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 third of three exchanges; read the first and the second.
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Becca Rothfeld: For you, the main distinction is between “centripetal and centrifugal forces”; for me, the main distinction is between the forces of community and the forces of atomization—between forms of organization that encourage collaboration, and forms of organization that reinforce the old American fetish for “going it alone.” I must confess that I do not have much respect or reverence for the pioneer virtues, or for the figure (in my view, the fantasy) of the maverick. I don’t think that institutions command, as you put it, “solidity,” nor do I think it makes much sense to conflate institutions of every kind with that menacing mystification, “the establishment.” There are plenty of new and in some respects countercultural institutions—the Drift, founded several years ago, or Cluny Journal, founded just last month (and hosted, as it happens, on Substack)—that are “on the margins” but are nonetheless institutional outfits, insofar as they employ editors and make decisions about what sort of writing to include.
I am in passionate agreement with you that these sorts of publications have a vital role to play in vitalizing literature and holding older, stuffier outlets to account. But the question, in my view, is not whether centrifugal forces of various sorts are valuable—of course they are!—but how these forces should be organized. Must those writing “on the fringes” do so alone? Must they send out newsletters without the benefits of editors or conversation? At its best, the editorial relationship functions to formalize the social nature of the literary enterprise; at its worst, the “influencer” model imagines writing as an isolated act. Of course, neither magazines nor Substacks are always at their best or always at their worst. But the tendencies encouraged by the former strike me as richer than the tendencies encouraged by the latter.
There are many reasons why I prefer the communal model. Some are political. It’s easier for writers to organize for better pay and better benefits when they work together. Substack is like the Uber or, better, the OnlyFans of writing. Proponents of the so-called gig economy argue that it increases the freedom of those who toil within it, and so it does, in a limited way—but more enduring freedom, in the form of actual material security, can only be achieved by way of solidarity.
Some of my reasons for favoring communal organization over atomization are aesthetic and intellectual. (This exchange is itself a testament to the benefits of thinking alongside or in opposition to someone else.) Again, you seem to regard editing as nothing more than an imposition, a means of digesting a formerly distinctive voice into a bland pap. But this is not all editing is or can be. There are many publications (including, I hope, this one) that preserve the singularity of writers’ styles while pushing them to hone their ideas. At heart, then, what is at issue is whether we think better in conversation, or whether we think better alone.
I’m not just looking at Notes. I subscribe to 82 (!) Substacks and receive a veritable barrage of emails, seemingly daily. I enjoy many of them. Others I do not enjoy but read anyway, just as I find myself clicking from one banal YouTube video to another, almost as if possessed. But the role these Substacks play in my life is not akin to the role that magazines play, because the medium does indeed morph into the message. It’s not just that the internet has cannibalized my attention span (though it has) or that I prefer reading off a screen (though I do). And it’s not just that social media encourages its users to perform their personalities and therefore exaggerate or embellish and give into their baser, more bullying impulses (though it most certainly does).
Perhaps the biggest problem with Substack is that the long sequences of emails are indistinguishable from our Instagram feeds, or our Netflix homepages, or the playlists that Spotify recommends to us. The only difference is that we are responsible for personalizing our Substacks, whereas the other apps personalize content for us, guided by what we already like. In both cases, we encounter only ourselves and our preexistent tastes, over and over again. One of the best things about a magazine, new or old, online or off, is that it has a point of view that is decidedly not your own. Magazines change your tastes because they surprise you; they force you into contact with a sensibility that you could not replicate or even imagine by yourself. They include writing from people you wouldn’t think to read; they confront you with writing you wouldn’t expect to enjoy. In short, they seduce you, and to my mind, the point of engaging with literature at all is to be seduced, by which I mean, to be altered beyond any possible prediction by the jolt of an alien entity. Cluny Journal, the Drift, the Cleveland Review of Books and many other small magazines are exercises in curation, and they therefore present an alternative to the otherwise inescapable algorithm.
Because after all, the worst thing about algorithms is not that they choose for us. The worst thing is that they choose just as we would—that they condemn us to consume only that which we already know that we like. The world of the algorithm, like the world of the influencer, is a hall of mirrors. No matter where we turn, we see the same thing reflected back at us: a flatter and more inflated version of ourselves.
Sam Kahn: So, first of all, this has been fun to do. It’s very interesting to talk to somebody whom I really respect, and to realize that we’re looking at the same phenomenon and seeing an almost totally different picture!
There are a few places where we just disagree. You see Substack as being within the domain of the algorithm. You write, “The only difference [between Substack and our algorithmic feeds] is that we are responsible for personalizing our Substacks, whereas the other apps personalize content for us, guided by what we already like.” But that’s a big difference! And it means that our interaction with Substack is categorically different than, say, with the YouTube algorithm. And in that personalizing of our experience, there is more than ample room for us to surprise and expand ourselves. Among the Substacks I read, there’s the memoirs of a convict, an “autistic slut” giving data on sexual preferences as she’s gleaned them from her experiences, and the aforementioned chief of staff giving advice to other chiefs of staff. None of these have much to do with my “preexistent” self—and is exactly the kind of diversity, and shock of the new, that you extoll. I do find it harder to see how it’s possible to get that experience from a publication, which tends to be bound by an “editorial line” and by the tastes of the editor and owner, and is accountable in the end to a steady subscriber base, which has signed up for a particular product.
In terms of editing, I’m not opposed to editing per se. Actually, at the moment, I make my living as an editor—and am about to launch a new publication as an editor. But we should be clear that editing, at core, is not about changing semicolons to periods or even improving people’s writing. Editing is a political activity. It’s about controlling who has access to the channel of distribution—in this case a publication—and usually is about maintaining an editorial line and standard of taste. Anytime a writer is in an interaction with an editor, they are in a subordinate position—the editor can always cut off access to the distribution channel—and writers who feel that they have something different or original to say can’t help but chafe at this arrangement.
I very much agree with you that Substack is the equivalent of Uber or OnlyFans (or Airbnb), but to me this is unequivocally a good thing! I’m saying this in large part as a former Airbnb host (and frequent guest). That system is just better. It frees up property that people have (their car, their home) and allows them to monetize it. It puts more assets out on the market and allows for the seller to customize the experience (easier with Airbnb than Uber). Yes, there is a risk of prices coming down so much that no one can make a living, but it really is better than the narrow and extortionist choke points in the old system—the taxicab medallions that drivers had to save up for forever, the hotels with their exorbitant charges and hidden fees, and for that matter the brothel owners and pimps and porn impresarios who controlled the sex trade when, with OnlyFans, sex workers can make almost all the profits themselves.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to realize that people argue pretty much only from their direct experience, and I suspect that largely accounts for our differences. So I’ll round this off by getting a little personal. You’re someone for whom (I think) the publication system as it is has worked well. (I first came across your name because an editor whom I was pitching asked me to write my piece as much like Becca Rothfeld as possible.) But I have a lot of experience with what the other side of the glass looks like. I’ve written fifty plays, none of which have been formally produced, over a hundred short stories, only one of which has been formally published, about a half-dozen novels, which live on my computer. Before Substack, I had only a handful of essays published—most edited beyond recognition. I was dying on the vine, and all the creatives I knew—perfectly talented, educated people—were dying on the vine as well. If Substack hadn’t come around when it did, I’d still be doing my job—adjacent to what I really wanted to be doing—stealing time to write when the boss wasn’t looking, muttering something every so often to people I met that, yes, I also write on the side. When I started on Substack, I believed enough in the publishing industry, had enough of a stigma around self-publishing, that it felt like some kind of creative suicide. I felt like I would be screaming into a void.
And then… it wasn’t that. It’s surprising for me to hear you describe community in the institutional model, because that hasn’t been my experience—maybe more a mad competition for slots and jobs. But on Substack, I started to get something that I didn’t really know existed—long, thoughtful comments from absolute strangers on my posts. And from comments like those (this is among people who are on Subststack a lot) emerged a real community of people taking in and building off each other’s work.
Something else surprising happened. I started being able to place pieces fairly regularly with outlets beyond Substack and found that… I just didn’t really enjoy it. The pieces would be published, I would add the publication to my artistic résumé, and maybe they would be read, but as far as I was concerned they were disappearing off into the ether. What I tended to look forward to was for suitable time to pass and to be able to repost the piece on my Substack and let the usual tumult start in the comments.
I’m sharing my personal experience because I’m sure that it’s not at all personal to me. That you can basically multiply what I’m describing of the creative industry by the hundreds of thousands. And, for me, there’s a very clear before and after. There’s the institutional model, which is fulfilling to the very small number of people who are elevated by it—but, for whom, I would contend, their always-precarious position within an institution makes it difficult to really write as themselves. And then there’s the wilds of people writing as themselves and finding the network that they can. For a long time, that was called “self-publishing”—or, more often, “failure”—but Substack, as a technology that has never really existed before, creates the capacity for a vast network among what you call the “mavericks.” For me, that’s the difference between, basically, dying on the vine and having, within a couple of years, a surprisingly fulfilling life as a writer. That experience must be shared many times over by people who love to write but find themselves, for whatever reason, outside of an institutional system. Their access to the tools of publication and to actual engaged audiences is something that can only be celebrated.