Welcome to the Ghost version of the S Peter Davis newsletter

Hi everybody,

Thanks for taking part in my cross-platform newsletter experiment. Please forgive me if it does feel like an experiment.

I'm working hard to just be a writer and be allowed to have my work seen in a world that will fight tooth and nail to prevent people from doing that.

Venture Capital Internet World is a dystopia in which every creator is locked aboard a fleet of cruise ships. You don't know which ship is sinking. Each captain will tell you that your ship is fine but all the others are sinking. You will not know who is lying until your ankles get wet. Also instead of lifeboats there are men with guns who will shoot you if you try to leave the ship.

I'm trying to ride multiple ships at the same time and it's not designed to do that. No platform is perfect or even very good, and each one has things it can do that the others can't. I am really hoping a decentralized web can help solve some of these problems so possibly one day I might be able to merge all my subscribers on each platform together and make this a whole lot easier.

The issues are presenting themselves already. The other week when I launched this Ghost newsletter officially, I immediately got a few free subscribers. That's, uh, well, that's not supposed to be possible because I disabled free subscriptions, as this is initially supposed to be an alternative payment option for my Substack. I can't do the same "multi-tier" strategy on Ghost that I can do on Substack, it's either a paid newsletter or a free one here. So free subscribers until now haven't been receiving any emails at all.

I don't want to knock back anyone who expresses interest in my writing, though, so for the time being I have bumped all the free subscribers up to a complementary subscription so you can read the articles. If the emails bounce or something then remember my website is https://www.speterdavis.com where I aggregate absolutely everything I write on any platform and most of it is free.

If you haven't been receiving emails since you signed up then here are some links to my most recent pieces that you may have missed.

Meet the Real Elites

The pains of this election come in waves like the plagues of Egypt. After the initial shock and horror died down, next comes the insufferable smugness of the pro-Trump independent journalists. If you spend any time on social media platforms amidst the protruding skeletal frame of legacy media’s beached

Plato Was a DickS Peter Davis

Fire Sale at the End of History

America may not have come to terms with it yet, but you’ve just witnessed the most spectacular and consequential episode of Mythbusters in history, and Adam and Jamie weren’t even there to guide us through it. To explain: One of the most important things that the United States

Plato Was a DickS Peter Davis

The Hard Problem of Social Media: Run Rabbit Run

Well hello again, December. This is the one year anniversary of the most popular thing I’ve ever written on the Substack platform and it was about how that platform is going to be in trouble if it didn’t figure out what it wanted to be: Now we’re

Plato Was a DickS Peter Davis

Thank you for reading!

SPD