T he big trend in writing and journalism in the year 2020—other than the New York Times continued conquest of everything in print—is the flowering

Why I am Bearish on Substack

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2021-07-15 22:30:06

T he big trend in writing and journalism in the year 2020—other than the New York Times continued conquest of everything in print—is the flowering of the Substackerati.[1] Hardly a day goes by without some famous figure announcing their new hope you will become a new subscriber to a new newsletter they are writing on this new thing called Substack. This thing’s rise is a glory to behold—but a glory whose shine I am deeply skeptical of.

I will admit at the start of this post that my bearishness on all things Substack may just come down to an obstinate old-fashionedness on my part. I am a child of the old blogosphere. I am nostalgic for the old ways. It is possible that all I am about to write confuses what I wish for what I see. But my skepticism of the Substack model is rooted in my experience of writing on the web over the last decade and a half, and informed by my research into what made good writers tick in the decades and centuries before that.

I invite you to read some of these investigations (start with “The World Twitter Made.” Also relevant: “Requiem For the Strategy Sphere,” “Public Intellectuals Have Short Shelf Lives,” “Life in the Shadow of the Boomers,” “Book Notes: Strategy, a History,” and “On Adding Phrases to the Language.”) A running theme in all of these essays is the importance of seeing individual authors not as individual authors, but as voices in a chorus. No writer is an island. If a “public voice” is inspired to spend hours massaging paragraphs and digging up references, it is because she has something to prove, and more important still, someone to prove it to. She writes in response to ideas she has heard or read. She feels compelled to add her voice to a larger conversation. The best thinkers speak to more than their immediate contemporaries, but without that contemporary argument in the background few would bother speaking at all.

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