Substack is not blogging

One of the allures of open-web blogging, for me as a humanities student at its zenith, was its aesthetic novelty. We had straight news drip-dropping in like it were written in classified section code, gems like

Lott stepping down, Shrub next god willing…

The offline world of the 90s and 00s¹ was filtered for, if not prestige, then at least a curatorial spirit. Everything from a magazine article to an evening news broadcast was a remove from what you’d hack together in your word processor or by hand.

Blogging bypassed the filters. Oh, to have been old enough to have carved out an omnipundit niche as a guy who wrote sub-Joycean 100-word updates throughout the day on Senate bill processions which would’ve given me a reputation as a “policy wonk”!² The old school blog switched between the forms of diary, travelogue, AP newswire, memoir, and others in a way that felt self-unconscious.

The ad monopolies of Google and Facebook plus the great sucking sound of social media meant peak blogging came quickly, probably somewhere in the early 2010s at the latest. By the time it became somewhat popular again with Substack, Ghost, et al., it’d become something else—something optimized and also platformed, in that it was part of an online economy in which where you publish matters much more than what you publish.

Every newsletter in my inbox would threaten an all-encompassing tract on “The End of Oil and the Final Reckoning for the West”, “The 900 Best Movies of the Year”, or “Why You’ve Done Everything Wrong Until Now—Here’s How to Come Back”. Every post was now an event, delivered on a schedule to meet subscriber expectations like a weekly (or yearly, if you’re Netflix) drop of a streaming episode—appointment reading!!

Some of these I’ve enjoyed, I’ll admit, but it’s exhausting, especially as someone who’s aspired to blog again and didn’t find the Substack model something I could live with. Substacking requires a level of audience building and more so production value (charts, statistics, enormous back stories and lores) that blogging didn’t. You have to be visibly professional for it to work.

I expect this’ll get even worse (or better, if you’re good at it already) as “AI” tools up the stakes for length (need to pad the post with some machined words so it’s a “deep dive” and not just a “quick take”), extremity of takes (to stand out from the moderate slop), and graphical overload (illustrations aren’t enough now). Ironically, one of the guys who’s most pushed Substacking/nouveau blogging in this direction is a nominal “AI” skeptic: Ed Zitron, who brags about the 5-figure word counts of his epic, “data”-heavy letters and who was recently exposed as a conman, eager to take AI money while melodramatically railing against it.

Anyway, I moved to this site a few years ago because I wanted a space to blog unprofessionally, without the SEO optimizations I’d spent years learning, the goal of becoming a “video podcast” franchise³, or the further aspirations to be a longform historical explainer video guy. Jürgen Geuter (“tante”) wrote a great post late last year on the distinction between creating (now associated with software and AI assistance) and making (doing things in an analog or at least haphazard fashion). This passage in particular really inspired me to run with my sloppy blogging this year:

I think that the focus on creating is just the little capitalist devil sitting on our shoulders telling us to produce more.

I think the most radical act today is to just make something. Especially if you are not good at it or if it’s a bit of a struggle. Draw if you’re not good at it. Play the piano even though you’re not great. Make something just for the fun of being in this world, touching it, being in it. Becoming you. Let this radicalize you a bit.

Fuck creation. Love making.

Love making—that’s the goal.