Dispatches from the present
Last month, Point editor Becca Rothfeld and cultural critic Sam Kahn used their respective Substacks to debate… the merits of Substack. The following conversation picks up and expands on that initial exchange, touching on broader questions about the value of the “institutional model” of legacy media, the importance of platforms for outsider writing, and whether the medium really is the message.
This is the second of three exchanges; read the first and the third.
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Becca Rothfeld: Your first claim is that Substack should not be in the business of emulating legacy publications; your second claim is that it is a radically unprecedented forum. “Substack is the blank page hooked up to the Internet,” you write. “That’s the long and short of it, and if you think about that that’s unbelievably powerful—and also something that has never existed before.” I agree that influencers won’t succeed by trying to emulate institutions—that they have an altogether different role to play in the literary economy—but I’m not sure I see much of a case for Substack’s novelty. Something very much like it has existed before. What, if anything, distinguishes Substack from, say, LiveJournal or Blogspot or even Tumblr in their respective heydays (except insofar as it’s a successor to Twitter-turned-X and is therefore more of a centralized hub for established writers)? And how, really, does the writing on Substack differ from the writing that thrived on Blogspot circa 2010?
That Substack does not represent a dramatic departure from other blogging platforms is not a failing. There was good writing on the blogging platforms of the early and mid-aughts; there was also bad writing. It is ever so, on just about any forum, edited or unedited, and I’m certainly not a partisan of novelty for its own sake. I don’t mean to insult Substack by calling it yet another blogging platform; I only mean to raise the question of why we should expect it to transform the literary landscape in ways that other blogging platforms (and for that matter, other sorts of social media) have not.
And of course, blogging platforms and other sorts of social media have transformed the literary landscape in just about every way—far too many to catalog. New micro-genres (the meme, the tweet) emerge daily; new vocabularies and sensibilities are forever appearing, then vanishing. The conditions of production have changed, too, probably irrevocably and mostly for the worse. Now that everyone can self-publish, imprints are competing with a deluge of free content; now that podcasts and videos are the preferred mediums of so many erstwhile readers, the market for literary fiction is shrinking. Some of these developments are positive (much of the language that has coagulated online is genuinely innovative, and I’m glad that low costs of production have enabled the appearance of a number of excellent new literary magazines). Old scold that I am, however, I think most of them are bad (I’m not convinced that the democratization of culture has been entirely salutary for the culture in question, and I’m certain that outsourcing curation to algorithms is a bad idea). But whether the internet has been good or bad for literature on the whole, I don’t see what Substack offers that digital culture was not already offering.
Other than that, I think there are three major points of disagreement between us.
The first is that I suspect there is a much closer connection between medium and content than you let on. You write, “a lot of writers on Substack still have bad habits picked up from blogging or Twitter arguments, but to say this is a feature of the platform is a self-fulfilling loop.” But I don’t think it’s an accident that the dynamics of Twitter recur on Substack: like all social media platforms, the site trades in parasocial encounter. The result is that people tend to click on the most polemical writing, and writers tend to exaggerate and settle into shticks. It’s certainly possible to resist the material incentives on offer, but those incentives are powerful, and they cannot fail to color the mood and, ultimately, the work.
The second is about the merits of editing. You write, “As the platform gains in popularity and credibility, more people—self included—are publishing their best work there, and are happy to trade the loss of an (often theoretical) paycheck for editorial freedom.” But I don’t think editorial freedom is always a good thing, because I don’t experience editing exclusively as a burden or an incursion. I’ve seen how my writing and even the texture of my thinking improve in conversations with others.
The third is how much freedom Substack really affords us, both as readers and as writers. That invisible hand, The Algorithm, is the real impresario. We control what we block and what lands in our inboxes, but we don’t control what shows up on our feeds (so at most, we control what we’re tempted to subscribe to only partially). An editor is a fickle beast, but at least we have some understanding of how the species operates. An algorithm is a black box, a little burst of inhumanity. It may be a conservative impulse, but I always opt for the company of the devil I know, especially when it’s a devil I often tend to admire.
Sam Kahn: Good! We disagree on almost everything! Not least on the points of disagreement.
Your framing is of a dichotomy between the “institutional” and “influencer” models, and I take it that you have a generally positive view of institutions, and of their solidity, and view “influencing” as maybe harmless but as fundamentally a mode of self-advancement that can easily get into loops of hyperbole and aggrandizement.
My framing would be to try to take a broader lens, and to see what we’re talking about as more of an eternal tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces. “Institutions” here represent an idea of a stable authority, following a centralizing logic. It’s very clear that the institutions don’t rest their survival on being right or not—if the New York Times, let’s say, totally botches the WMD story in Iraq, it’s not as if the New York Times comes to an end; it keeps printing the next day, with the same patina of authority. In our society, if we dig under the hood a little, we find that our venerable institutions almost all emerge from a particular moment in time—from the late 1800s—which is not a coincidence. That was the moment when consolidated capital (aka the robber barons) generated a handful of large-circulation newspapers and magazines—which is, for the most part, the “legacy media” that we are still left with.
Meanwhile, the centrifugal forces are always there and always fighting for their place in the sun, even if they tend to be less visible than the centripetal behemoths. What I would argue is that a healthy public sphere rests on some kind of balance between the two energies. The institutions have their merits and their resources, but the Washington Post, almost by definition, can’t generate a new form of writing. Innovation is always going to come from the outside—whether that’s Martin Luther self-publishing his essays to a church door, or Walt Whitman typesetting Leaves of Grass himself, or Ezra Pound persuading London bookshops to sell his self-published poetry, etc., etc. Any artistic or aesthetic movement that does anything interesting is always going to start the same way—on the fringe. At the moment, that fringe energy is congregating on Substack, simply because that’s where the combination is of the fewest constraints and the greatest possibility for dissemination.
These dynamics are ancient, and both the achievements of the center and the fringe deserve our respect. But there’s something peculiar about our time, which is that so many of the institutions are collapsing all around us. This, I don’t think, is particularly their fault—it’s just that they’re rooted in the print era or the era of broadcast media and they simply have less clear value when anybody with a keyboard and an opinion is able to access the public sphere, and anybody who happens to be in the right place with a cell-phone camera is able, essentially, to report a story. The reaction of the legacy media to this structural change is, in a word, hysteria—to believe that standards are falling everywhere, that “misinformation” is rampant—when what’s really happening is just that their business model is struggling to keep pace with the times; and, actually, as I’ve argued elsewhere, we’re in a “writing renaissance” where all kinds of interesting writing is emerging in digital publications that are popping up like mushrooms after the rain.
But we’re talking primarily about Substack, and here, I think, our disagreement is more tactical. It kind of feels like we’re looking at different Substacks! I have a feeling you’re looking more at Notes—and, yeah, Notes is having trouble emerging as anything other than a Twitter clone. But in “core” Substack—on the newsletters, which are unaffected by algorithms—I come across some new, interesting writer like multiple times a week. They’re writing about politics, culture, art—about anything you can think of, really—and writing distinctively in their own way. And this is also really a key difference between the center and the fringe. If any of these writers got a piece into the New York Times (which happens often enough), the Times would edit it, polish it, might make it “better,” almost certainly would make it more “professional,” but somewhere in that process the piece would stop sounding like the writer and would sound like the Times, in the way that every piece in the Times sounds like every other piece in the Times. What is gained in clarity and professionalism is lost in personality and passion.
To acknowledge what I view as your strongest point: yes, the medium is important. The internet has severely diminished our attention spans, and that makes us, collectively, much worse readers of long fiction or long-form journalism. Substack struggles with that problem as well. Fiction tends not to do very well there. The platform rewards hot takes, Substack puff pieces, etc.—and many writers there have noticed that and leaned into it.
But, at the same time, a kind of miracle is happening—and attention spans, which seemed to be down for the count, are lengthening again. I was really shocked, when I started writing on Substack, at the long, thoughtful comments that people were leaving on my posts—and all across the ’Stack. In retrospect, the loss of attention span wasn’t necessarily an inherent property of the internet. It was a race to the bottom in the early days of Twitter, Instagram, etc. But a lot of people really did get sick of mindlessly scrolling, and there is a hunger there—I see it all the time on Substack—for quality content. I’m not disputing some of the dynamics you describe, but I believe strongly that there is another side to it. The challenge for us in this era is to learn to be good readers again. After that, good writing follows.
Read the third exchange here.