Cade Metz Pulls a ‘Deep Capture’ on Slate Star Codex
It’s no surprise to me that a New York Times reporter named Cade Metz is responsible for the destruction of a superb blog called Slate Star Codex.
According to the anonymous author of the blog, a Times reporter, revealed by National Review to be Metz, contacted him recently to say that he was writing an article on the blog. He “told me it would be a mostly positive piece about how we were an interesting gathering place for people in tech.”
But there was a catch. “Unfortunately,” the blogger wrote, “he told me he had discovered my real name and would reveal it in the article, ie doxx me.”
Since the blog’s author was a practicing psychiatrist, who writes under the pseudonym “Scott Alexander,” there were plenty of reasons not to reveal his real name. But Metz would have none of it.
The blogger went on:
When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he said that it was New York Times policy to include real names, and he couldn’t change that. After considering my options, I decided on the one you see now. If there’s no blog, there’s no story. Or at least the story will have to include some discussion of NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks.
So he shut the blog. A storm of criticism followed, during which it was…
