8 ms·

Colin Kaepernick to Join Medium Board of Directors

52 points by apress 6y ago

tonystubblebine 6y ago
I was excited in the WashPo coverage that they said Colin would be pushing more coverage of prison reform. It took me awhile, including attending a few events run by public defenders, to come around to the far end of the spectrum of reform which is abolition[1]. Abolitionists would say that reformers are wasting their time and that prisons work as designed. Prison abolition, like defunding the police, is a topic that's reasonable if you dig into it but sounds radical and dangerous on the surface. So it's something the main stream media won't cover well or will cover with a lot of both-sidesism. I never read what the WashPo or NYT say on this topic because I know it'll be frustratingly bad. So I see this as a great moment for Medium, to be a place where this topic can be covered fully and in depth. It's a win for their subscription model, which is generating the revenue that allows for high quality coverage. It's just great. I'm so excited. [1] If abolition sounds dangerous or radical, the key point that got me over the hump was that it is a long term goal, say a hundred years, that is meant to be executed category by category. Once you see the goal that way, it's easy to first of all find categories that can simply be eliminated by decriminalization. And then as you keep going you find ways to either do restorative justice where the focus is on making amends or ways to solve the root issue prompting crime. It's not until the end where you would face the possibly impossible issues of what to do with a Jeffrey Dahmer for instance.
- mc32 6y ago
  So what do you do with people who do things out of malice, say, mobsters, human traffickers? Some people do things because there’s an opening. How do you do restorative justice with them?
  - tonystubblebine 6y ago
    What do I do? Nothing. Did you see that part of my post? I really tried to emphasize that you go piece by piece and that harder pieces get addressed later. I'll be dead before anyone tries to figure out what to do with mobsters. But if you could find a way, almost definitely that way would be preferable to incarceration. That is why it's called abolition. The goal is to find ways to abolish every single category of incarceration.
    - mc32 6y ago
      I guess my point is that I can imagine abolishing some categories, but not all bar some heretofore unavailable alternatives.
      - tonystubblebine 6y ago
        There is a lot of research that people don't know about. And also a lot of people willing to do more research. So why limit your position here to just the solutions you can personally imagine?
    - tuesdayrain 6y ago
      >you go piece by piece and that harder pieces get addressed later Sounds like diving head-first into something with significant short and long term consequences while refusing to plan for the actual end-game. Frankly the reason people haven't addressed the "harder pieces" of abolition yet is because there is no good alternative to prison. Some people are fundamentally dangerous to society and no amount of "please be nice" therapy or education will change them.
      - tonystubblebine 6y ago
        What is the risk here? Break it down for yourself. I think either you are imagining a different process than I'm imagining or you'll find there are no short or long term consequences other than maybe some research money that gets spent verifying a dead end. If 90 years from now a set of experiments to find alternatives to incarceration for mobsters failed, that's not going to make people regret the first step of abolition which is probably decriminalizing drug possession. Or the second step, which is also well supported, which is eliminating cash bail.
        nickff 6y ago
        It seems like you're setting a target that you have no actual plan to achieve. Perhaps de-scoping the project would have the twin benefits of appearing more reasonable to your audience, and allowing for the possibility of success.
  - perfmode 6y ago
    this wikipedia article has some in depth responses to your line of inquiry. it also presents common positions of those in opposition to abolition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_abolition_movement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_abolition_movement
  - perfmode 6y ago
    prisons in the united states emerged on the heels of the abolition of slavery it seems we have at some point forgotten the main aim it was put in place for... and even so, we see that extensive without oversight, people running the systems aren’t doing the right thing.
    - mc32 6y ago
      Are you saying that this is only an effort in the US? I’d imagine this kind of movement would want wider reform?
      - perfmode 6y ago
        “While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners.” The movement begins in the United States, but it is ultimately a global humanitarian concern. Restorative justice ultimately is a paradigm shift in the way we relate to each other as human beings. To realize such a vision, we start where we are, and put one foot in front the other.
  - kgin 6y ago
    I imagine work on that problem will be ongoing long after it’s been figured out for everyone else. Definitely shouldn’t be a prerequisite to starting on the easier situations.
    - nickff 6y ago
      Saying "we'll figure it out as we go" is not very convincing to skeptics. Prisons are not a startup that should rapidly pivot, or 'fail-fast'. Why not just focus on a more limited set of objectives, which can be achieved via currently-known means?
      - tonystubblebine 6y ago
        Wasn't I clear about limited early objectives? Piece by piece over the course of a hundred years. It's not fail fast. The early pieces are pretty well known and not particularly controversial.
        nickff 6y ago
        Framing something as a vague hundred year struggle makes it seem both unrealistic and unachievable. It's usually better to set a more limited target, then after you succeed and garner credibility, you propose a new goal. You might think that I am quibbling about marketing, but there's a real chance you never get off the ground with the grand scheme, or your first step fails. The 'big ideas' are often very popular with adherents, and ignored by everyone else.
      - prepend 6y ago
        “move quickly and murder things” As a fan of iterations in software development it’s irked me as some of the language has been picked up in the “real world.” Moving fast and breaking things and minimum viable products only work if you’re reliably iterating and changing. It’s not a license to suck and procrastinate and only do fun things and assume someone will figure it out afterwards. I worked with a colleague who had this cargo cult mentality to projects where ve would come in, say crazy stuff, promise everything, hire a random contractor and then move on. Ve called verself a “change agent” but never really changed anything other than the air in the room.
  - clawedjird 6y ago
    Why do you think mobsters or human traffickers are driven by malice? Those occupations, if you can call them that, have clear economic and political incentives supporting their existence. If you want to stop people from becoming mobsters or human traffickers, I think it would make sense to create a political and economic system that reduces or eliminates those incentives. People calling for restorative justice generally aren’t looking to simply reproduce the status quo without prisons.
    - jpxw 6y ago
      Some people are just bad. There’s no economic reason for someone to rape and kill a child.
      - shitgoose 6y ago
        Or torch Wendy's.
      - klyrs 6y ago
        Unfortunately, I'd say that there might be economic incentives to kill children. When people are extremely poor, children are expensive. When a single parent is working multiple minimum-wage jobs, the kids are going to be neglected. Neglected kids act out more. Frustration gets pent up, the impossibility of the situation looms; a hefty medical bill or a high-needs disability... I think it's actually pretty normal for parents to fantasize about killing their children... but when times get extra tough... grim. Healthcare and UBI starting at childbirth would go a long way to reducing that incentive. Economic incentive for rape... I can't think of an argument. On the other hand, trafficking is extremely lucrative. But, tragically, child molesters are frequently victims themselves. I can't help but think that a robust mental health care system could go a long ways towards breaking that cycle.
- perfmode 6y ago
  thank you for this. to support your use of the word radical, i wish to offer: etymologically, “radical” comes from “radix” meaning root. to be radical in this context means to strike at the root of the problem. it means to reason from first principles and to reason in a way which takes into consideration leverage points in complex systems.
  - tonystubblebine 6y ago
    Right. Not sure why you are getting downvoted. This is true that people are afraid of root causes. And I think it's relevant to Hacker News because this is a community that tends to like first principle thinking.
    - bigyikes 6y ago
      Probably because the etymology of this word has little to do with the connotation of this word, at least as it exists in the minds of most people.
- downerending 6y ago
  I think society should focus on the root issues that lead to crime. That said, there are a lot of people in the world who we cannot allow to walk the streets without being quite cruel to the law-abiding rest of us. Making amends is great, but it should not lead to release.
  - skavi 6y ago
    Are those people the way they are due to some innate characteristics or could they have turned out differently in a different system?
    - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
      If they are a true and active threat to those around them, does it matter?
      - dragonwriter 6y ago
        Does it matter to how you treat those in front of you? Maybe, maybe not. There's a whole debate about the moral dimensions of responsibility and punishment to be had there, but it's beside the point I'm interested in. Does it matter to your long term policy of how to deal with the issue of which they are an instance? Absolutely. You waste human potential when you view the problem too narrowly.
  - philistine 6y ago
    When the words you use have been co-opted to mean people of minorities who are definitely not too cruel for society, those words lose all meaning. At this point, the cruel people look like a statistical anomaly.
- rbecker 6y ago
  From your other replies, I get the sense it shouldn't be callied "prison abolition", but "prison minimization where it makes sense, lets see how far we can take it". The former sounds like the dumbest idea you could possibly have, while the latter sounds perfectly sensible. From that perspective, you could not possibly have chosen a worse name for your movement, and it'll guarantee its failure under a torrent of questions like "this man raped and murdered my daughter - and you want him to go free??" If you want to make a difference, call it something else.
  - burfog 6y ago
    From the name "prison abolition", my first assumption is an alternative more like Sharia. Thieves get their hands chopped off. Other ideas include caning (as in Singapore) and hanging. It gets rid of prison. We save a lot of money. We still have a powerful deterrent to crime. So with that we get prison abolition while still keeping bad people from being uncontrolled. Everybody happy?
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > From your other replies, I get the sense it shouldn't be callied "prison abolition", but "prison minimization where it makes sense, lets see how far we can take it". The latter is not sufficiently succinct as a label, and also not accurate. The goal of prison abolition is abolition. And even if some institutionalization is left, it probably won't much resemble modern imprisonment much in it's scope, design, purpose, focus, or role in society. It's similar (though longer term) to police abolition, which doesn't favor abolition of (even armed, uniformed) law enforcement, but does favor abolition of the monolithic all-purpose paramilitary local law enforcement agencies that dominate that function at the local level today. > If you want to make a difference, call it something else. Yeah, using a long phrase that people fall asleep.halfway through as a label for a political movement is effective messaging.
- skissane 6y ago
  > If abolition sounds dangerous or radical, the key point that got me over the hump was that it is a long term goal, say a hundred years Normally, when people say "abolish" they mean "get rid of it now". When you say "abolish" but you actually mean "we'll get rid of it in a century from now, after everyone currently involved in this issue is dead, and we don't even know how that future generation is meant to pull it off, but we are sure they'll work it out somehow" you aren't really talking about abolition in the here and now, you are actually talking about reform in the here and now. "Abolition" is really just reform with a deliberately provocative presentation.
  - throwawaysea 6y ago
    Thank you for this very succinctly worded version of what I have been thinking about. Is there a generic term for this sort of provocative rhetoric?
    - cbnotfromthere 6y ago
      "Is there a generic term for this sort of provocative rhetoric?" Yes, but it's not allowed by the rules here.
- aaron695 6y ago
  If I was working for the Russian's I'd push abolition (I assume they push Defund the Police in a big way) Like you say "abolition sounds dangerous or radical". Almost by definition Conservatives will vote hard as possible the other way. If the idea is correct, you can't educate people on complex topics like this anyway. It needs to be iterative. It also sounds nothing like it is. Sound bites matter when Twitter controls the discourse.
  - prepend 6y ago
    This sounds like some inception from the far right to trick the far left into sounding insane. I’m not sure if there’s a more far fetched wedge issue that drives the middle away than this. I though completely open borders was as interesting as I found, but “change human nature to never crime” is even better. There’s a great science fiction book called “The Demolished Man” by Alfred Bester about a future society where criminals were rehabilitated rather than imprisoned.
    - tonystubblebine 6y ago
      I got it from public defenders and they seem pretty authentic about having come to this conclusion from first hand experience in the justice system.
jl2718 6y ago
Just imagine if you are a person that has a PhD in criminal justice, spent an entire career in the CJ system as e.g. a parole judge or internal affairs prosecutor, wrote textbooks about CJ reform, maybe even experienced incarceration and rehabilitation first-hand. Imagine how you would feel about this appointment. Would this look like a genuine commitment to advancing the kind of intelligent discourse that solves a problem? Or would it look like a desperate celebrity appointment for marketing and fundraising? Surely he’s brave and has learned a lot. His contribution was symbolically transformative. It’s hard to imagine that he is the expert on the topic. It seems to me that what is going on here is picking sides. BLM is like a social startup on a massive growth trajectory. Invest now for massive gains in social proof. There’s also a fear element, like, get your business on the internet or it’s the internet will kill your business. Replace ‘internet’ with ‘social justice movement’. This is the point in the timeline where every company on earth is desperate to make a website.
- tonystubblebine 6y ago
  Pretty sure that the majority response from these PhDs is that they will be the authors in these publications. This isn't Colin Kaepernick's daily blog we're talking about. Colin has money/power and this is what he's using it to support. So, if I were a PhD or other expert, I'd be focused on the good news that there is a new source of support for getting my expertise out there.
  - jl2718 6y ago
    Oh, you're saying that this is more like Colin Kaepernick's decision to partner with Medium moreso than Medium's conveniently-timed decision to support a movement through celebrity endorsement. Yes, that makes sense, and it seems that Kaepernick likely has the upper hand in this transaction. His brand is much stronger than Medium, better growth potential, impossible to replicate. I hope he got at least 20% of the company in this deal.

52 points by apress 6y ago

I was excited in the WashPo coverage that they said Colin would be pushing more coverage of prison reform. It took me awhile, including attending a few events run by public defenders, to come around to the far end of the spectrum of reform which is abolition[1]. Abolitionists would say that reformers are wasting their time and that prisons work as designed. Prison abolition, like defunding the police, is a topic that's reasonable if you dig into it but sounds radical and dangerous on the surface. So it's something the main stream media won't cover well or will cover with a lot of both-sidesism. I never read what the WashPo or NYT say on this topic because I know it'll be frustratingly bad. So I see this as a great moment for Medium, to be a place where this topic can be covered fully and in depth. It's a win for their subscription model, which is generating the revenue that allows for high quality coverage. It's just great. I'm so excited. [1] If abolition sounds dangerous or radical, the key point that got me over the hump was that it is a long term goal, say a hundred years, that is meant to be executed category by category. Once you see the goal that way, it's easy to first of all find categories that can simply be eliminated by decriminalization. And then as you keep going you find ways to either do restorative justice where the focus is on making amends or ways to solve the root issue prompting crime. It's not until the end where you would face the possibly impossible issues of what to do with a Jeffrey Dahmer for instance.

mc32 6y ago
So what do you do with people who do things out of malice, say, mobsters, human traffickers? Some people do things because there’s an opening. How do you do restorative justice with them?
- tonystubblebine 6y ago
  What do I do? Nothing. Did you see that part of my post? I really tried to emphasize that you go piece by piece and that harder pieces get addressed later. I'll be dead before anyone tries to figure out what to do with mobsters. But if you could find a way, almost definitely that way would be preferable to incarceration. That is why it's called abolition. The goal is to find ways to abolish every single category of incarceration.
  - mc32 6y ago
    I guess my point is that I can imagine abolishing some categories, but not all bar some heretofore unavailable alternatives.
    - tonystubblebine 6y ago
      There is a lot of research that people don't know about. And also a lot of people willing to do more research. So why limit your position here to just the solutions you can personally imagine?
  - tuesdayrain 6y ago
    >you go piece by piece and that harder pieces get addressed later Sounds like diving head-first into something with significant short and long term consequences while refusing to plan for the actual end-game. Frankly the reason people haven't addressed the "harder pieces" of abolition yet is because there is no good alternative to prison. Some people are fundamentally dangerous to society and no amount of "please be nice" therapy or education will change them.
    - tonystubblebine 6y ago
      What is the risk here? Break it down for yourself. I think either you are imagining a different process than I'm imagining or you'll find there are no short or long term consequences other than maybe some research money that gets spent verifying a dead end. If 90 years from now a set of experiments to find alternatives to incarceration for mobsters failed, that's not going to make people regret the first step of abolition which is probably decriminalizing drug possession. Or the second step, which is also well supported, which is eliminating cash bail.
      - nickff 6y ago
        It seems like you're setting a target that you have no actual plan to achieve. Perhaps de-scoping the project would have the twin benefits of appearing more reasonable to your audience, and allowing for the possibility of success.
- perfmode 6y ago
  this wikipedia article has some in depth responses to your line of inquiry. it also presents common positions of those in opposition to abolition: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_abolition_movement https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison_abolition_movement
- perfmode 6y ago
  prisons in the united states emerged on the heels of the abolition of slavery it seems we have at some point forgotten the main aim it was put in place for... and even so, we see that extensive without oversight, people running the systems aren’t doing the right thing.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Are you saying that this is only an effort in the US? I’d imagine this kind of movement would want wider reform?
    - perfmode 6y ago
      “While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world's population, it houses around 22 percent of the world's prisoners.” The movement begins in the United States, but it is ultimately a global humanitarian concern. Restorative justice ultimately is a paradigm shift in the way we relate to each other as human beings. To realize such a vision, we start where we are, and put one foot in front the other.
- kgin 6y ago
  I imagine work on that problem will be ongoing long after it’s been figured out for everyone else. Definitely shouldn’t be a prerequisite to starting on the easier situations.
  - nickff 6y ago
    Saying "we'll figure it out as we go" is not very convincing to skeptics. Prisons are not a startup that should rapidly pivot, or 'fail-fast'. Why not just focus on a more limited set of objectives, which can be achieved via currently-known means?
    - tonystubblebine 6y ago
      Wasn't I clear about limited early objectives? Piece by piece over the course of a hundred years. It's not fail fast. The early pieces are pretty well known and not particularly controversial.
      - nickff 6y ago
        Framing something as a vague hundred year struggle makes it seem both unrealistic and unachievable. It's usually better to set a more limited target, then after you succeed and garner credibility, you propose a new goal. You might think that I am quibbling about marketing, but there's a real chance you never get off the ground with the grand scheme, or your first step fails. The 'big ideas' are often very popular with adherents, and ignored by everyone else.
    - prepend 6y ago
      “move quickly and murder things” As a fan of iterations in software development it’s irked me as some of the language has been picked up in the “real world.” Moving fast and breaking things and minimum viable products only work if you’re reliably iterating and changing. It’s not a license to suck and procrastinate and only do fun things and assume someone will figure it out afterwards. I worked with a colleague who had this cargo cult mentality to projects where ve would come in, say crazy stuff, promise everything, hire a random contractor and then move on. Ve called verself a “change agent” but never really changed anything other than the air in the room.
- clawedjird 6y ago
  Why do you think mobsters or human traffickers are driven by malice? Those occupations, if you can call them that, have clear economic and political incentives supporting their existence. If you want to stop people from becoming mobsters or human traffickers, I think it would make sense to create a political and economic system that reduces or eliminates those incentives. People calling for restorative justice generally aren’t looking to simply reproduce the status quo without prisons.
  - jpxw 6y ago
    Some people are just bad. There’s no economic reason for someone to rape and kill a child.
    - shitgoose 6y ago
      Or torch Wendy's.
    - klyrs 6y ago
      Unfortunately, I'd say that there might be economic incentives to kill children. When people are extremely poor, children are expensive. When a single parent is working multiple minimum-wage jobs, the kids are going to be neglected. Neglected kids act out more. Frustration gets pent up, the impossibility of the situation looms; a hefty medical bill or a high-needs disability... I think it's actually pretty normal for parents to fantasize about killing their children... but when times get extra tough... grim. Healthcare and UBI starting at childbirth would go a long way to reducing that incentive. Economic incentive for rape... I can't think of an argument. On the other hand, trafficking is extremely lucrative. But, tragically, child molesters are frequently victims themselves. I can't help but think that a robust mental health care system could go a long ways towards breaking that cycle.
perfmode 6y ago
thank you for this. to support your use of the word radical, i wish to offer: etymologically, “radical” comes from “radix” meaning root. to be radical in this context means to strike at the root of the problem. it means to reason from first principles and to reason in a way which takes into consideration leverage points in complex systems.
- tonystubblebine 6y ago
  Right. Not sure why you are getting downvoted. This is true that people are afraid of root causes. And I think it's relevant to Hacker News because this is a community that tends to like first principle thinking.
  - bigyikes 6y ago
    Probably because the etymology of this word has little to do with the connotation of this word, at least as it exists in the minds of most people.
downerending 6y ago
I think society should focus on the root issues that lead to crime. That said, there are a lot of people in the world who we cannot allow to walk the streets without being quite cruel to the law-abiding rest of us. Making amends is great, but it should not lead to release.
- skavi 6y ago
  Are those people the way they are due to some innate characteristics or could they have turned out differently in a different system?
  - __blockcipher__ 6y ago
    If they are a true and active threat to those around them, does it matter?
    - dragonwriter 6y ago
      Does it matter to how you treat those in front of you? Maybe, maybe not. There's a whole debate about the moral dimensions of responsibility and punishment to be had there, but it's beside the point I'm interested in. Does it matter to your long term policy of how to deal with the issue of which they are an instance? Absolutely. You waste human potential when you view the problem too narrowly.
- philistine 6y ago
  When the words you use have been co-opted to mean people of minorities who are definitely not too cruel for society, those words lose all meaning. At this point, the cruel people look like a statistical anomaly.
rbecker 6y ago
From your other replies, I get the sense it shouldn't be callied "prison abolition", but "prison minimization where it makes sense, lets see how far we can take it". The former sounds like the dumbest idea you could possibly have, while the latter sounds perfectly sensible. From that perspective, you could not possibly have chosen a worse name for your movement, and it'll guarantee its failure under a torrent of questions like "this man raped and murdered my daughter - and you want him to go free??" If you want to make a difference, call it something else.
- burfog 6y ago
  From the name "prison abolition", my first assumption is an alternative more like Sharia. Thieves get their hands chopped off. Other ideas include caning (as in Singapore) and hanging. It gets rid of prison. We save a lot of money. We still have a powerful deterrent to crime. So with that we get prison abolition while still keeping bad people from being uncontrolled. Everybody happy?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > From your other replies, I get the sense it shouldn't be callied "prison abolition", but "prison minimization where it makes sense, lets see how far we can take it". The latter is not sufficiently succinct as a label, and also not accurate. The goal of prison abolition is abolition. And even if some institutionalization is left, it probably won't much resemble modern imprisonment much in it's scope, design, purpose, focus, or role in society. It's similar (though longer term) to police abolition, which doesn't favor abolition of (even armed, uniformed) law enforcement, but does favor abolition of the monolithic all-purpose paramilitary local law enforcement agencies that dominate that function at the local level today. > If you want to make a difference, call it something else. Yeah, using a long phrase that people fall asleep.halfway through as a label for a political movement is effective messaging.
skissane 6y ago
> If abolition sounds dangerous or radical, the key point that got me over the hump was that it is a long term goal, say a hundred years Normally, when people say "abolish" they mean "get rid of it now". When you say "abolish" but you actually mean "we'll get rid of it in a century from now, after everyone currently involved in this issue is dead, and we don't even know how that future generation is meant to pull it off, but we are sure they'll work it out somehow" you aren't really talking about abolition in the here and now, you are actually talking about reform in the here and now. "Abolition" is really just reform with a deliberately provocative presentation.
- throwawaysea 6y ago
  Thank you for this very succinctly worded version of what I have been thinking about. Is there a generic term for this sort of provocative rhetoric?
  - cbnotfromthere 6y ago
    "Is there a generic term for this sort of provocative rhetoric?" Yes, but it's not allowed by the rules here.
aaron695 6y ago
If I was working for the Russian's I'd push abolition (I assume they push Defund the Police in a big way) Like you say "abolition sounds dangerous or radical". Almost by definition Conservatives will vote hard as possible the other way. If the idea is correct, you can't educate people on complex topics like this anyway. It needs to be iterative. It also sounds nothing like it is. Sound bites matter when Twitter controls the discourse.
- prepend 6y ago
  This sounds like some inception from the far right to trick the far left into sounding insane. I’m not sure if there’s a more far fetched wedge issue that drives the middle away than this. I though completely open borders was as interesting as I found, but “change human nature to never crime” is even better. There’s a great science fiction book called “The Demolished Man” by Alfred Bester about a future society where criminals were rehabilitated rather than imprisoned.
  - tonystubblebine 6y ago
    I got it from public defenders and they seem pretty authentic about having come to this conclusion from first hand experience in the justice system.

jl2718 6y ago

Just imagine if you are a person that has a PhD in criminal justice, spent an entire career in the CJ system as e.g. a parole judge or internal affairs prosecutor, wrote textbooks about CJ reform, maybe even experienced incarceration and rehabilitation first-hand. Imagine how you would feel about this appointment. Would this look like a genuine commitment to advancing the kind of intelligent discourse that solves a problem? Or would it look like a desperate celebrity appointment for marketing and fundraising? Surely he’s brave and has learned a lot. His contribution was symbolically transformative. It’s hard to imagine that he is the expert on the topic. It seems to me that what is going on here is picking sides. BLM is like a social startup on a massive growth trajectory. Invest now for massive gains in social proof. There’s also a fear element, like, get your business on the internet or it’s the internet will kill your business. Replace ‘internet’ with ‘social justice movement’. This is the point in the timeline where every company on earth is desperate to make a website.

tonystubblebine 6y ago
Pretty sure that the majority response from these PhDs is that they will be the authors in these publications. This isn't Colin Kaepernick's daily blog we're talking about. Colin has money/power and this is what he's using it to support. So, if I were a PhD or other expert, I'd be focused on the good news that there is a new source of support for getting my expertise out there.
- jl2718 6y ago
  Oh, you're saying that this is more like Colin Kaepernick's decision to partner with Medium moreso than Medium's conveniently-timed decision to support a movement through celebrity endorsement. Yes, that makes sense, and it seems that Kaepernick likely has the upper hand in this transaction. His brand is much stronger than Medium, better growth potential, impossible to replicate. I hope he got at least 20% of the company in this deal.