Technology #1: Biting the hand that feeds you
this post includes the word fuck in five places
In February an email from Substack titled “A new economic engine for culture,” arrived in my inbox. I had paused on my publishing for a bit because, well I don’t know why exactly - who knows why one does anything really - but maybe publishing had begun to FEEL good. But was the writing any good? I didn’t really have any idea.
Here’s the first sentence from that email:
“We have always believed that the internet’s powers for good could be realized if they were tied to a business model that produces better incentives than what the dominant online media platforms currently offer.”
Heart begins to sink. As a person who grew up entirely on the internet I will admit that I had much bigger hopes.
One of the key findings, the letter goes on to say, from Substack’s research is that writers wish to be saved from social media. Less than a month later, Substack launched Notes, their version of social media, a twitter-like interface where writers can post quotes from Substack articles with ease and also publish short pithy comments separate from their essays with links back to their profiles. This looks a lot like brand building, which I would argue is what the writers actually wanted to be saved from. That and the impulse to write short sentences that could be printed on a tote bag until the end of time while the book that we’re all working on stays hidden in the bottom drawer. Brand building is the task that writers were really asking to be saved from.
I tried publishing a note this week. “Feeling this:” I wrote, and quoted from Kimberly Harrington’s essay called Sick of The In-Between.
This last week in particular I have felt like FOR FUCKING FUCK’S SAKE YOU FUCKING GODDAMN UNIVERSE COULD YOU PLEASE JUST DO ME ONE SINGLE SOLITARY SOLID. And the universe replied, “do you even know how to use semi-colons?” and I was like, “Not completely.”
Though I really do feel her on the first part it’s the semi-colon joke that got me. A writer who admits to still not really understanding the semi-colon is a writer after my own heart. I pressed send and into the ether went my note, like a shooting star in an infinite galaxy, never to be heard from again. Was this how the dream Substack envisioned would be realized? As other people began to publish their own notes of one kind or another I started to panic. If I ever do finish that book in the bottom drawer, will I be totally fucked if I don’t jump on this train? Is this really the future for writers who want to enter the brave new world? Have I been given the tools that power the people but I just don’t know how to use them efficiently?
Somewhere along the line I’ve became increasingly skeptical of the promise of progress. Another statement that suggests Substack is or will be “a system where this is growth instead of decay, where people have more power than unaligned algorithms or mad kinds, and where the central currency is trust,” sits very much not at all in the center of my body. Trust should not be a currency. These are not the choices. All algorithms are aligned aren’t they? With the mad kings? Don’t all made kings deal in asking for something before they’ve delivered?
This did not stop me from asking for your money.
Substack’s CEO Chris Best really, “stepped in it,” as Roxane Gay said in her own newsletter round up, when he addressed the platform’s “hands-off approach to content moderation” in an extended interview with Nilay Patel at the Verve.
In the first part of the interview Patel grills Best about whether the beef between Twitter and Substack is because Substack was trying to downloading the Twitter database to bootstrap Substack Notes, and even though neither person says straight up what this means, when Best says NO, I feel like, yeah, probably. Is a part of Twitter open source? Is that what Substack exposed and exploited and now is profiting from? I feel like something was off about both Patel saying he didn’t really know what it would mean for Substack to do this and for Best to say that Substack was not. But then again maybe I am case-in-point for their argument that we do not have a misinformation problem as much as a trust problem.
As the interview continues Patel tries to understand the implications of Substack’s non-moderation policy. It does not go well for Best.
Patel: No, I really want you to answer that question. Is that allowed on Substack Notes? “We should not allow brown people in the country.”
Best: I’m not going to get into gotcha content moderation.
This is not a gotcha... I’m a brown person. Do you think people on Substack should say I should get kicked out of the country?
I’m not going to engage in content moderation, “Would you or won’t you this or that?”
That one is black and white, and I just want to be clear: I’ve talked to a lot of social network CEOs, and they would have no hesitation telling me that that was against their moderation rules.
Yeah. We’re not going to get into specific “would you or won’t you” content moderation questions.
One the one hand, I have seen how assigning a person to write the list of terms that will flag a post for content moderation or removal becomes very Foucault. On the other hand, could he not just say:
Fuck, we really don’t know what we’re going to do about this. Up until now we haven’t had this problem because the writers on Substack are a self selecting bunch. Most people who invest in writing for free and then also just for a subscriber base are pretty modest and maybe there’s a link between modesty and just being a good human? I’ll just say we’ve been so lucky in this regard and as we grow these are issues we are going to have to think through more carefully. But also just no.
In Substack’s own article on the topic, they say that by setting an extremely high bar for intervening in the relationships they maintain with their readers, the company will essentially bypass any radical messaging and the forces that be will balance themselves.
Is this Neo-libertarianism? I’m not a political junkie and I’m probably using this term wrong. But I do know that from the start I’ve been curious about Marc Andreessen’s venture fund being one of the original investors in Substack. This is the guy that launched the browser without one of its most collaborative features. Some say he’s been trying to redeem himself ever since.
Let me know what you think of this first essay on Technology for the ever feminist mostly creativity minded publication: Art Monster. Have thoughts on technology to share? Put a link in the comments. Want to co-found a company dedicated to the annotated web? Call someone else! But let me know when you launch and I’ll be one of your first and most loyal users. Trust me.