Theses on Substack (and Recommendations)
Curator
1.Substack is the fulfillment of a possible direction of the internet that seemed to emerge around 2000-2005 and then withered away. That direction was blogs, live journals, really extraordinarily intricate sites that were the extension of individuals’ passion projects. This was the period when nobody could figure out how to make any money on the web, so a very utopian, gift-economy vision of the web came into view - an internet site as a sort of personal museum for the entire population.
2.It’s not surprising that that vision didn’t quite take hold. The feeling was that the web was too anarchic - there were no thoroughfares connecting sites to one another. You either knew what to look for or you didn’t and even the search engines weren’t particularly effective at building community or allowing people with similar affinities to find one another.
3.Hence the rise of the platforms. The great virtue of social media was the construction of virtual communities - Facebook a facsimile of one’s own network of social relations; Twitter a society-wide message board - which gave web users the ability to truly find one another and to do so in public forums.
4.Unfortunately, the social media platforms were all terrible. It’s become obvious to everybody that the last decade is going to be remembered as a really dark period in the history of human interaction - and for many reasons. The platforms developed too much power too fast. The platforms were monopolistic and fundamentally hierarchical - and tended to be powered by ridiculously immature executives. They lived off ads, clicks, algorithms, practiced active censorship, exacerbated polarization, and created such constrained, combative modes of discourse that nobody was ever able to say anything except by shouting.
5.Substack, and a parallel site like Vimeo, offers the ability to fulfill a core vision of the web - to have genuinely user-generated content, democratic expression, ‘personal museums,’ and to make use of the tech contributions of the social media era: instead of a disparate archipelago of blogs, to have an ‘online city’ in which people are capable of finding and supporting one another.
6.As a type of community, Substack is more of a slum city or shantytown than what most consumers of journalism and of writing are used to. I say ‘slum city’ not at all in a pejorative way. Having spent much of the last few months wandering around and getting a sense for what’s on Substack, the feeling is of being in a sort of souk in which it’s almost impossible to get oriented in any way but in which one can also discover all sorts of interesting treasures.
7.One of my first introductions to Substack was Bari Weiss lamenting the site’s ramshackle quality - its difficulty in establishing a clearly-organized, readily-navigable capability that could draw in ‘average readers.’ And that is a real consideration for people like Weiss, Matt Taibbi, Yascha Mounk, etc, who are more or less at war with journalism-as-it’s-currently-practiced and are looking to turn Substack into something like the Rebel Alliance, scrappy, idiosyncratic, but also as organized, in its own way, as the Evil Empire. “I am extremely interested in what I’ve been referring to as how do I make a common address for that sensibility, that independent-minded spirit that is able to separate identity from ideas,” Weiss said. And I’m very sympathetic to Weiss’ position, but at the same time I wouldn’t want Substack to become too cogent. If you believe in democracy - or, to be more precise, in democratic expression - then you have to believe in the core Substack model: the idea that everybody has their page and platform, that everybody has at some level equal access to being heard but that there is an intricate meritocracy within the the site (recommendations, etc) for how various Substacks can float to prominence.
8.What Substack offers, at core, are the following precepts:
a) against gatekeeping
b) against advertising
c) against conformity of style
Each one of these tenets makes it inimical to the mission of traditional journalism, which is all about a hierarchy of content (even the basic premise of the front page is about telling you what matters), an ad-based revenue model, and ease of perusal.
9.The great advantage of traditional journalism is that it rewards passive consumption. It is possible to be a knowledgable, well-read person in very little time just by scanning through a well-made newspaper. However, traditional journalism is also a deeply corrupt system. The financial model of legacy ownership plus ad revenue makes all journalism fundamentally slanted in one direction or another. The pretense of editorial objectivity - which so many newsrooms really do hold dear - is readily hackable, as the whole career of FOX News (“Fair and Balanced”) demonstrates. And, ultimately, journalism is no fun for writers - I think people who aren’t writers, who consume newspapers, have little sense of how constricting and actually soul-crushing journalistic writing (‘AP style’) is for people who love to write.
11.It’s not as if Substack by itself can replace traditional journalism, but at this point there actually is something of a rivalry. Traditional journalism is like a gated community. Substack is like the slum city that the gated community is trying to keep out. Another analogy is that Substack is like the union-driven Players’ League that, in baseball, briefly attempted to challenge the ascendancy of the owner-dominated Major Leagues.
12.These sorts of populist-driven initiatives have a tendency to fail - they run against the spirit of capitalism or, more precisely, against the spirit of passive consumerism. Everything hinges on the ability to generate revenue - in the case of Substack, enough Substacks have to go paid for Substack to get its cut, pay back its VC money, and keep the ship afloat. Which means that everything hinges, really, on active consumerism - that enough readers are willing to explore the slum city and, ultimately, to upgrade their subscriptions.
13.Of course it’s not exactly as if Substack is perfectly populist. The financial model relies on paying top-dollar to a few ‘ringers’ - high-end, well-known writers who will bring enough consumers into Substack that they will pay as well for subscriptions by unknown writers whom Substack isn’t paying. Everything hinges, as well, on the quality of the unknown writers who have to be able to earn subscriptions and, ultimately, to get paid for their work. To use another baseball analogy, it’s a bit like The Bad News Bears - Tatum O’Neal and Kelly Leak as the ringers bringing the team so far; but then the rest of the Bears have to pull their weight as well.
14.In terms of getting oriented in Substack, most of the writers I’m following are (still) the ringers. Of course I don’t exactly know who is getting paid or how much but I have guesses. I’m going to try to write somewhat regularly to spotlight and shout out to various Substacks, and the really critical point is to bridge that gap - to acknowledge the ‘ringers,’ the marquee Substacks that are doing good work, while finding the relative unknowns who deserve recognition.
15.A great deal of the impetus for and urgency of Substack is the turn towards the center-right. This distinguishes Substack from writing sites like Medium. It’s not necessarily vital to the Substack mission but it’s helped to generate energy in the early period (and to make Substack, I’d submit, so much obviously better than Medium). The reason for the center-right direction is mostly a historical accident - the social media platforms panicking in the wake of Trump’s election and of the pandemic, giving in to a censorship regime and tossing out for ‘disinformation’ a wide range of intellectuals who were maybe a touch conservative but actually perfectly mainstream. Substack has turned out to be the natural home for that contingent, and - to use one more baseball analogy - there’s a bit of a feeling of the Texas Rangers in the era of John Rocker, Carl Everett, Chan Ho Park; the premise that the site offers sanctuary to talented individuals who couldn’t play nice in their old homes but are perfectly capable of putting in good work. (This was my first bemused impression of Substack - of coming across all these canceled figures,
(!) Robert Malone (!), Steve Kirsch (!) who had disappeared off the radar of ‘mainstream’ publications but could be found writing smart, engaging work on Substack.)
16.In terms of recommendations, the place to start is, predictably enough, with the marquee Substacks, with Bari Weiss'
with Matt Taibbi's journalism empire - - with Yascha Mounk’s with Charlie Sykes’ . Each of these is really a publication housed on the Substack platform - edited by a world-class journalist with a right-of-center perspective - and represents a concerted challenge to the mainstream media.17.Next, in recommendations, are the marquee journalists who offer the same sort of perspective but more as lone wolves:
and the animal that is . Each of these are respected writers/professionals with perches outside of Substack. Greenwald is continuing on his lonely crusade for journalistic integrity although now outside of The Intercept. Shellenberger has been a ridiculously smart critic of the piety and hypocrisy of the environmental movement; and has recently added to his portfolio a critique of social justice-inflected civic policy. Loury is like the patron saint of heterodoxy and has an extraordinary ability to question everything. Hanania is so heterodox as to chafe against the label ‘heterodox’ and seems always to be genuinely thinking with every post. deBoer seems to have the label ‘leftist’ permanently attached to him, even though he spends most of his time being annoyed by the same liberal publications that enervate all the other Substackers. Singal is not for everyone - an intemperate critic of the mainstream media. Henley hosts a series of thoughtful podcasts on political and cultural topics. Every so often, this crowd does seem to form a circular firing squad and take on each other - which, when it happens, is great fun.18.What’s been somewhat lacking, from my exposure to Substack, is really good, fresh fiction or creative writing. Quality fiction writers just seem to be reluctant to give up on traditional publishing and to post their work for free - which is, I guess, understandable. The fiction focus on Substack is more essays about writing. Standouts have been the bravura critic
the great Mary Gaitskill - (although Gaitskill keeps stopping and restarting her Substack), and who doesn’t write that often but is really, really funny. I happen to not really like George Saunders’ writing, but he is a team player and if not, you know, actual content he does contribute pithy and inspirational sayings. Same goes for Roxane Gay, who’s been generously using her brand to feature various ‘emerging writers’ - although none of them, I have to admit, are to my taste. So far, the star in this category has been who has genuinely gotten into the Substack spirit - regularly writing original poems and very sharp, warm, original essays.18.Next in recommendations are my friends. These are people I’ve communicated with and can’t be really objective about - but are doing wonderful work across a range of subject matter.
(who also works with Glenn Loury) writes lyrically and beautifully on psychedelics and on Russian dissent. Mary Tabor has a very warm, inspiring community for encouraging creativity. has a smart site for literary criticism. Similar praise goes for the formidably intelligent GD Dess - . has a soulful, intelligent account of his transition from academia into the great wide open of Substack and the freelance market. Jackie Dana - with - has been working assiduously to create a fiction community on Substack. writes skillfully on a range of subject matter, but, on Substack, has been focusing in particular on personal writing. Samuél Lopez-Barrantes - - elegantly combines philosophical and personal writing.19.Next are a group of intellectuals where I’m not exactly sure if they’re ‘ringers’ or ‘Bears’ but write with tremendous energy and have accrued an impressive following. There are probably a lot more people in this category, but the ones I’ve come across are
who writes thoughtful cultural criticism; who is a firing-on-all-cylinders intellectual; who is impressively unfiltered on high-brow subject matter; who has a social psych background and is becoming a winning voice for my (millennial) generation; .20.Finally there are people I’ve stumbled across with a range of followings who are interesting and intelligent.
writes astutely about her life in Meta and Feta. has a wonderful piece about realizing, as an adult, that she has ADD. unfailingly thinks on the big scale philosophically. Adam Mastroianni has a nice sociological perspective in .21.Last thought is what I’d like to see more of. Or, I guess, the place to start is what I want to see less of - which is a)Fewer news round-ups. I know that I have a version of this with Commentator, but, in my Substack e-mail, I now regularly receive seven or eight perfectly intelligent, well-written, but largely interchangeable roundups of the news of the week. b)Fewer pieces encouraging creativity or discussing the challenges of the writing life. Better to just write! And share writing! As opposed to sharing how difficult the writing process is. This was the tendency, incidentally, that buried Medium as a place to find interesting ideas. c)Fewer look-around-the-room pieces. There’s a tendency in the era of the personal essay to think that any essay on lived experience is brave or revealing - but, to meet that standard, a piece actually has to say something difficult and to reveal something. (Katie Harrington’s work is a good example of this done well.) There’s almost nothing worse than writing that moves into personal territory - and then shies away from being revealing. (Or if there is anything worse it would be the domain of writing that does say something revealing but ends up really hurting anybody connected to the writer.) My sense is that for Substack to become widely excellent, a lot of the Bears will have to figure out a better way of doing personal writing - finding a formula where it’s possible to say difficult and true things about one’s own life but without establishing an expectation that, in every piece, one will reveal all one’s deepest, darkest secrets.
I would say not nearly enough baseball references.
Thank you for the kind words and for including me. I'm very committed to my Substack and to a lot of others (and I subscribe to more than 30 of them). I'm still trying to figure out more of the ways in which a book-centric writer like me can write and grow for this medium. Thanks again!