worry that the 0s and 1s will mix inside the patch cables and pollute
the purity of his art? Does he believe, perhaps, that a shared domain name and
a set of common IP addresses might impart guilt by association? If so, one must
ask how far he intends to pursue digital immaculacy before the quest becomes
self-evidently absurd. Does he want his own data center? His own trunk lines?
His own ISPs and cell-phone towers? Once upon a time, tolerance meant sharing
physical rooms with people whose views you opposed, and even abhorred. Now, some
people can’t even share the Internet.
Rogan’s critics say that he lies and
facilitates the lies of others. For the sake of argument, let’s agree that he
does. One must ask at what point this became an exception to our culture of
open speech? Neil Young made an entire album filled with falsehoods about GMOs. Should REO Speedwagon boycott
Spotify in response? Epic Records hired Rage Against the Machine and
promised never to
interfere with their work. Should their
cleaner-than-thou label-mates, ABBA, have ripped up their contract as a result?
This is a serious question: At what level of platform do we wish to impose ideological
segregation? The op-ed page? The newspaper? The newspaper’s comments section?
The newspaper’s comment’s section’s web host? Should I boycott Farmers’
Insurance if the guy in their commercials lies on Twitter? Should I refuse to
fly Delta if I spot a passenger I disdain? I’ve been on TV with Joy
Reid, for goodness sake. Should I have stormed off in high dudgeon the
first time she said something false?
Where’s the line? For customers who are
following Young’s lead, the replacement of choice for Spotify seems to be
Apple, which is more acceptable because . . .
well, why is it acceptable? True, Apple doesn’t have Joe
Rogan’s show. But it distributes almost every podcast under the sun, including
those hosted by figures whom progressives have managed to cancel
elsewhere. Are we seriously to believe that Apple —
which both directly and indirectly “facilitates” the monetization of speech — is less a “vector” for
“dangerous misinformation” than is Spotify? And what of Apple’s ties to slave
labor? What of its lobbying
against legislation that would force it to improve its
business practices? Unlike some, I do not think that everyone who uses a
MacBook Pro is complicit in Apple’s corporate sins. Unlike some, I’m not tying
my consumer choices to the supposed purity of the providers I select. One of
the problems with Neil Young’s announcing that he cannot in good conscience
work with Spotify is the implication that anyone he continues to work with must
be acceptable — or, at least, less bad. So, are they? Is Apple less morally
culpable for its reliance on Uyghur Muslim laborers than is Spotify for hosting
Rogan’s podcast?
Spotify, Apple, Joe Rogan, and Neil Young
are all private actors, and they can do as they wish. That is Liberalism 101,
and I would not wish to change it if I could. But there are other elements
within Liberalism 101, too, and they are no less vital to our political order.
I would, of course, have been firmly within my rights to refuse the book offer
that Random House made me on the grounds that I find their other authors
intolerable. But to have done so would have made me a stupid bigot. I would be
fully within my rights if I declined to join any public debate that required me
to share a stage with someone being paid to disagree with me. But, again, to do
so would make me a stupid bigot. There is nothing “liberal” about regarding
artistic platforms or delivery mechanisms as political creatures to be
condemned. On the contrary: Such a habit is quite literally totalitarian. I
have been asked this week if I’m on the side of Joe Rogan or the side of Neil
Young, and my answer is that I favor neither. My preference, instead, is for a
world in which I can subscribe to a digital music library without getting
caught up in a cauldron of screaming, stupidity, and badly misplaced
neo-Puritanism.
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