Hellooooo lovelies,
Due to midterms, job applications, and the DUMPSTER FIRE NATURE OF BEING ALIVE, this will be a short post. It seems daunting right now, after a long day of Zoom calls with varying degrees of nonsense, so I will return to the premise of my newsletter: One Thing. Let’s talk about One Thing.
Substack has been under fire lately, and if like me you’re subscribed to 15 million of its newsletters, you already know why. Substack—a cog in the Coporate Wheel of Doom like basically everything and everyone on God’s green Earth—sponsors some writers. Said writers get a lot of money: they’re basically payed a massive advance. Obviously, I am not one of them. It will not disclose a list of which ones are sponsored, because since when are Cogs honest or transparent or Good? To top it off, many of the sponsored writers, like Glenn Greenwald for example, are transphobic and share similarly problematic views.
Journalist Annalee Newitz explains the situation well in their Last Ever Substack, which I recommend reading if you’re interested in the intersections between transparency and journalism. There were a lot of dramatic, Last Ever Substacks in the past two weeks.
Of course there is the irony of critiquing Substack on Substack; being openly communist on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter; bringing Whole Foods cookies to a DSA club meeting. (Ok that last one was a stretch, but you get the point: Whole Foods is part of Jeff Bezos’s empire.) There’s just no way around this Capitalism shit, and expressing yourself in any way that isn’t in-person (and away from your iPhone) inevitably lines someone evil’s pockets. (It seems to me that we’re always having the wrong free speech debates; it’s maybe not about what you say but the channels of money that influences who sees what you say, whether or not what you say is deemed true or socially respectable, etc.) Also, as an aside, sometimes the evil people are really ugly and/or weird. For example, Jack Dorsey takes regular ice baths so he can live to be 135. Sometimes the difference between 3 and 5 years of exploiting the poor is a sturdy freezer.
Which is why I wonder: what is that point? Is there any point at all in fighting? Is there a point in anything? Is there a difference between working in advertising and working in journalism, at a publication owned by shitty problematic billionaires? Is the only solution to become a hermit? To pick up a ukelele? To believe in love? To embrace Marxism? What does Marxism even look like aside from “discourse” on “Twitter” and judging liberals for voting? While we’re on the topic, what would a proletarian revolution look like, and would it just be the Purge? Why can I never remember when taxes are due, even though it’s literally the same day every year? Why don’t they teach practical shit in school? Why does dental floss sometimes cost seven dollars?
I also can’t help but notice that a lot of the writers dramatically leaving Substack have alternate platforms, podcasts, staffed writing jobs, and/or enormous followers. They’re good in any case. Could their move be symbolic, personal, limited in meaning? Could it sway public opinion enough to pressure Substack into changing its policies (likely not)?
I don’t have an answer to any of it, but I do have a headache; logging off for now.
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