As VP of Comms For the Newsletter Company, It’s Really Important That I Make Sure Everyone Associates Our Brand With Being a Huge Unaccountable Dipshit

Free speech means I'm allowed to do this

Hello, welcome. I’m a “VP” (“vice president”) of “Comms” (“communications") at the newsletter company. Corporate Communications is a tough job: You try to get your brand narrative out there to the public, sometimes battling a hostile press, sometimes struggling just to be heard among a sea of competitors. Your goal, in corporate comms, is to break through the noise and make people understand what your company is about. And, not to brag, but I think I’m pretty good at my job, which is why so many people understand that our company is about conflating the concept of free and open debate with being a braying jackass all the time.

Obviously, one way we get this message across is by having a bunch of braying jackasses on our platform. But as a comms professional, I assure you, this is not enough. There were a bunch of braying jackasses on Blogspot, but no one ever thought of that as a platform specializing in braying jackasses. And, making my job even harder, our platform is not exclusively home to braying jackasses. Lots of thoughtful, intelligent, conscientious people use our platform, and even rely on us for their livelihoods. My job is to make sure no one in the broader, Internet-using public associates the work of those people with our corporate brand.

Every day I log in with one mission: To ensure people understand that we, here at the newsletter company, do not just provide a platform for shitheels and trolls, but that shitheels and trolls are an essential part of our corporate culture. I need people to understand that, as a company, we fundamentally believe that promoting the dumbest and flimsiest thinkers and arguments is, actually, supporting The Marketplace of Ideas.

So when I heard that some people might be unhappy at the thought of Elon Musk purchasing a stake in Twitter and joining its board, I knew what I had to do: Communicate publicly that people who work at Twitter and aren’t happy with Elon Musk joining Twitter’s board are unwelcome to work at The Newsletter Company, due to Open Debate(?) and Free Speech(?). The most important way we can protect speech is to jokingly(?) threaten to establish blacklists of people that disagree with the way particular billionaires conceive of “regulating” “speech.”

It’s really important to communicate (my job! lol!) that we here at the newsletter company think any objection one might have to working, even indirectly, for a man whose car company negligently produces pedestrian death machines, whose factory floors are hotbeds of racism, who smears critics as pedophiles, and who routinely uses the platform that he purchased a stake in to manipulate share prices of companies he has an ownership stake in or plans to buy, is actually a censorious attempt to cancel debate. Before you ask: Yes, I will blame “context collapse” when people are like, “what the hell are you talking about.” That’s Comms 101, buddy.

Again, on paper, my job, as a Comms Professional, is to make people like us and generate good press for our company. But: Is Twitter on paper? Checkmate.

Thanks to the hard work of my team, the broader public understands us to be “The Asshole Company,” the place where dumb idiots subsidize huge assholes. And while I do have to credit the many huge assholes on our platform for helping to win us that recognition, I do take some modest pride in my own role in ensuring people understand that supporting assholes is part of our institutional DNA, and not just an incidental side effect of our business model.

I went to Yale.