My recent post on ‘branding’ seems to have struck a chord, but I was also a bit of a jerk in it. I was more ad hominem than I really meant to be. For one thing, I didn’t expect the post to be circulated as widely as it was (my previous post, on Vichy France, did not have quite the same pick-up!), but, more importantly, the idea with a post like that one is a sort of Oasis v. Blur friendly rivalry, where different people have their arguments about what writing is, or what Substack is, with the premise that that added intensity ultimately makes writing more interesting and is good for everyone. As a few people pointed out in the comments, there is something of a false binary here — making money through writing v. keeping writing weird — and the ideal, of course, is some harmony between the two, with
for the purposes of this conversation making the case for seeing-things-through-an-audience’s perspective while I’m making the contrarian point.I don’t want to spend too much time writing about Substack (that’s its own little trap), but since we’re on this topic I did want to spell out a bit more what I’ve really been hoping for from this platform and from writing in general —and, in deference to Sarah and her smart, not-wrong-at-all writing advice, I’ll try to keep this trim.
I started writing on Substack at some point last year out of a monumental frustration with the paths offered to writers by the conventional publishing world. I had a feeling that shifts in technologies — i.e. the internet and especially the whole peer-to-peer premise of the Web 2.0 — created the possibility for a real revolution in writing and in how we think about writing. To a great extent that revolution was happening under our noses — with Substack being a great driver of it — but we still had our old superstitions about what writing was and we (writers and readers just as much as publishers) hadn’t quite adjusted to some of the possibilities that were emergent in the new form.
Writing, more than anything else, more than telling stories, more than putting words on a page, is a way of shaping and modeling the experience of being alone. Since we spend probably most of our lives alone, this is a very handy thing, and, even in a digital era, with all the attendant distractions, etc, I’m genuinely surprised that more people don’t write as a way of filling up the vacant hours — that, on the train for instance, there aren’t nearly as many people writing in notebooks as there are playing Candy Crush. For me, I don’t think I ever exactly feel alone when I’m writing; and then there’ll be a point in the day when my brain shuts off, and writing is no longer available, and alone-ness of a very different kind kicks in. For a long time, there has been a schism in how people thought about writing — there was writing-for-public-consumption, which was meant to be crafted, professionalized, and which at the end of the day was always fighting for column inches; and then there was writing-as-doodling, diary writing, notebook-writing, writing to fill up the time. The advent of the internet at some fundamental level means the end of column inches; the creation of a limitless blank page in public view. That’s a more profound change than I think we’ve realized; it creates the opportunity for people to express their thoughts as opposed to a ‘finished product’; for people to interpenetrate one another’s inner lives; for people to shape their aloneness very differently.
Writing is a method for learning to be an adult. I’ve felt for a long time that there’s something very deficient in the way we think about adulthood in our culture — it seems basically to be about fitting in to some sort of hierarchical power structure and winning social affirmation by doing so. Maybe it’s the perpetual adolescent in me, but I always fundamentally found that lame. Conversely, the adulthood that seemed to be modeled for me by the writers I admired was an ethic of radical self-responsibility, of taking complete ownership over everything that one expresses. That heightened autonomy was almost impossible in the ‘real world,’ was just barely achievable in the world of writerly self-creation and almost not at all in the world of present-day newspaper offices or publishing houses where, ultimately, a person is almost always writing on behalf of someone else and circumscribed by their institution. With a platform like Substack, it becomes possible to really say exactly what you mean to say, with no oversight, no institutional approval, etc. I find that to be the height of maturity, and to be really fucking cool — and so I’m always surprised by the slightly pitying look I get from people when I say that I’m writing on Substack as opposed to the look I get when I say that I have an article coming out in some magazine (even if the person I’m talking to has never heard of the magazine).
Writing is a means for being part of the ‘public.’ I’m getting tired myself of how many times I’ve referenced his work but this man….
….figured out (as far as I can tell) the basic dynamics of our era, which really is an era of radical social transformation. It’s all about modes of disseminating information. For a long time, really since the printing press, we have been in a system of I-talk-you-listen, of a consolidated hub of speech (the publishing house, the radio station, the TV station) and everybody else, for the period of the transmission, reduced to “an inert mass.” The internet creates a chink in that system. Suddenly, two-way communication becomes possible. In order to speak, it no longer becomes necessary to first ‘earn a platform.’ As the man pictured above writes, “Each side in the struggle has a standard-bearer: authority for the old scheme, the public for the new dispensation struggling to became manifest.” How this conflict plays out is uncertain — “we may be stuck for decades in this ungainly posture,” the quote continues — but, for me, it’s important to be on the side of the public. Substack is among the very first vehicles in my lifetime to create the opportunity for genuinely public exchange, with an absolute minimum of ‘moderation tools.’ That’s a precious thing and deserves to be celebrated and protected.
Writing is an invitation into one’s inner world. Elon Musk put it accurately when he said that Twitter was the new ‘town square’ — and that goes a long way to explaining why Twitter has always been so sucky. Nobody can really say anything to each other in the town square! It’s all rumors, half-baked arguments, and (when it’s most fun) a genuine mob. But writing is basically about solitude and a conversation between two solitudes — about extending an invitation into one’s metaphorical home and having a very different sort of exchange there. Substack is an imperfect compromise, since it involves the (deeply uncomfortable) invasion of strangers’ inboxes, but it represents a very different spirit from the clamoring-for-public-attention that is social media. I don’t know where it all leads, but, ideally, it’s a very different kind of public space in which people are able to do exactly the kind of work they want to do, are able to do so in complete freedom but with an audience and community, and are able to continue with it steadily throughout their lives.
Writing is a religious activity. This is almost embarrassing to say out loud, but it’s the truth of it. As you may have noticed, there is a certain vacuum of religious sentiment in modern life. I don’t mean the absence of gods or archangels — it’s fine to be missing all that — but an absence of people having a clear sense of purpose, a sense of fitting into a larger role. Maybe that’s for the best — people do have to figure these things out on their own — but the prevailing wisdom that people are basically economic producers or consumers is clearly inadequate. I’m not exactly thrilled that so many of my pieces on this Substack have turned into sermons, but there is a reason for it. Writing is a means for figuring out who you are and tracing the contours of your soul. It’s very easy to forget that in an environment that emphasizes ‘craft,’ ‘product,’ and, above all, ‘marketability,’ but it is the point of the whole exercise. A platform as free and unencumbered as Substack (in its current iteration) gives the chance to explore that.
Beautifully put. Especially the last point. There is a spirituality to the writing I enjoy on substack, especially Castalia. As I mentioned once, this is a sanctuary.
Can I ask you to expand on this statement: “Substack is among the very first vehicles in my lifetime to create the opportunity for genuinely public exchange, with an absolute minimum of ‘moderation tools.’”?
Those exact same features are present on any self-hosted blog. I think that thing that makes Substack different is the network of subscribers, authors, and readers who stumble across posts. I believe it has the potential to be even more because of various features that aren’t as well-used as they could be. Things like cross-posting, writing replies to posts made on other newsletters, and even just a healthy comments section. All of those things together could really create a vibrant ecosystem that has kind of died off in the blogosphere.
Glad you enjoyed the logo.