Dear Friends,
Happy New Year! At the partner site
, profiles the street painter Michael Kirby and writes on (non) fatherhood.Best,
Sam
NEW YEAR’S WISHES FOR SUBSTACK
1. That it stay in business and turn a profit.
2. That its community focuses — far more than anything else — on great writing. There’s been a bit of a temptation, which I especially noticed in 2023, to take shortcuts, to write for one another, and, above all, to offer services and advice to other writers. That’s a more than understandable impulse, but, in the end, it’s a bit short-sighted: it’s led to the somewhat disconcerting charge that Substack is picking up Multi-Level Marketing vibes and, more importantly, it makes Substack into an insular world. What Substack needs most is to be cool. That coolness was conferred early on by the Substack Pro program, which vaulted Substack beyond the Mediums and WordPresses. And there really was this wonderful, bazaar, bargain-hunter feel that I had early on in joining the site, of wandering down one row of dusty stalls after another and stumbling into all these famous people (Patti Smith! Garrison Keillor!) hawking their wares just like everybody else. But the truth is that, with few exceptions —
, , etc — the famouses have been phoning it in. The cool has to come from everybody else — from the sense that there is a writing renaissance happening here and producing things that are not available from the traditional publishing world. That happens in the political sphere — with the sort of internal exiles (Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Alex Berenson, etc) who are pretty much cut off from the mainstream journalism world but who have interesting critiques and are unsparing in making them. It happens in the sphere of memoirs and sort of lyrical essays — and I’ve found so many people in my, I guess, corner of Substack who write really beautifully with a mix of intelligence and personal expressiveness. I would like to see more great fiction. And what I would like to see more of is a sense that a site like Substack offers something new in the world — which is writer-driven, as opposed to publisher-driven, writing. That represents a great unshackling — the ability to find audiences without running the gatekeeper gauntlet, without submitting to the ‘house style’ of one publication or another — and it should lead, even more than it has, to a proliferation of styles and highly individualistic modes of expression.3. That the world at large undoes its trick of the mind in believing that publishing conveys worth. This is, I suspect, more of a New Year’s Resolution for 2025 (or 2028) than this year, but it would be nice for more people to catch on to the quiet revolution that really is happening. I talk about
all the time on this Substack, so I guess I might as well talk about him once more. Gurri is, above all, the theoretician for this new revolution, contending that the era of the ‘Fourth Wave,’ of ‘I-talk-you-listen’ (the era that originated with the printing press and runs through the radio and television station), effectively ends with the proliferation possibilities and the two-way traffic of the internet. The ‘Fifth Wave’ means that lots of people are expressing themselves — and, it turns out, lots of them have interesting things to say. The traditional publishing outlets — both journalistic and literary — are more and more in the position of the Great And Powerful Oz, putting an imprimatur of ‘authority’ on their work, which is pretty rarely based on the quality of what’s on offer. I am struck, over and over again, at how excited people I know are when they hear that I’ve published something in some journal (even if it’s one they’ve never heard of) — which typically means that it disappears off into the ether, and I don’t hear anything from it ever again — as opposed to ‘just posting it on my Substack,’ which, actually, always seems to mean some engaged, interesting conversation as well as the absence of any editorial oversight or distortion to the piece itself. Simply put, most readers don’t understand what a racket publishing is — they don’t understand the power of the publisher to set the tone for everything that appears under the publication’s imprint and they don’t understand how constraining oversight is for writers who want to be free and exploratory — and it seems like it will take some time, even with the ‘Fifth Wave’ very much with us, for readers to catch on.4. That the money is there. I don’t think it’s exactly a design flaw or something — more something that’s just happened — that Substack is a platform for writers more than it is for readers. It’s somehow very hard to pay for Substacks — at least I find that to be the case — because there are so many other worthy Substacks just a click away and similarly deserving of support. I suspect that there are some intractable problems here — people just don’t like to pay for things on the web; and people don’t like to pay for writing (unless they get tricked by a clever publicity scheme into thinking that they need the status symbol of some hip book or other) — and the way through is the coolness factor: to have a devoted cadre of readers who catch on that Substack really is a jewel and that there is writing there that is unattainable elsewhere.
5. That the free speech standard holds. You are sick of the free-speech-on-Substack debate. I am sick of the free-speech-on-Substack debate. But it is important — and I have been participating in it more than I would really like to — because, without the free speech standard, Substack gets into a moderation regime where every controversial point of view becomes subject to debate about whether it should be on Substack or not. You may have noticed what a worse platform Substack became in the wake of The Atlantic article. Once a centralized entity is brought into the conversation — i.e. the Substack leadership — the conversation loses all of its flow. It’s exactly like kids who are playing around, exploring in their various different directions, and then suddenly discover the tattle-tale game — that they can report on each other and complain about each other to their parents. That whole thing is death to a platform. Now that Substack has unflinchingly stuck to the free speech standard, the hope is that the appeal for moderation quietly fades away, that everybody gets back to writing.
6. That there is less writing on here about Substack. There is an impulse — which I have as well — to write a great deal about the platform we are on. It’s exactly the sort of thing that makes people at a party want to talk about the room and about their hosts. What we all seem to be slow to realize is that Substack really wants to be as hands-off as possible. It’s a little tricky because the founders also want to play with their toys — they like to write and to single out the writers they personally enjoy — but they seem to understand, in a way that the Twitter and Facebook founders didn’t, that manipulation or moderation distorts a platform at a sort of spiritual level. Writers here are not actually writing on Substack. They are writing their own Substacks — in what
"the world at large undoes its trick of the mind in believing that publishing conveys worth." Call me a pessimist, but I think it'll take a miracle for people to change their perspective on that. Still, I hope you're right. On the whole, I think Substack is changing things. But it's a lot more subtle than when, for instance, YouTube was invented.
Hear hear! Let's hope for all of these. And even if someone falls on the other side of the the free speech debate, at least the other 5 are all unambiguously good for all writers.
Thanks also for the shoutout about the federated structure of this place. I wish more people take it seriously. Instead of complaining about management, each writer should channel their inner "prepper" have have a gameplan for when things go awry here. Have your digital go-bag ready. Substack's great promise is that we own our work — we should be ready to take them up on the offer! After one gets comfortable with our power to leave, hopefully there will be less pressure to worry about WTF Substack HQ is or isn't doing. Fortunately, I feel that vibes are settling down, the novelty of the argument is long gone and those who are staying have more or less made their peace with their continued transaction with this company.
Here's to a year of great writing (and much less focus on a random internet startup with an orange bookmark logo)!