🔒 Capital Will Crush Substack

 One of the biggest problems with trying to build a career in something creative in a capitalist world is that the tools and platforms you need to use to achieve your goals are all adversarial to those goals. When some service or company insists that their success depends on your success, they are invariably defining “success” on their terms. It’s circular—their definition of your success is whatever benefits them, and if it doesn’t benefit them, then you’re not really successful.

 In the society we have, in our wisdom, chosen to build for ourselves, every interaction is transactional. Most companies try to gain your trust by obscuring the purely-business nature of the transaction. It’s the field marketing agent or street hawker who tries to pull you into a conversation by complimenting your shirt. We live in a society built on lies.

In reality, everything is just money flowing around. Nothing happens without money moving. The means by which a company extracts wealth from you defines your relationship with them. If you pay a fee for the service, then you’re a client or a customer. If they take a cut of your earnings, then you’re an employee.

 So let’s talk about Substack again.

 Substack has what you might call an inconsistent reputation on an internet that has become so fractured that the only two types of platform you can join anymore either accuse Sydney Sweeney of Nazism for making a Boomer pun or are owned by guys who make straight-arm salutes at political rallies.

 Nevertheless, from a purely technical standpoint it’s been pretty great. It’s free to use, and its internal network effect—walled garden though it may be—has allowed writers to build thousands-strong communities of followers in a short amount of time, using their writing alone as the pitch. Now that short-form social media has taken over the internet the only way to gain a following anywhere else is to be really good at tweeting, something which not every long-form writer is great at, myself included. Either that, or there’s Instagram and TikTok, which require you to be a really interesting, bombastic, outgoing personality with a rich and visual life, something which, again, not every long-form writer is great at, myself included.

Writing is the ultimate spend-money-to-make-money business. I run an identical version of this newsletter on Substack, which was the initial version I started back in 2022. I began a Ghost version last year when the Substack brand became too toxic for other social media platforms. For any chance of getting anyone on, for example, Bluesky to read my work I need to have a non-Substack delivery method.

 But though they’re both just a blogging and newsletter platform, the dynamic is very different. Though Ghost is sort of trying to experiment with internal networking it doesn’t really have a discovery layer so the only way to attract readers is either to develop a very large social media following or pay to advertise. Basically, Ghost and Beehiiv and the other upfront-fee platforms people taut as alternatives for Substack are for people who are already famous.

 Substack, in trying to wear a friendly face and appeal to the ambitious amateur, has had phenomenal success in capturing an audience intimidated by the prospect of labor-intensive self-promotion and expensive services. But they are the marketer complimenting your shirt. They don’t really like your shirt and couldn’t care much less about your writing. Substack’s strong performance out of the gate has led some of us more cynical types to wonder when the platform is going to do the inevitable thing and start enshittifying.

 Last month Substack did another venture capital funding round so successful that it earned them the so-called “unicorn” status—a startup worth over a billion dollars. Despite this, the company still isn’t profitable—its expenses are greater than its revenue. Its operating costs are funded by rich people like Marc Andreessen, and Marc Andreessen is not doing this out of the kindness of his heart. Marc Andreessen does not have a heart. He has a tiny little radioactive egg-shaped rock down there powered mostly by resentment and racism. He wants that money back, with interest, and soon.

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