I'm leaving Substack. And launching something new!

Don't worry! I'm not leaving you.

Hey subscribers.

To say that the start of 2025 has been a shock to the system would be already be the understatement of the year.

One week into the start of the year, much of Los Angeles set aflame, like out of a page from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. The fire still burns on and the loss of land and life remains incomprehensible. My heart continues to ache for those most affected, who lost homes, heirlooms, memories, creative manifestations of artistic magic, and of course, lives loved.

While Los Angeles burned, Meta not-so-quietly burned its DEI program, fact-checking program, and speech violation policies that protect all of us, but especially the most marginalized of us from harmful and violent language being used on the platform.

Mark Zuckerberg quite literally said that protecting speech against topics such as immigration and gender identity is “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”

If that isn’t a harrowing statement of the direction American culture is headed this year, I don’t know what else is.

In the same week, it was also announced that Meta, along with countless others of companies and CEOs, from Apple to Google to OpenAI to Uber and more, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, happening this Monday.

Naturally, my initial response to all of this was to say fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em all. Delete Instagram. Detangle myself from the Google ecosystem. Stop goddamn paying for ChatGPT. But as I quickly started going down the path of breaking free from Big Tech, I:
(1.) was reminded how deeply entrenched in these platforms we are, by design.
(2.) still just wanted to see for experiment’s sake what could happen when attempting to move online with a sense of agency and autonomy
(3.) and wanted to bring others along with me on the journey of reclaiming our relationships to the platforms on which we spend so much of our time and give so much of our data.

With that, I’m excited to announce this week I’m launching a new project, Terms & Conditions.

Terms & Conditions is a newsletter that will explore how to reclaim agency and autonomy in the digital age. We’ll take it one platform at a time, unpacking the good, the bad, and the ugly, before deciding whether to Keep, Tweak, Switch, or Ditch the platform all together.

When we log onto these platforms, we’re forced to accept their terms, their conditions. But what if between “Meta going MAGA” and the TikTok ban, this is a chance for us to slow down and ask ourselves: What are our terms? Our conditions? Our boundaries? And how can we assert and honor our needs and priorities, on or off these platforms?

My hope is that, through Terms & Conditions, I will be able to arm and aide you with the context needed to empower you to set your own terms of use and boundaries with the Big Tech platforms that profit off our data while forcing our collective hand to blindly accept their rules on their terms, while examining and breaking down the social, political, cultural, and economic conditions under which we inter-connectedly exist online.

There will also be a paid tier, for those feeling particularly charged up and activated to log-off, delete, unsubscribe, and change your relationship to tech.

For paid subscribers, you’ll have access to Rage & Reconfigure, a weekly video support group for feeling and working through being online under the rule of Big Tech. Together, we'll share frustrations and problem solve roadblocks to support each other in living a life online, on our terms.

I’m launching Terms & Conditions on Ghost, an independent, nonprofit, open-source publishing alternative to Substack. My reasons for switching were directly influenced by one of my favorite tech journalists, Casey Newton of Platformer. You can read his post about why he made the switch from Substack to Ghost last year, here.

If you’re already subscribed to me on Substack, no action required from you. I’ll be importing all of my subscribers onto the platform and you’ll receive the first Terms & Conditions newsletter in the coming days.

If you’d like to immediately sign up as a paid subscriber, you can do that here.

Thanks for sticking around and riding this wild ride with me. To greater things. I can feel it.

More soon,
Van