It’s funny how naive smart people can be sometimes. Take the founders of Substack, a US-based online platform that enables writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers. It also enables them to earn money from their writing if they wish to, though as far as I can see, most don’t.
I can personally testify to its merits. I’ve been a blogger for ever, but when Covid-19 arrived, I decided to also publish my blog as a free daily newsletter and started to look around for a way of doing that. Substack fitted the bill and it’s delivered the goods; I’ve found it reliable, stable and easy to use. The experience has also been illuminating because the engagement one gets with newsletter readers is significantly more rewarding than is the case with a conventional online blog.
Substack was founded in 2017 by two geeks, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, and a journalist, Hamish McKenzie. It grew rapidly, partly because it looked like a lifeboat to many journalists and writers who could see the writing on the wall for conventional media organisations. It enabled prominent hacks working for prestigious publications to monetise their celebrity, or at least get paid for writing online. (Substack had teamed up with the online payments processor Stripe to make it easy to charge some of the writers’ subscribers a monthly fee; if they did charge, then Substack took a cut of their earnings.)
Sometimes, those earnings can be substantial. In 2019, for example, a well-known American historian, Heather Cox Richardson, started a Substack providing daily scholarly informed commentary on US politics, which rapidly acquired a large following – and about a million dollars in revenue. Richardson may be a special case, but there are clearly quite a few other authors on the platform who are earning good livings from their work.
But, in a way, the money is a side issue: most Substacks are free. What’s important is that, as social media degenerates into fragmented chaos, Substack has evolved into a significant part of our culture’s public sphere. Some of the most thoughtful long-form writing around nowadays can be found on the platform.
From the outset, the founders were emphatic about their commitment to free speech. A decision to subscribe to a writer’s posts was a matter between the subscriber and the writer. The platform’s owners would apply a “high, high bar” before intervening in content. It was important that users of the platform be able to debate opposing views, etc, etc. The usual “marketplace of ideas” guff, in other words.
You can guess where this is heading. The platform that aspired to be “the last, best hope for civility on the internet” turns out to have a “Nazi problem”. “Just beneath the surface,” says Substack writer Jonathan Katz in the Atlantic, “the platform has become a home and propagator of white supremacy and antisemitism. Substack has not only been hosting writers who post overtly Nazi rhetoric on the platform; it profits from many of them.”
Katz found 16 newsletters sporting “overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics”. One calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is “one of several that openly promote the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory [which contends that white people are being stripped of their power by the rising demographic of non-white migrants] that inspired mass shootings in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Christchurch, New Zealand and other places”. And so on.
Prompted by this, more than 200 Substack writers wrote an open letter to the platform’s founders asking a simple question: “Why are you platforming and monetising Nazis?” On 21 December, McKenzie, who bills himself “co-founder and chief writing officer”, replied. He and his colleagues “have heard and have been listening” to the complaints. They wished to make it clear that they didn’t like Nazis either, but “some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetising publications) makes the problem go away – in fact, it makes it worse … subjecting ideas to open discourse is the best way to strip bad ideas of their power. We are committed to upholding and protecting freedom of expression, even when it hurts.”
Aw, shucks. Such a sweet, innocent lad. The redoubtable Substacker Margaret Atwood was having none of it, pointing out that most, if not all, of the aforementioned Nazis were breaking the platform’s own rules. “You can’t have both the terms of service you have spelled out and a bunch of individual publishers who violate those terms of service. One or the other has got to go, and hiding under the sofa and pretending it isn’t happening will not make your dilemma go away. Nor will some laudable rhetoric about free speech.”
Spot on. And, as the veteran journalist Casey Newton has also noted, the correct number of Nazis on Substack is zero.
What I’ve been reading
Quiet storm
An Odd Silence is a very perceptive post by Bill McKibben about the mainstream media’s blind spot concerning the climate crisis.
Words of love
Michael Tobin’s prize-winning A Love Song for Deborah is a moving account of his life after his wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
Follow the money
The Los Angeles Review of Books features Nothing for Something: Cryptos, Cons, and Zombies, Peter Lunenfeld’s sharp review essay about the cryptocurrency phenomenon.
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