Saying Goodbye to Spotify

ON A SUNDAY afternoon this winter, I sat listening to some classic bossa nova playing over a streaming service called Tidal. That last detail is important only because I spent the previous morning switching from Spotify, the dominant music streaming service, in what may be the single least effective moral statement of my life (though there are other contenders to that crown). But sometimes you just have to stand up for reality.

The Spotify kerfuffle began, as you’ve probably heard, when it reportedly made a $200 million deal with Joe Rogan for the right to broadcast his podcast, a remarkably long and tendentious series of rants that included his advice that 20-somethings should not be vaccinated against the coronavirus (as well as repeated use of racist language). Rogan also had as a guest on his show the remarkably underwhelming Canadian philosophe Jordan Peterson who explained, incoherently, why the models that physicists have built to model the earth’s climate couldn’t possibly work. In response to Rogan’s anti-vax rant, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell—generational icons if ever there were—pulled their music from the streaming service and others have done the same. They were met with criticism from Roganers who called this an attempt at censorship and accused them of betraying their ’60s-era anti-establishment credentials.

But here’s the thing: The rebels of that era, through all the haze of drugs and bravado, were taking a stand on the side of reality. These were the children of the first Earth Day (“they paved paradise”), demanding that we see the effect of pollution on our air and water; the children of the feminist movement, demanding that we see that women were not a delicate species apart; the children of the anti-war movement (“four dead in O-hi-o”), demanding that we see the price our ideologies were exacting at home and abroad. And, of course, they were the children of a scientific moment: Both Young and Mitchell had polio as kids, meaning that even more than the rest of us, they must shake their heads at dudes like Rogan.

The “rebels” of our moment are insistent that reality barely exists—that anyone’s opinion on, say, vaccines or climate science is as useful as anyone else’s. This is, in practice, a kind of nihilism, embodied best as usual by Donald Trump, the man who insisted that the “concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive,” and that wind turbines were causing cancer, and that perhaps we should ingest bleach. These things are not true—not even close to true, not even in the same neighborhood as truth.

We live in an odd moment when the hoariest of establishments—the Biden White House, say, or the Vatican, or public health experts, or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—hew relatively close to actual fact on the great questions of the day. They’re not infallible (Catholic doctrine aside), and they should be challenged, but not on the grounds that every opinion counts the same. Reality counts double.