Dear Friends,
I’m sharing a sort of intramural post on the ‘meaning’ of Substack. At the partner site,
, writes on Elie Wiesel and on the meaning of literature.Best,
Sam
WHAT IS SUBSTACK FOR?": A MULTIPLE CHOICE
On Notes (which, by the way, is getting very good), the existential question keeps coming up: What is Substack? (Or what is Substack for?)
These are the possibilities as I see them:
A) Substack is a way to monetize writing. I’ve gotten into a couple of minor fights with
B) That counter-argument, among the Notes faithful, is that the push to monetize, and to make easily-digestible content, weakens what is really special about Substack — the sense of community, the idea that Substack is a nice place to be weird and different and for a thousand flowers to bloom. In that view, the money is slightly beside the point. Substack, simply, is a great place to be a writer and to find other writers. Growth is, as puts it, pretty much all just about putting out good content, being friendly within the community, and maybe doing the occasional spot of self-promotion. The vibe of this point of view is something of the ‘90s coffee house. There’s open mic night, everybody gets applauded and appreciated no matter what they do, and there’s opportunity to savor the gems. It’s hard to argue with any of that, except that money should show up sooner or later, and many of the people writing on Substack are professional (and/or are broke and need a paycheck) and coffeehouse goodwill only takes you so far. The particular concern with this way of thinking is that, with the tendency of the internet in its current incarnation to silo into separate platforms, Substack becomes another silo, and writers do their work here without wider reach.
C) The way to counteract that, another line of thinking goes, is to treat Substack as a base. It’s all good and well to work to build up subscribers and then to flip those subscribers paid, but the reality is that the vast majority of people with large Substack subscriberships already had a significant audience before coming to Substack, and it’s not sustainable to think that all of one’s growth can come within the platform. The model — and this applies most to the hustling freelancer — is to have different modes of distribution: to treat Substack as a ‘home game’ with a friendly crowd, with a built-in ability to experiment and to really write in one’s own voice; and then to also play ‘away games’ with editors and ‘house styles’ at different publications, but also paychecks. That sort of practical (although logorrheic) approach is far from a betrayal of the Substack model. It helps to legitimize Substack in the wider publishing world and creates a pleasantly dual sensibility: on the one hand, there’s old-style publishing with all-powerful editors, high barriers for entry, etc, and, on the other hand, there’s Substack, exemplar of the Web 2.0, and the two of them can exist harmoniously side by side.
D) I think, though, that Substack is more than that and Substack represents, really, a Revolution. Fundamentally, there’s a huge change happening in the world, which is what Martin Gurri calls the “Fifth Wave.” Gurri’s idea is that, for about six hundred years, since the invention of the printing press, we have been in a system where power in discourse belongs to those who are able to make copies and then distribute those copies. This results in the I-talk-you-listen model of discourse, and our artistic life involves a Hunger Games-ish dive to the mosh pit of whomever controls any of those means of amplification, with a successful artistic career being an ever-greater consolidation of one’s brand across all possible “airwaves” or modes of distribution. This whole mindset is so baked into us that it’s hard to remember how cruel and narcissistic it is as well as how contingent on currently-existing distributive technologies. Real artists seem always to exist in another mode, which is to have a “studio” — to be constantly making without necessarily even paying all that much attention to whether or not their work was distributed. (Brancusi would often casually toss away a sculpture that he had spent the day making. Klee apparently once made a thousand pictures in a year — far more than any art dealer, however industrious, could ever hope to sell.) That mindset was always seen to be peculiar, unworldly, but maybe it just was out of keeping with existing modes of distribution. With the internet — where there is no limit to the number of “copies” that can be made of a work, where two-way communication is possible, and the sense of artificial scarcity promoted by the communicative industries outmoded — it becomes possible for a person to be, as Deleuze put it, “a continuous producer of energy” and to do so not in isolation but as part of a robust, mutually-sustaining community. That’s putting recent developments — the blogosphere, the Web 2.0, Substack — rather grandly, but the point is that there is an opportunity to have a field for creative discourse that is in line with how artists (and intellectuals, etc) have always liked to operate but that has almost never exactly been available given the dominance of communicative industries. It’s a fairly narrow window and it’s very easy to fall back on old habits — the social media platforms circa 2015 all collectively seemed to forget that they were there just to provide web tools for their community and decided to move back into the role of an (extremely heavy-handed) publisher. What distinguishes Substack, far more than its business model, is what I take to be the very genuine idealism of its founders: no ads, no censorship, no arbitrary character limits, just a community by writers for readers. This creates possibilities for a very free exchange that is remiscent of writing in periods when the communicative industries were least dominant (the feuilleton culture of the Enlightenment era; the small press culture of modernism) and when literary styles and modes of thought were least restrained. That revolution, which I really believe in, goes well beyond Substack, although Substack is a very important, very interesting piece of the puzzle. In Notes, amidst all the positivity, all the cheerful community-building, there are hints of concern: the are-we-a-MML question, the are-we-just-a-‘90s-coffee-shop question, and I get all that and wrestle with it (and wrestle, too, with the fact that Substack is a start-up and that the monetization question can never be ignored), but what I would like to see more of is the Substack hardcore position, that Substack represents something really special and really revolutionary (the same impulses as the 2000s blogosphere but in a more consolidated form), which is the ability for writers to truly be themselves in their writing, to write continuously without depending on editors or publishers, and to do so always as part of a flourishing, self-sustaining community.
Long live the Revolution!
Dear Sam, Thanks for this very thoughtful essay. I too have pondered the questions of Substack. I like to think, or dream, that it could foster a new publishing industry and be the one place where writers or creators -- photographers, painters, musicians -- could actually make a good living by attracting 1000+ supporters paying $5 a month or $60 a year, from a supportive online community. I too have been impressed in recent months by Substack Notes and by the way it helps me grow my Substack by several new subscribers or followers per day. And yet it is still slow-going in terms of the amount of time and work I have put into it -- if one thinks of writing as work -- and the financial return. I -- we -- have not been "discovered" by mass media. Viral posts or multiple hits and exposure in legacy media are still necessary to grow it.