February 1 2024
I could not be happier to be back. There is so much to tell you and yet nothing to say.
I recommend Justin Duke and Buttondown without reservation. Before I start sending you "normal" newsletters, a brief and final word on Substack, as well as a few thoughts from now and 100 years ago. And please look at this button Justin made.
Because the posts are unpaywalled, you're supporting rather than subscribing. Please do if you can. We lost a few to the Zionists and Nazis. Later, skaters.
I asked Jonathan M. Katz for his take, as we've had similar experiences. Since then, Substack have only sunk deeper into the kind of dirt you never get out of your clothes. (Look up star Substacker Chris Rufo and his race science antics, as well as everything else he's done.) Jonathan's experience is mine, and his words below would be mine.
JMK: "The thing that finally convinced me I had to leave Substack wasn't the white supremacists on the platform per se, or the fact that I was losing subscribers, or even that the supposed communications professionals in management issued a statement that everyone read as saying that helping literal Nazis make money was a core part of their belief structure somehow. It was that the platform in the final analysis turned out to be completely fake. Substack claims to be a place that will help writers. It turns out they only mean writers who flatter them and buy into their extremely narrow conception of what a "new economic engine for culture" means—a place where the only politics to be celebrated are the extremely reactionary kind, otherwise you're invited to be as vapid and ethereal as possible. Undercut that image and Hamish will undercut you, using any tools at his disposal. It's just not a place I want to be any longer."
It does not matter the venue. When venture capitalists dabble in publishing, there is only one outcome. It is not when a magazine finally fails that it dies, but the first time the founders sell to someone not involved directly in the work. Think of a restaurant that starts a second branch: the plot begins to thin and the spirit is lost.
When VC gets involved, there is one outcome. Often in less than five years, one or two of the founders cash out, the employees are screwed, and the company is stripped for parts. The same thing happens in the crypto community, where art and writing are used as a sort of value wrap, a vinyl coating to disguise the business of shuffling assets and draining value. If your publication is backed by VC money, your work is already screwed.
From The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke: "I have been doing something to ward off fear. I have sat up all night writing, and now I am as tired out as if I had taken a long walk through the Ulsgaard fields. The thought that all of that is no more and that strangers are living in the rambling old manor house is difficult to grasp. Perhaps at this very moment the maids are asleep in the white room under the gable, sleeping their heavy, moist slumbers from evening till morn.
And one has no one and nothing oneself, and one travels the world with a suitcase and a box of books and, when all's said and done, no curiosity at all. What kind of life is it, with neither house nor inherited things nor dogs? If only one had one's memories, at least. But then, who does? If only one had one's childhood – but it is as if it were buried deep. Perhaps one has to be old to have access to all of this. I suspect it may be good to be old."
See you soon.