Neil Young’s Spotify Boycott Isn’t ‘Brave’

S ince Neil Young announced that he was pulling his music off Spotify in protest of Joe Rogan’s having a podcast on the platform, figures favorable to the move have been busy mining their thesauruses in search of synonyms for “good.” Thus far, I have seen Young’s decision described as “moral,” “empowering,” “brave,” “ethical,” “inspiring,” and even “imperative.”

I have a word to add into the mix: “Intolerant.”

Neil Young doesn’t like Joe Rogan’s podcast. So what? Is it really now Young’s standard that if he dislikes what another person says in public, he won’t share a library with that person? What, one must wonder, does Young believe is going to happen if he hosts his music on the same streaming service as people he personally disdains? Does he worry that the 0s and 1s will mix inside the patch cables and pollute the purity of his art? Does he believe, perhaps, that a shared domain name and a set of common IP addresses might impart guilt by association? If so, one must ask how far he intends to pursue digital immaculacy before the quest becomes self-evidently absurd. Does he want his own data center? His own trunk lines? His own ISPs and cell-phone towers? Once upon a time, tolerance meant sharing physical rooms with people whose views you opposed, and even abhorred. Now, some people can’t even share the Internet.

Rogan’s critics say that he lies and facilitates the lies of others. For the sake of argument, let’s agree that he does. One must ask at what point this became an exception to our culture of open speech? Neil Young made an entire album filled with falsehoods about GMOs. Should REO Speedwagon boycott Spotify in response? Epic Records hired Rage Against the Machine and promised never to interfere with their work. Should their cleaner-than-thou label-mates, ABBA, have ripped up their contract as a result? This is a serious question: At what level of platform do we wish to impose ideological segregation? The op-ed page? The newspaper? The newspaper’s comments section? The newspaper’s comment’s section’s web host? Should I boycott Farmers’ Insurance if the guy in their commercials lies on Twitter? Should I refuse to fly Delta if I spot a passenger I disdain? I’ve been on TV with Joy Reid, for goodness sake. Should I have stormed off in high dudgeon the first time she said something false?

Where’s the line? For customers who are following Young’s lead, the replacement of choice for Spotify seems to be Apple, which is more acceptable because . . . well, why is it acceptable? True, Apple doesn’t have Joe Rogan’s show. But it distributes almost every podcast under the sun, including those hosted by figures whom progressives have managed to cancel elsewhere. Are we seriously to believe that Apple — which both directly and indirectly “facilitates” the monetization of speech — is less a “vector” for “dangerous misinformation” than is Spotify? And what of Apple’s ties to slave labor? What of its lobbying against legislation that would force it to improve its business practices? Unlike some, I do not think that everyone who uses a MacBook Pro is complicit in Apple’s corporate sins. Unlike some, I’m not tying my consumer choices to the supposed purity of the providers I select. One of the problems with Neil Young’s announcing that he cannot in good conscience work with Spotify is the implication that anyone he continues to work with must be acceptable — or, at least, less bad. So, are they? Is Apple less morally culpable for its reliance on Uyghur Muslim laborers than is Spotify for hosting Rogan’s podcast?

Spotify, Apple, Joe Rogan, and Neil Young are all private actors, and they can do as they wish. That is Liberalism 101, and I would not wish to change it if I could. But there are other elements within Liberalism 101, too, and they are no less vital to our political order. I would, of course, have been firmly within my rights to refuse the book offer that Random House made me on the grounds that I find their other authors intolerable. But to have done so would have made me a stupid bigot. I would be fully within my rights if I declined to join any public debate that required me to share a stage with someone being paid to disagree with me. But, again, to do so would make me a stupid bigot. There is nothing “liberal” about regarding artistic platforms or delivery mechanisms as political creatures to be condemned. On the contrary: Such a habit is quite literally totalitarian. I have been asked this week if I’m on the side of Joe Rogan or the side of Neil Young, and my answer is that I favor neither. My preference, instead, is for a world in which I can subscribe to a digital music library without getting caught up in a cauldron of screaming, stupidity, and badly misplaced neo-Puritanism.