Thinking through the consequences of this type of technology is important, but the narrative of "we can no longer allow technology X to go unregulated" as a vague catch-all for every negative externality is unhelpful. Regulate how? What concrete solutions is the author suggesting?
Companies I'm already working with - I've been in situations where the company would be better served with different leadership but it never happens because pushing for the changes is too hard and risky professionally for all involved. This is at least in part because of the culture shift that's happened in the US over the past decade or so.
There is another side effect to this that I would add as a casual investor. My bar for getting involved in a US startup is much higher than it used to be, because it's hard to make uncomfortable changes that might be construed in the wrong way. I find myself investing more freely in other countries where there is more upside and less risk of a career-destroying media storm. China for example has all kinds of unique risks associated with its government, but these are more predictable. I think this may be the biggest long-term side effect to all of this stuff - the US loses its position as the place to do disruptive business.
They definitely do, but I think they are easier to spot. The problem with bigger publications it that they have overarching biases blended throughout, subtle ads and so on, rather than individual authors being overly opinionated. In the substack model, you probably know about the author's biases when you sign up.
The problem with buying the NYT subscription is that you still get the ads. If not overtly, then they are still buried in the content in some sponsored form or another, because this is a large part of how the newspaper makes money. And the newspaper has other agendas too - political, commercial, etc. The Substack model, on the other hand (at least so far) lets you cut out most of the crap - the signal to noise ratio is just so much higher.