Our beautiful walled gardens of moral purity.

“Hey did we decide that [redacted] was a Nazi hot tub, or is it okay to use?”

This showed up in a private chat group recently. A simple question about a platform, but embedded in those thirteen words is everything that's broken about how we navigate the world right now.

We've turned each consumer interaction into a moral audit. An app download requires community consensus. Every platform choice needs ethical clearance. And somewhere along the way, we started referring to the places where we work, create, and connect as potential "Nazi hot tubs."

Look, I get why people leave.

Amazon, Gumroad, Shopify, Substack—on a regular basis, there's another target for moral outrage. A CEO says something awful, a platform hosts something indefensible, a policy shifts in the wrong direction, and suddenly a migration begins. It starts as ethical concern, turns into moral pressure, and ends up looking like a stampede. Some of these actions are more than justified, but ever since Twitter it feels like we’re on heightened alert, ready to switch off any connection if our casual research finds an ounce of perceived evil.

The same week that question landed in our chat, friends were debating the use of Shopify because "TL;DR they host objectionable racist shops, CEO wants staff to mandatorily use AI." Someone mentioned setting up Gumroad, then immediately backtracked: "Actually, Sahil went to work for DOGE." Another person confessed they judge authors "a little less" just for publishing on Substack. I’m not innocent in this, I’ve done it too. 

We're literally training ourselves to see moral contamination everywhere. And this morning I ask myself, where does this end?

One day Gumroad is a symbol of independence. The next, it's toxic. So what then—Stripe? Square? MyPillow? Ok, I went too far, that dude and his stupid pillow need to go away for good. What's the exit strategy when every platform, store, app, whatever  eventually fails our purity test?

Here's what really gets me about that question: the assumption that someone else has already decided for us. "Did we decide..." Not "Should I use this?" or "What do you think about this platform?" but "What's the verdict? What's safe? What won't get me excommunicated from the group?"

We've convinced ourselves that refusing to use the wrong app is somehow equivalent to actual political action. We're playing moral war games with our Visa cards while the actual systems of power laugh all the way to the bank. This isn't activism—it's activism theater. We get the dopamine hit of moral superiority without any of the real work, risk, or sacrifice that actual change requires. I don’t say that from a white tower, I’m saying this as I look you in the eye as best I can through my writing. 

Where does this end?

Think about what real change looks like: organizing, voting, running for office, community building, mutual aid. Now think about our version: switching platforms and feeling righteous about it.

And we're exhausted. I’m exhausted. I'm tired of everything being a moral decision. Tactical retreat has turned into a life strategy, and the world won't improve based on the number of doors I close.

We're all carrying this invisible weight—the constant moral calculus of every click, every purchase, every platform choice. It's not making us better people, it's making us tired people. We're fracturing relationships over app choices while billionaires consolidate actual power. We're so busy policing each other's digital decisions that we forget to actually engage with the world we claim to want to change.

At what point does refusing to participate in flawed systems stop being protest and start becoming withdrawal? We're not just avoiding platforms anymore—we're avoiding each other. And guess what, that never ends the way we want.

We’re using consumer choice as a proxy for citizenship. We've outsourced our moral complexity to our shopping habits. It's easier to boycott Substack than to engage with difficult ideas from people we disagree with. It's simpler to avoid the "wrong" platforms than to do the messy work of actual human connection across difference.

Each time we cancel one platform, we migrate to another that will eventually disappoint us too. The indie darlings become corporate. The scrappy upstarts grow fast and break more than just things. The founders tweet one too many things, or the board replaces them with someone worse. And then we repeat the dance: moral inventory, public judgment, mass exodus.

Over the last few years, I’ve watched as friends and peers slowly narrow their circles (I’d throw in family but I fear that will always be divided, we’re all destined to live out three or four greek tragedies. Everything has to be pure: the tools, the friends, the takes. And if it's not, it gets cut. I get it. I've done it too. But I've started to wonder if this kind of performative purity is actually making us better—or just lonelier.

Did you know that Ad Busters, the quintessential anti-consumerist activist magazine publishes on Substack? They’re active on all of the evil platform hits: Facebook, Instagram, and X. The organization that literally wrote the book on anti-corporate activism, spent decades fighting "toxic capitalism," and champions escaping "the capitalist paradigm" is publishing on the same platform that we have boycotted for hosting hate speech.

Hear that whoosh sound? That’s moral outrage being sucked out of the room.

Maybe I've internalized too much of the culture war to ask these questions out loud without fearing I'll lose my progressive membership card. But I'm asking anyway.

Not because I want to defend broken platforms or bad actors. But because I want to defend something bigger—something we're at risk of losing: the ability to engage with people without exile. The ability to stay in dialogue—especially when we don’t see eye-to-eye. The ability to build, together, without requiring each other to pass a moral purity test every three months.

We don't have to turn purchases into a political statement. We don't have to be the ethics police of our own consumption. We can care deeply about justice and still use Amazon when we need toilet paper delivered. We can give ourselves permission to read an article without performing moral contamination theater. This doesn't mean abandoning our values or ignoring genuine harm. It means distinguishing between the work that matters and the performance that does not.

I’m done confusing retreat with resolve. Done mistaking exile for ethics.

Boycott when you need to. Protest when it matters. Draw your lines in the sand when you must. But don't give up on the idea that we can still and need to show up for each other even when it's messy. We won't build anything with only exits. At some point, someone has to stay and hold the door open.

Because if we don't—if we keep canceling everything that doesn't meet our ever-evolving standards—we may wake up one day surrounded by people who agree with us on everything, and yet feel more alone than ever. What a bland, obnoxious society that will make.

The proxy war will not end in the way that we hope or expect. It's time to put down our credit cards as weapons and remember that the real work is still the human work. 

Like talking to each other again.