Ensuring Personal Agency

Taking responsibility.

I think I’ll start this one by just thanking you for being a paid subscriber, seeing as this is the first written piece since I rejigged the subscriptions etc. I find the subscription thing very awkward and I really want a situation where it’s virtually nothing, but with all the same benefits.

To be clear about why I do the paid subscription at all, I’m trying to grow the Substack as a backup income should anything ever happen to SEG down the line. Just as people with our ethos have never really been fashionable, but rather tolerated because we’re an essential requirement to ensure a safe and functioning society, small businesses like SEG who promote those unfashionable values are now walking a tightrope of toleration with the enabling technology companies on which our businesses are built. To the outsider that may seem overly paranoid, but ask any company owner similar to SEG whether they’ve seen a difference in how they’re able to operate on social media since 2017 when SEG was founded and they’ll tell you it’s night and day. Unfortunately for SEG we grew our following on Instagram primarily, and Facebook, both Meta products and both now proven, along with Twitter (as it was then) to be unduly influenced by the whims of government policies. There’s a tonne of examples of this over the years and a few close calls with SEG. All it takes is for someone working within ‘trust and safety’ at Instagram to decide the ‘Hanged Man’ is something to do with KKK stuff somehow and we’d be turned off overnight. Ridiculous, but not something that’s great to have hanging over your head, your income at the mercy of morons or activists. We obviously try to mitigate against this by growing our mailing list and followings on other platforms (hence the recent push to X under Elon Musk -not perfect but the best we have). It’s a constant fight to remove what is really still a single point of failure numbers wise.