Why Substack?

Media started democratising with Gutenberg, but the curve of democratisation has accelerated exponentially in the last twenty years. It took a lot of work for Thomas Paine to publish Common Sense. It takes almost no work for idiots to post stupid shit on Twitter.

As the publishing bar has dropped to zero three things have happened:

• More stupid people post more stupid shit;

• More smart people post more dangerous shit;

• More smart people post poorly polished shit.

All of this presents a problem — and an opportunity — for publishers like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, who have responded with ranked feeds. Ranked feeds are a brilliant solution to the problem. They solve the discovery problem for you by showing you the content you want to see. And they solve the engagement problem for the publisher by showing you the content you want to see. Boom. Everyone wins.

Ranked feeds, of course, have a pretty big negative externality. They create filter bubbles which reinforces the stupid shit we already believe and cause our own personal Overton windows to shift rapidly in whatever direction we were predisposed to. The liberal get more liberal, the conservative get more conservative. The nut jobs get more nutty.

It wasn’t always thus. Our media — and national discourse — used to be dominated by a very small elite. Walter Cronkite ran the show. When Cronkite turned against the war in Vietnam, that was it. As LBJ said: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”

Getting out of Vietnam was obviously a good thing, but the domination of media by a small elite wasn’t obviously a good thing. Debate was confined to a narrow ideological range, and good ideas were stifled. Innovation happened in big containers like NASA and rarely in small, hyper-empowered groups of like-minded people. Revolution had to happen in the streets, not by pen.

Back to Substack.

The golden age of internet media started around 2001 with the launch of MovableType. Wordpress followed in 2003. No one serious used Blogger. Anyone could publish, but there was a barrier to entry. You had to have a web host. I had my own server collocated somewhere and built my own system with Gentoo. Obviously most people didn’t do this, but setting up MovableType still took work.

You had to have something to say and a burning need to say it. And the timing was good. MovableType debuted on September 3, 2001. Just before 9/11. And so everyone had something to write about. About the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, George W. Bush, José Padilla. A generation of pundits were born. Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan, and so many more.

It took work to discover blogs. They would link to each other. You’d find people who roughly matched your ideology, but you didn’t agree about everything. You would read Andrew Sullivan every day or every few days and sometimes you’d read things you disagreed with. He’d link to Glenn Reynolds and you’d learn about a different perspective.

Now, of course, our feeds are just full of shit that we already agree with. And I think we’re getting bored of that. Facebook is slowly dying and the things replacing it don’t fill the gaps. They don’t support text. Instagram and TikTok are MTV. They aren’t the nightly news or the New York Times. They can never support Common Sense.

But Substack can. Anyone can have a Substack — hi! — but it takes work. You need to build an audience. The hard way. And your audience gets everything. The things they agree with and the things they don’t. It’s pushed to them. It’s like everyone subscribes to the RSS. And the posts can be forwarded by email. They can go viral. Sort of.

All the ingredients are there to return to the golden age as the great ranked feeds continue their slow and belabored deaths. A group of semi-elite intellectuals can post and build audiences again without having to resort to clickbait. The spreading of shit can focus on music videos and people throwing up airquotes as they answer questions no one ever asked them. And I can shake my fist at the sky like an angry old man remembering the “good old days” twenty years ago when I was young and naive and optimistic.

And, who knows, maybe this is the first step in the better future we all want.