i live in Florida, though probably not for all that much longer. i have such mixed feelings about stuff like this. 1/

the humans here are great people, like everywhere, even most of the Trump voters (most of whom, in my experience, tend to be apolitical and cynical about everyone, Ds/Harris just tweaked their stereotyped cynicism about stereotypical politicians a bit more than Trump/Rs did). 2/

at a personal level, i don’t wish any ill on the poly sci dept at FSU or on anybody else except the actual perpetrators of the crimes we are suffering under. 3/

but at a political level, i don’t want FSU, my alma mater New College, or the economy broadly in Florida to thrive under present (and continually worsening) policy and leadership. 4/

it may or may not be the case that you can do profoundly stupid, evil fascism and muddle through with a decent economy, for-the-most-part fine universities, etc. 5/

but i would rather it not be the case. 6/

i would rather changing the policy environment to shut up and threaten gender minorities, to round up even people who immigrated lawfully into camps while their status is resolved or changed beneath them, to elevate cronies to all positions of authority and overpay them, should have a cost. 7/

so i kind of want to root, at a personal level, for the spunky holdouts in various FSU departments, doing great work in obscurity, teaching great kids who are not remotely at fault for what’s going on. 8/

but i myself am going to vote with my feet, even though in many respects i still and will always love Florida. 9/

though @seandehrlich.bsky.social’s points about the professional costs of avoiding red states are correct at a personal level, i’d advise young academics to think about accepting those costs, to effectively boycott places under unusually fascist government, for the greater good. 10/

(of course the US as a whole is under fascist government now. the implications of that are left as an exercise to the reader.) 11/

i’m not going to hold it against academics and professionals who do have options but choose to stay and do the best work they can, just as i don’t hold ordinary, great-people, apolitical-ish Trump voters personally responsible for our fascism. 12/

but i do think the positions of those groups are perhaps uncomfortably similar. 13/

perhaps another anology would be to X. people still there tell me their feed, with their follows and blocks, is pretty well tuned to their interests, and they don’t see much ragebait or fascism. it’s just where their friends and professional communities are. 14/

and maybe so! at a personal and professional level level, X was certainly still the best place for me when I made my choice to leave it. neither Mastodon nor BlueSky has come close to replacing what Twitter once was for me. 15/

but we left anyway. and i think it has mattered. what is left of X is far less than what Twitter was, or what X would be if we were still there. boycotting the Nazi bar is not only moral vanity. it does have some effect. /fin

I don't say everyone should subscribe to The New York Times regardless. Cancel! 1/

But "if everyone put their money where their mouths are" is like "if everyone eschewed Cheetos and ate only fresh veggies". It is not, in fact, how consumer choice works. 2/

If you want journalism to actually exist in the world, you have to come up with a better answer for how to finance it than insisting that if consumer choices were driven by deeper forms of virtue than in fact they are, things would work as well as an economics textbook says they should. /fin

The New York Times offers international journalism, but not just. The New York Times is the primary source of in-depth, investigative domestic journalism as well. 1/

Do you think American audiences can replace The New York Times with BBC and Al Jazeera? Both of which have their own, rather terrible biases. Both of which also are funded in order to launder those biases to their audiences. 2/

A very discriminating news consumer can follow all of these interest-laundering organizations and hope that, in doing so, they can tease out the common journalistic signal and wash away the insidious bias. We can't, but we can do our best and it's the best we can do. 3/

But note this doesn't imply boycotting The New York Times. It implies subscribing to it, despite its shittiness, and subscribing to the others too, despite theirs, in order to help support the diverse ecosystem of shit from which some approximation of truth might be fertilized. /fin

I support, qua BBC, public finance of media, but unlike BBC in UK, public finance of a diverse panoply of sources. Consumers won't finance journalism, something else must, I'd rather a diverse range of public sources than (inevitably along with) plutocrats drafts.interfluidity.com/2025/03/09/v...

I mean, I only subscribe to NYT because they keep offering it for a very low price when I go to quit. But The Atlantic. Wired. TechDirt. Texas Tribune. Teen Vogue. can rival the NYT in terms of providing the consumer good of content. But they don't, can't, do the job NYT does. The journalism. 1/

The New York Times maintains significant international bureaus. It maintains a large staff of very skilled, very expert journalists who pursue investigative work over months and years. It has a near monopoly on these capabilities now. It is what is left of what was once the newspaper industry. 2/

Organizations like Propublica do this kind of work, but only domestically, and they don't have nearly the NYT's resources. I like Propublica much, much better than the NYT, because they don't have NYT's shitty editorial biases! 3/

But there is no constellation of Propublicas that can replace or match the New York Times. 4/

The fundamental problem begins where you started! The consumer good of content is easily created, increasingly automatically, and to paying audiences it can be much more engaging and entertaining than actual journalism. 5/

Actual journalism requires, has always required, a business model based on criteria other than consumer choice. 6/

It used to be a prestige loss-leader funded by other things, e.g. classified ads. But unbundling, plus and increasingly competitive media landscape (no 3 network lock), has eliminated that source of funding. 7/

So we have the philanthropic efforts like Propublica. And we have the business model of The New York Times, which is also the business model of The Brookings Institution, and the business model of Harvard. 8/

What The New York Times sells is making the worldview of liberal plutocrats seem sensible and palatable. 9/

Brookings sells the same, just on the academic rather than journalistic terrain. Harvard sells the pedigree of the children of liberal plutocrats. 10/

In all three cases, the business model is bundling and laundering. At Harvard they bundle selection of the very brightest students with selection of legacy admits, and give them indistinguishable degrees. That launders the crap "merit" of the legacies. 11/

NYT and Brookings finance and publish some of the very best work, journalistically and social science-ly, on the planet. They mix into that best work editorial biases that promote the anti-social-democratic worldview of liberal plutocrats. 12/

Those crap biases get bundled with and laundered by the excellent work also produced by the same organizations. It becomes difficult for outside consumers to distinguish excellence itself from the worldview of liberal plutocrats. 13/

That's the business model of these three institutions! It is why they thrive, even while journalism and academia more broadly struggle. 14/

It is beyond the capability of consumer choice to remedy. Sure, consumers could boycott these things and render them worthless. But consumers offer no business model that could support the excellences these organizations do provide, which require some non-consumer-choice-based source of funding. 15/

So in the existing fallen world, if we want the excellence, we have to take them cleverly leavened with the poisons of their backers, and do our best to disentangle the arsenic from the apple sauce. 16/

It's not ideal! But a fix will have to go deeper than voting with our wallets. /fin