When the words on the page don’t match what you’re trying to say (follow up on the Ben Thompson post)

Ben Thompson: Technological Scale and Government Control, Paramount Outbids Netflix for Warner Bros.

This is a lot more complicated than the nuclear question, where government control and ownership was a given; the sort of actions taken by the government over the last week fly in the face of the concept of private decision making and property rights. Unfortunately, those rights are not set in stone: they are ultimately enforced by someone, and the someone who is doing the enforcement is the one doing the violating. That’s not great, but it’s happening and/or will happen, and it’s important to come to grips with that reality — and I don’t think trying to describe that is at all equivalent to endorsing it.

Ben Thompson posted a clarification today regarding his post from yesterday, which I described as "no good, very bad." Unfortunately, the clarification is for members only, so most people will only see the original post without the added context.

He is surprised that people interpreted his original post as endorsing government seizure of private property, the idea that might makes right, and…well…fascism. I've reread the original post, and I honestly don't know how else you could interpret it. To me, it felt like him sharing his opinions on current events, in the style he always does.

I have two main thoughts left. First, building on what I said yesterday about him vocally disagreeing with one administration far more often than the other, I'm positive that if this had happened under the Biden administration, there would be no ambiguity about whether he supported it or not.

Second, the people who liked his post yesterday weren't really people who thought the government was doing something wrong and that Thompson was just accurately describing it. They supported the government's actions, and they thought Thompson was supporting that argument. Hell, after listening to Dithering this morning, I got the feeling he was doubling down on his support. This means that people who liked the post, and people who didn't like the post, both interpreted it differently than he intended. That's a pretty clear sign that your writing was not as clear as it could have been. That's always something important, but it’s doubly so when your lack of clarity makes wide swaths of people think you're endorsing fascism (and some of them like that!).

Listen, I write for an audience of strangers. They certainly don't live in my head and don’t always understand the intent of my posts. When that happens, you just take it on the chin, clarify what you meant, and move on (see my recent post about iPadOS going away). Ben gave a bit of a classic "I'm sorry if you were offended" sort of clarification, but whatever, I'll get over it.