Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the ‘Curator’ post of the week. This comes from trawling around the ‘artistic/intellectual web’ and using the most interesting articles I find as a jumping-off point for a discussion. As always, comments, arguments very welcome. At
, W.V. Buluma discusses the novel Dust and the assassination of Tom Mboya.Best,
Sam
SUBSTACK VS. TWITTER
Shots are fired!
Twitter blocks reposts from Substack, creating, effectively, a war between the two platforms.
This isn’t entirely a surprise — I actually had my Twitter account disabled a couple of months ago for reposting from Substack — but there is something somehow startling in how brazenly Twitter is doing it, at the moment by marking Substack links as ‘unsafe.’
What are the conclusions?
First of all, that Subcomandante Musk has acted like any revolutionary before him and has taken on exactly the behaviors of the regime he purported to overthrow. The premise of his Twitter purchase is that Twitter is “the modern town square,” and what that means in practice is that he wants to keep anybody else from building their own town. It’s not really a surprise that Musk has acted so forcibly, although unnerving that it took so little time. The deplatformed writers looking to return to Twitter after Musk’s purchase — “Let the wild rumpus begin!” wrote Walter Kirn on The Free Press in November — are now like the sorts of exiles who find themselves in permanent diaspora. With this development, by the way, the journalist Matt Taibbi emerges with flying colors. Taibbi had personally been given a scoop by Musk to crawl through the internal files of the outgoing regime, but forced to choose between Twitter and Substack, Taibbi makes the conscientious decision, writing, “Not much suspense there; I’m staying at Substack. You’ve all been great to me, as has the management of this company.”
Second, that social media has, to a really startlingly extent, become siloed over the last five or ten years. The Facebook people are on Facebook, the Twitter people on Twitter, the Instagram people on Instagram, etc. Musk’s heavy-handed attempt to squeeze out a rival reifies an already-well-developed trend, which would have seemed outlandish in the ‘90s or 2000s. Then, people who were on the web were on the web — they ‘surfed’ across different platforms, they had multiple identities, the whole ethos went against brand loyalty. The Web 2.0, with the consolidation of a handful of tech oligopolies, means that everything becomes brand loyalty, anybody on Twitter, for instance, is expected to be essentially an ambassador for Twitter. There’s nothing to say about this trend, really, except to note that this is an inevitable result of monopolization — and that the only proper response is to fight against it in any way possible.
Third, if there is a war then it’s important to choose sides. For me, this one is very easy. Twitter sucks and has always sucked. Periodically, over the last decade or so, I’ve tried to get myself addicted to Twitter — thinking that it’s the only game in town; that it is for worse or for better where all the writers are — and it’s just never taken. I’ve never had a pleasant experience on Twitter, never been really taken with someone’s unique insight, with some perspective I hadn’t encountered before. The strict character count creates an incredible flattening. The only possible modes of expression become up/down votes, vitriol, or snarky put-downs. Nuance is impossible, creativity impossible. As
astutely writes in a piece discussing Twitter’s death, there is no real discussion, only various forms of assent: “Twitter acts as if we have already signed up for the game and affirmed all of its rules.” Not so surprisingly, what was supposed to be the quintessentially democratic forum becomes the ultimate reification of a social pyramid. People are curious what celebrities think about something — because they are already celebrities — and then the algorithms lock the hierarchy into place.Substack meanwhile is what the web was meant to be. No character counts, no arbitrary constraints, no ads, no algorithms. It is a stocked pond — it lives because of the signing bonuses paid out to established writers — but what it represents is an opportunity to combine the best of the original web (unfiltered free expression) with the best of the Web 2.0 (social media tools that foster communal networks).
Let’s be real. Substack is a startup and is subject to the same market pressures as anyone else. In the Substack space, everybody got a little too excited about a recent moment in Succession in which a Substack-like company comes into the sights of Waystar Royco. And that makes one remember that, of course, Substack would be looking to sell at one point or another. If this were a Succession episode, the war with Twitter would be part of a dance leading to a purchase (The New York Times notes somewhat ominously that Andreessen Horowitz, an investor in both companies, “could be called upon to play referee in a spat”); and the instigation of Musk’s move was the rolling-out of the somewhat imitative, Twitter-like feature ‘Substack Notes.’
McKenzie has gone on record as saying that Substack would have ads “over his dead body.” And Substack’s letter on Substack Notes is really a beautiful statement of core web values. “Many of us have grown so tired of hellsites and doomscrolling that we have forgotten that the internet can be good,” the company’s founders write. But these are treacherous waters, with Substack coming into range of larger companies and with the temptation to sell, or sell out, ever increasing. Here’s to hoping that Substack stays true to what the platform represents.
TIMOTHY SNYDER AND THE ROLE OF THE HISTORIAN
In thinking about what a contemporary mode of discourse should look like, how a contemporary intellectual should be, I’m taken by The Guardian’s profile of the Ukraine historian
.The profile itself is a straightforward kind of puff piece. With his 2017 book, On Tyranny, Snyder achieved a mainstream celebrity unusual for a university professor, and most of The Guardian’s piece is an annoyingly earnest attempt to wrap its mind around how this could be so. “Historians aren’t supposed to make predictions” is the sub-header of the piece. The implication is that if a historian is audacious enough to comment on the commentary world, then he somehow stops being a historian, he becomes something like a media star, but then The Guardian is flummoxed again to realize that Snyder does not behave like a media star, that he is “somewhat diffident” and “introverted,” and an underwhelming reportorial visit to Yale to watch him teach a university class leads to the not-all-that-surprising conclusion that Snyder carries himself just like a university professor. Robert Baird, the piece’s author, seems a bit taken aback to realize that “when Snyder arrived in the seminar room, he provoked no murmur or hush among his students.”
The circle is not so difficult to square as The Guardian thinks it is. Snyder is a university professor, extraordinarily knowledgeable about Ukraine, who is also an individual person, able to have his own views, to express them publicly, and to create an interchange between his academic knowledge and his political observations. And in so doing, he really has done something remarkable — bringing his field of study (Ukraine) to the forefront of consciousness of the Western world.
Of course, Putin is more to credit for Ukraine’s current centrality than Snyder, but it is worth pausing on the degree to which Snyder’s apparently idiosyncratic take on history has, within the last few years, become not just mainstream but common sense.
Snyder’s primary contention, Baird writes, is that “Eastern Europe was not an ahistorical no-man’s land trapped between Europe and the Soviet Union, but a place with its own agency and its own history.” His wonderful history Bloodlands is, in its way, a study in simplicity. He takes apparently familiar stories — the rise of Nazism, the rise of Stalinism — but, by moving the lens away from the centers of power to the periphery (to the ever-invaded, ever-neglected Ukraine), the entire history of the 20th century takes on a very different shape. Decisions are understood differently than how they normally would be. The people of Eastern Europe, in Ukraine above all, are treated as being between a rock and a hard place. Apparently anomalous events, like Ukrainian Jews cheering the arrival of the Nazis in 1941, the Ukrainian UPA carrying out its genocidal campaign against Poles in the later part of the war, are viewed within a context of powerless people grasping at the choices they had. “Between 1933 and 1945, Ukraine was the most dangerous place in the world,” Snyder writes.
Snyder’s focus on Ukraine — seen, for most of his academic career as a place of no particular importance — gave him an unexpected insight onto contemporary American politics. Baird chides Snyder for claiming that he “broke the story” of Trump and Putin’s collusion, but he certainly was in the vanguard of it. The point was that Snyder saw a familiar dynamic unfolding in the Ukraine — Yanukovych as a puppet, Russian largesse supporting compliant actors within the Ukrainian political space — and then noticed that the same pattern was repeating itself in the U.S. It had somehow slipped under the radar of American political commentary that Paul Manafort, advisor to Yanukovych, had somehow materialized as Trump’s campaign manager — simply because it somehow didn’t really occur to Americans that events on the other side of the world could influence an American presidential election. The subsequent outrage at the collusion between Trump and Putin always had something naive about it — Americans couldn’t imagine that they might be a client state for someone else; but that wasn’t so shocking to Snyder, who had watched it happen through his study of contemporary Ukrainian politics. As Baird writes of Snyder’s commentary from this period: “The news Snyder brought his audience was almost unremittingly bleak, yet it also offered a strange kind of reassurance. You are not wrong to feel that the situation is grievous, Snyder told them. Take it from an expert in political barbarism: things are exactly as bad as they seem.”
There shouldn’t really be anything so surprising about a historian having insights on contemporary politics — after all, that’s sort of the whole point of the exercise of learning history: it is to draw analogies and, precisely, to make predictions. What seems, though, to have created the most controversy around Snyder is — alongside the slightly overheated tone he sometimes uses — his very clear allegiance to a particular country. “To American leftists, Snyder sounds like a Ukrainian nationalist,” writes Baird, and that very clear affinity does seem to set him apart from the general tenor of academic discourse. It’s understood at the moment that liberal academia defaults to an airy internationalism. Nationalism is bad, goes almost without saying. Problems are meant to be solved through some sort of inter-governmental galactic council, with local biases sifted away and a one-size-fits-all liberalism imposed.
Snyder is having none of that. He has clearly pitched his tent with Ukraine’s nation-building project — and to the extent that Bloodlands includes at-times torturous defenses of the OUN and Stepan Bandera. For him, the core of liberalism is actually a certain kind of democratic nationalism. This was what liberalism meant throughout the 19th century, and it becomes an unresolved chapter of history, a tragedy, that Ukraine missed out on the nationalist wave.
Ukrainians are acutely aware of this deficit. The lack of any sort of sovereignty - as well as the lack of defensible borders — made Ukraine a pawn, and really a killing-field, for the two most murderous dictators in human history. And Snyder has taken up the Ukrainian perspective in treating Ukraine’s history as being essential about ‘colonialism.’ That’s a loaded word in the West — the colonized aren’t supposed to be white; and the Putin apologist John Mearsheimer reacted, for instance, in disbelief when an interviewer suggested that Russia and Ukraine’s dynamics be viewed through the lens of ‘imperialism’ — but I’m convinced that that’s the right way to understand the war. Ukraine’s tilt towards the West in the last decade is, essentially, an exercise in nation-building and in decolonization. That was anathema to Russia, which has never really accepted the 19th century principle of state sovereignty and continues to think along imperialist lines. And, at an intellectual level, the conflict becomes an exercise in shifting one’s thinking from a lazy ‘spheres of influence’ idea to a recognition of national autonomy. Putin assumed that Ukraine was part of his ‘sphere,’ and for a long time the West more or less tacitly accepted that. Ukraine’s fervent defense forces everyone to reconsider what ‘liberalism’ really means to them and to recognize that liberalism is nothing without sovereignty, without, to some extent, nationalism.
As it turns out — and The Guardian article is a useful reminder of this — Snyder has been remarkably right about everything over the past decade. He was absolutely right about Russia’s incursion into Ukraine in 2014, although, as one of his academic friends recalls, he was viewed as an “absolute nut” at the time he made the prediction. He was right to view the Trump campaign through the lens of Putin’s imperialism. He was right to see Putin not as a shrewd pragmatist in the way that Western media reflexively viewed him but as being essentially, in his twisted way, an idealist. “When I read those angry things that Putin published in Russian newspapers about civilization, his anger didn’t seem to be tactical. It seemed to somehow come from someplace deep,” Snyder recalled of reaching a particularly dire view of Putin’s psychology.
And he was right also in becoming as public a figure as he has. The point of an academic isn’t just to know about the past, just as the point of an intellectual isn’t to be right about stuff. What matters is to be engaged — is to come to an informed view and then to take the barricades with it, to shape the discourse.
REANALYZING THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
Foreign Affairs Magazine is really pushing a scoop that they feel they have about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s the 60th anniversary and Putin has released a trove of previously secret state materials giving much of the Soviet side of it. Foreign Affairs is eager to claim that the crisis was marked by blunders on all sides — that “the difference between catastrophe and peace often comes down not to considered strategies but to pure chance” — and that it offers an uncanny parallel to the present day, with both sides drifting dangerously closer to some sort of nuclear standoff.
I am not exactly convinced by either of the conclusions, though, and would tend to think the opposite. First of all, I’m not exactly sure what the Cuban Missile Crisis has to tell us about Putin — except that nukes are very dangerous and to be avoided, which we knew already. And, yes, there were various logistical errors on the Soviet side in carrying out ‘Operation Anadyr,’ but, from the story laid out in Foreign Affairs, the Missile Crisis actually comes across as a lesson in how simple statesmanship can be so long as there is a reasonably cool hand on the tiller.
Khrushchev’s desire to have nuclear missiles in Cuba — usually presented as a reckless gamble — comes to seem, actually, like a fairly straightforward extension of the logic of deterrence. “The United States had nuclear missiles in Turkey and Italy. Why couldn’t the Soviet Union have them in Cuba?” Foreign Affairs writes, paraphrasing Khrushchev’s words from a top-level internal meeting. And that does make a certain kind of sense. The United States had nuclear weapons in Turkey, a neighbor of the Soviet Union, at that time, and those weapons also had to get there somehow or other — there was no real reason, according to the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction, why the Soviet Union couldn’t have its own missiles as close to the U.S. as Cuba.
This reasoning, needless to say, didn’t sit particularly well with the U.S. military brass or with the American public at the time, but it did offer the way out of the conflict. The solution, actually, turned out to be pretty simple, a “Cuba for Turkey exchange,” a mutual stand down — and a much simpler story than how it’s usually seen in America, with Kennedy and Khrushchev facing off “eyeball to eyeball” and Kennedy being the one not to blink.
The standoff, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, wasn’t really between Kennedy and Khrushchev, it was between the civilian heads of state and the military hardliners — with, as far as I can tell, the American generals behaving the worst out of anybody. That’s the real lesson of the Missile Crisis — that what really matters is who’s in the room and who’s making the decisions. The U.S. generals badly wanted to invade Cuba and were looking for an excuse to do so — which Khrushchev nearly provided them with. A weaker leader — Lyndon Johnson, for instance, who was arguing for exactly this — might have deferred to his generals’ advice. But Kennedy was at that time secure enough in his electoral mandate, and with civilian control over military decisions. Same went for Khrushchev on his side.
It’s noteworthy that the Soviets didn’t particularly see the standoff as being that much of a near-apocalyptic moment until the 1980s when, as Foreign Affairs writes, “Inspired largely by the American literature on the episode, Moscow came to see the crisis as an unacceptably dangerous moment.” But, in a way, reading about the event, I’m more inclined to take the older view of it. Yes, the Cuban Missile Crisis was very dangerous — we will never again be completely safe after nuclear weapons have been developed. But the Missile Crisis actually points to the wisdom of the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction. Both Kennedy and Khrushchev got it, and the whole event really can be understood as a case of tactical jockeying over where exactly the nukes would be placed. The danger in it was more on the political side, in a Dr. Strangelove-type scenario, with the American military brass losing all sense of proportionality and insisting on bombing strikes or an invasion.
DEALING WITH THE CREATIVITY GLUT
I’m trying not to make this point too many times, but another excellent post from
compels me to bring it up. Gioia talks about our current crisis in art and makes clear that it’s not at all about the ‘supply side’ — about art that’s being created — as it is about the ‘demand.’As Gioia has previously written, we really are in so many ways in a ‘golden era’ for art. People are making work on a staggering volume. The site Soundcloud recently reported that 100,000 new songs are added to it every single day. There is probably more encouragement for creativity than there ever has been — very little social stigma around expression, a prevailing sense that all subjects are available to creative exploration. And the creativity industry has, to a startling extent, democratized the idea of creativity — getting rid of the older view that a person can only be a successful artist if they were born ‘talented’ or have a ‘calling’ for it and instead advancing a very matter-of-fact perspective, that if people put in the hours, then they are more likely than not to produce something that is interesting and worthwhile.
By any possible standard, these all have to be good developments. My personal belief is that there is no life that is better than a creative, expressive life — and the society I would most want to be in is one in which creativity and expression are manifest on the widest possible scale.
So, the question becomes why — in the midst of the ‘golden age’ — everybody is so miserable, all the artists broke and bottlenecked. The problem, as Gioia writes, is that the market hasn’t adapted to the “over-abundance of offerings.” He writes, thinking specifically of music:
Here’s the sad truth for a musician in the current day. They can’t even begin to compete in their field, because they are almost always lost in the noise before the competition even begins…..This can’t be healthy. You flourish as a creative person when you actively compete at the highest levels of your vocation. If the actual situation is that you’re just lost in a crowd, you’re demoralized from the start. Instead of demonstrating your skills, you’re shouting out for attention—and ineffectively in almost every instance.
That’s a good description both of the world of social media — everybody shouting, desperate to be heard — and just as much of the world of legacy publishing, in which only an infinitesimal fraction of submitted work will ever see the light of day. ‘The bottleneck’ has become the condition for just about everybody, and most creative people tend to see the handful of successes as a sort of personal insult — the exceptions that make it harder to perceive just how broken the whole system is.
Gioia is right to turn the perspective from the ‘supply’ to the ‘demand’ side of the equation, although his solution ultimately is a bit unsatisfying. As Gioia rightly notes, “Most programs for the arts are living in fantasy land.” They devote their attention to ‘developing’ or ‘cultivating’ the supply-side — which usually means an endless worrying-over already-completed work. Funding — most egregiously in the case of the MacArthur Grant — tends to go towards further rewarding already-very-well-established artists. Gioia is eliding things slightly in saying that this is ‘fantasy land’ — it all has the very-real-world-benefit of establishing an arts cabal, in which money circulates within a narrow zone between academia and the grant-generating not-for-profits, and with the endless ‘development’ periods serving as a seal of certified approval for work within the cabal — but it is true that the arts institutions aren’t even beginning to contend with the era of ‘over-abundance.’
“[The institutions] need to take a long, hard look at the audience,” Gioia writes. Which is — yes — true, but the institutions aren’t going to do any such thing: that’s inimical to how institutions behave. What audiences need to do is to take a long, hard look at themselves and to understand their patterns of consumption. Virtually anything that is brought to the public — a song written by an ‘artist,’ a book with a single ‘author’ plastered on the cover — is a very different sort of artifact from how it’s presented. It’s really much better thought of as a commodity produced through a torturous industrial process. Sometimes those commodities are of good quality, sometimes they’re not, but they have only a glancing relationship to the authentic production of genuine art.
The solution, in getting to a more harmonious social relationship to the production of art, would seem to be to drop the idea of professionalization altogether. There are cultures around the world — I’ve come across some of them — in which there’s an idea that “everybody is an artist.” Musicians (for instance) play their music in ritualized settings, pass the hat around afterwards, and then return to their regular jobs the next day — and in these kinds of cultures just about everybody is revealed to have a gift for some or another type of creative expression. In the trenches of artistic production, our own culture looks more like this than one would expect — virtually all of the writers I admire aren’t, technically speaking, professional writers: they’ve had some other job and did their writing in the gaps in their work.
But I’m not really ready to give up on the idea of professionalization in art altogether — people should be able to make a living doing what they love and are best at. I have no idea, really, what the economic formula looks like for that better arts market — at some level, probably, it is just passing the hat around and enough audience members being willing to drop something in it. But where I’m convinced that starts is with audiences and with audiences getting savvier about what the market actually looks like. Audiences have been trained, over the last 150 years or so (the period of time that Martin Gurri calls ‘the fourth way’) to regard themselves as passive consumers, to believe that the “art world” has somehow sorted out quality offerings within itself and with audiences viewing their job as being entertained (as at most offering an up/down opinion on whether they ‘like’ something or not). That’s a lousy way to take in art, and the two-way street of the ‘fifth wave’ offers many greater opportunities for audiences to influence and interact with artistic producers. It also brings with it a certain responsibility — for audiences to understand that a work of art is a deeply individual offering, not a commodity, and deserves to be treated on its own terms whether it has an industrial seal of approval or not.
To put it another way, we are used to thinking that a work of great art passes through the ‘center’ of the culture, that culture itself is a very effective sorting mechanism for figuring out what modes of expression represent it. In an era of over-abundance and saturation, that view needs to be re-thought. Works of quality don’t necessarily pass through the culture at all — or get anywhere close to its center. It’s time to embrace a more archipelagoed mode of thinking, in which people work to figure out what they like and then find clusters of the like-minded. Ideas like a ‘hit,’ a ‘work that defines an era,’ start to disappear. What matters is just people doing work that is meaningful to them — and then being lucky enough to find the right audience for it.
Substacks with custom domains are not yet caught by any Twitter censorship.
So, if you're willing to part with $50 and make peace with having "www." before your domain, I wrote a guide with the ups and downs:
https://www.magyar.blog/p/magyarblog-custom-domains-on-substack
It's my no1 source of search traffic, as, one upside is, the ability to use Search Console and get SEO, which normal, subdomain substacks don't have.
For what it's worth, Substack doesn't pay those big bonuses to writers any longer. As we have discussed, it's not a level playing field -- those with big followings get most of the promotion attention -- but I do get a steady stream of readers through the Substack network, which suggests that they are more successful at promoting the average person than most social media sites are. I've faithfully plugged The Recovering Academic and my Chronicle stories on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and from what I can tell, hashtagging makes no difference whatsoever in the visibility of a post. If you are starting with few followers, you are basically invisible unless you manage to catch the eye of someone with a bigger platform. Substack does seem more egalitarian in that way, even if the deck is stacked in other ways.
Of course, Substack doesn't owe me anything -- I'm grateful for the platform, for its thoughtful leadership team, and for the ways it continues to evolve.