Nuance vs. Byzantine: And How We Know Mark Cuban Is Full of Shit
- john raymond
- Jun 9
- 2 min read
In an era where every billionaire wants to be seen as a philosopher-king, Mark Cuban is the latest to wander into the public square and mistake his “nuance” for insight. But here’s the reality: nuance is dead—or rather, it's been revealed for what it truly is—a rhetorical buffer that softens critique, preserves elite comfort, and stalls urgent truth. The world is not nuanced. The world is byzantine.
The difference matters. Nuance is the language of negotiation and hedging; it asks us to consider “both sides,” to slow down, to weigh every idea as if all ideas deserve a hearing. Byzantine, by contrast, recognizes systems within systems, the entangled mess of power, misinformation, performative civility, bad-faith actors, and deeply-rooted control structures. In a nuanced world, you argue with a man like Cuban. In a byzantine world, you identify him as part of the problem and move on.
Mark Cuban doesn’t understand that Bluesky, like every platform now, is not some innocent debate club waiting to be moderated into maturity. It is a contested space, full of people fleeing abuse, disinformation, fascism, and neoliberal “growth” models. Cuban shows up, hand-wringing over “diversity of thought,” blind to the fact that the people he wants to platform are often the very ones others had to claw their way free from. He’s not just asking for “disagreement.” He’s asking for oxygen for bad ideas—wrapped in the flag of nuance.
And when the people on Bluesky tell him to fuck off, that’s not the end of free speech. That is free speech. It is truth functioning in a hostile system, raw and unapologetic. It's the immune system of a byzantine network identifying a foreign body that thinks its money should earn it patience and respect. But here, respect is earned by truth, not takes. And truth doesn’t care how many companies you’ve sold.
To be clear, this is not an argument against pluralism. Pluralism is foundational. But pluralism does not mean tolerating the endless recycling of discredited frameworks just because someone rich finds them “reasonable.” In a byzantine world, not every voice deserves weight. Most deserve exposure. And some—like Cuban’s—deserve ridicule, not because he’s the worst actor on the field, but because he still doesn’t understand the game.
So when he complains that he can’t talk AI or business or healthcare without being told to shut up, he’s revealing that he doesn’t understand power dynamics. These are not neutral topics. They’re the very battlegrounds of structural harm. And when someone from the top of the system speaks into them with “nuanced concern,” it reads as deflection. It reads as bullshit. It reads like Mark Cuban.
Free speech means being able to tell someone they’re full of shit. Free speech means telling a billionaire to go the fuck away when his “contribution” is to demand respect without accountability. That’s not hate. That’s clarity. And in a byzantine world, clarity is the highest form of political hygiene.
So yes—free speech is good. Especially when it tells people like Mark Cuban exactly what they need to hear.
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