On Responsibility.

Hello everyone. I know it has been a bit since I have published anything. To be completely transparent, I have found it extremely difficult to write recently. Across tech, media, and democracy - the three primary verticals of this newsletter - the news has been very bad. I want the things I write here to be encouraging, thoughtful, and pro-social, and I found myself beginning drafts that turned into incendiary screeds. Amidst the sadism and defiantly anti-social behavior of a few of the world's most cretinous losers, I have found myself seeking out frameworks, media, anything I can get my hands on to remind me of what I wrote for this newsletter on January 23 of this year: People have always cared.

Miscellaneous Reminders About the Future

I really do not love Arachne being a place where I dreamscape the world we will inherit. I think that there are a number of flaws around the process of prediction in general, and there is no reason to believe that we can project out, say, ten years with any

arachneAlex Schneidman

Just as past posts have tipped in the philosophical direction, so will this one. If that's not your vibe, thanks for having read this far. But today I want to meditate on responsibility. While there is a broad history of thinking about what we owe each other, I want to write specifically about how analyzing responsibility (i.e. what we owe each other, what we owe ourselves, what we owe the Earth, what we owe God, etc.) can offer a path for those of us struggling with the gleeful cruelty, stupendous shortsightedness, and pathetic cowardice exhibited by the powerful right now. So here's what I got.

Starting with "Why"

One of the most popular TED Talks of all time is Simon Sinek's "Start With Why" presentation. Over the years, Sinek has become something of a figure in left-of-center intellectualism, owed to the fact that his ideas have found attentive ears amongst the corporate liberal space.

The crux of his framework is as follows: Everyone, from businesses to great leaders, know what they do. Most of those constituents know how they do it. But it is the particularly great marketers, the particularly great leaders, who not only know why they do something, but they start with that purpose. For his marketing/business audience he puts it this way:

I have always been compelled by this framework, and have been drawn to mission driven organizations ever since because of it. I believe that when you really know why you want to do something, beyond just for money, the how and the what become extraordinarily clear.

While Sinek casts aside money as a "result" and therefore not a powerful "why," I believe it would be naive to neglect the incentive structures in place that make "because I want money" a common and formidable why. The incentives in place to amass wealth, notoriety, and power have massively outpaced the appeal of more positive, pro-social whys. And sure, I am relying on anecdotal observations of the playing field, but I don't think it is a stretch to say that being a genocidal, belligerent, snickering loser has become extremely rewarding.

I have started assessing the whys, both stated and implied, of the powerful, and in doing so I can imagine a path to the better world. So today I want to show you a few examples of what I mean.

The Grey Lady

What is The New York Times for? Who do they serve? What is their responsibility as an institution? They'll tell you:

This is the homepage of nytco.com, the online home for the company. If you want to learn more about their company, apply for a job, invest, this is what they want you to know.

So if I have them correct, they feel a sense of internal responsibility to 1. seek the truth and 2. help people understand the world.

Are they fulfilling this responsibility?

This past week news spread about a $400 million jumbo jet that Trump is set to receive as a gift from the Qatari government. If you found out about this via the Times, here are the two headlines you would see:

A common joke amongst skeptical readers of New York Times is that their headlines are often laughably indirect. In this case, language like "raises substantial ethical issues" or "heightens corruption concerns" tends to undersell the nature of the facts being reported. These syntactical decisions offer readers an alternate narrative, one where all of the experts quoted in these articles and where all of the people who can read this and see exactly what is going on are kinda making a mountain over a molehill. Corruption smurruption.

Why not be more direct? If the evident truth is that our corrupt president is doing something corrupt, doesn't it help people better understand the world to just say so? If, by your own assertion, you are truth seekers, don't you have a responsibility to adequately represent what is happening to the public?

To be honest, I can see how the Times might see these articles as seeking truth, and the headlines as careful phrasings not to be incendiary. We have enough incendiary bullshit in the news media space, they might figure. I happen to think this is garbage, and that the sincerity of their mission is blighted by a key omission from all of their reporting.

An extremely cursory exploration into the country of Qatar will expose you to their human rights violations. You'll find stories about the indentured servitude of extra-national labor they entrapped to build their World Cup stadiums. And, most notably absent from this Times article, you'll find that they are financial and diplomatic supporters of Hamas.

I don't think I need to tell you who Hamas is. I would like to highlight the (to use a polite term) irony of accepting gifts from a country that at one point was transferring $30 million monthly to Hamas while yourself violently disappearing dissenters of Israel's actions in Gaza/the West Bank for being "antisemitic." I don't know, I think funding a militia that targets Jews in the tens of millions of dollars is more antisemitic than writing a thousand word column for your school's student newspaper.

So here's the short of it: Donald Trump has accepted a gift from the same people who fund Hamas. Sure, let's quibble over the details. The gift is for the Department of Defense, he says, not for him! Fine, it's still accepting a gift from a country which has given the violent militia in the neighborhood of $1.8 billion total.

Now, consider this. If you were a news organization, one with a fairly adamant pro-Israel bend, one that reaches millions of Americans every day in the form of push notifications, newsletters, and games, one that says you seek the truth and to help people understand the world, wouldn't you think it was important to include even a passing mention of this fact.

Would illuminating this contradiction not directly urge the government to provide some sort of explanation? Would publishing such a fact in this specific context not inform the public as to the incoherence and stupidity of the Trump administration's actions? Would this not further encourage investigation and truth seeking to better contextualize the actions of the powerful? What the fuck are we even doing here?

As you may have surmised, neither Times article (and zero public statements made by prominent Democrats Chuck Schumer and Adam Schiff for that matter) even addresses this. I want to make clear that this is not some piece of esoteric knowledge that I went on a long pilgrimage to uncover. This is not shielded information. Everything I have written for you can literally be found in the very first paragraph of the Wikipedia page "Qatari support for Hamas."

Is it unreasonable to ask that every institution and every person alive always fulfills their stated mission perfectly? Yeah, probably. It's not fair to point to one example and say that they are not fulfilling their responsibility. But this is not an isolated occurrence. Via omission, passive headlines, half measures, and deference to power, the very institutions we trust to hold the powerful to task are failing their responsibility. While quibbling over the severity of the corruption, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The LA Times all have articles about this topic, and only one, The LA Times, makes a passing reference to what I've laid out above.

An organization that is willing to fail its own mission as frequently as The New York Times does must endure scrutiny. It really makes you wonder if there might be some other priorities, some other stakeholders to whom the Times feels responsible.

What the fuck are the Democrats even doing?

What is the purpose of a political party? To whom are they responsible?

Glancing through the average Bluesky timeline or perusing the more left-aligned subreddits you'll see a common thread of disdain for the Democrats, particularly the ones at the federal legislative level. Every single day I happen across someone begging, pleading with the Dems to do something.

It is hard to pin down one good example of how the Democrats are failing their responsibilities, the neglect is simply apparent. But I want to offer that this abdication of responsibility extends further back than this particular moment. It is endemic to the heart of the party, and I believe it comes down to their skewed sense their responsibility.

A common narrative amongst observers is that the Democrats failed to win the White House last November because their positions were "too extreme" and they did not court enough "moderate" voters. I simply do not understand this. Why is it the responsibility of the Democrats to moderate their positions but not the Republicans? Besides, this is also likely untrue. What becomes obvious upon further analysis is that Trump was given a victory not because the Democrats were too woke but because the media landscape treats Trump credulously.

And how could they not! When given an opportunity to make their case, the existing opposition party stressed how much "our democracy" was at risk. But when a Democrat was president and had favorable situations in the legislative branch, what did they do to preserve democracy?

Did they undo much of the catastrophic actions taken by the previous administration? No.

Did they expand the Supreme Court to ideologically align it with the voting public? No.

Did they end the filibuster, which has been used in bad faith by Republicans to challenge democratically created bills? No.

Did they pass extremely popular legislation such as: the federal decriminalization of marijuana, the cancellation of student loans, the expansion of Medicaid, the Equal Rights Amendment, or a federally enshrined right to abortion? No.

Did they acknowledge the justified and extreme dissent for American support of Israel's supremacist agenda in Gaza and the West Bank? No.

If you keep telling us to trust you as defenders of democracy, if you keep saying you are the ones on whom the responsibility to save democracy falls, you have to demonstrate that you are! If you don't, it makes us wonder to whom you actually feel responsible. If you are willing to throw trans people, immigrants, or women under the bus, who are you fighting for? Whose interests do you have in mind?

I worry that the tone of this piece comes across as conspiratorial or fanatical. By asking a lot of questions I'm tacitly "just asking questions" lol. But I use these explorations into the misalignment and failures of responsibility in our institutions to encourage myself, not discourage. In reflecting upon the failures of the powerful, I come back to my own conception of my responsibilities.

I feel responsible for writing compelling, persuasive entries in this newsletter. I feel like I owe people (whether they read once or they read every week) precision, clarity, and optimism. The world has offered me extraordinary privileges, among which are the skills that my teachers and parents have instilled in me. But skills and abilities are just what we do. Not why we do it. I'm lucky to even consider what my responsibility to world is.

I hope that you consider this question. You don't have to, obviously, I'm just some guy lol. But I have been heartened in my pursuit of a better world by remembering who and what is counting on me, and I think you might be too. So whether it is the people around you now, the people who will inherit the Earth, God, whatever, remember why you have been given power. With great power comes great responsibility.