I've been struggling to sit with my favorite authors and friends who publish through Substack.
Their art within my inbox, next to basic, organic tee-shirt advertisements and similarly extractive work emails, feels unimportant, skim-able, and tedious. There's no immediate followup like a quick reply and no affordance for sitting with the newsletter's provocations.
Even the most brilliant thinkers in the space (unknowingly?) struggle to hold my attention like a paperback book or printed article does.
Substack is a medium. A choice. A writer makes the intentional decision to delegate the hosting, design, and distribution of their work, their art, and their ideas to yet another tech company.
This doesn't mean their art is automatically subject to the dark patterns or monetizing laws of scale.
This doesn't mean they automatically write on behalf of Silicon Valley or Kingsnorth's "The Machine."
It does mean their work looks the same as every other writer's on the platform, their message is altered by the shape and site of the medium, and the incentive Substack drives (namely, growth and their banner pitch "Make money doing the work you believe in") will eat the intentions of the most careful artists.
I still want to read these authors.
I still know their work is good.
A subversively obvious solution would be to physically print newsletters I want to read. I can comb through them like a morning paper I receive and curate to catch up on ideas and stories percolating through different subcultures (Update 6/3/26: a friend of mine sent me an amazing little tool called Substack Print for this exact process- thanks Graham).
There's enough healthy friction, like a logistical eustress, involved in this analog process to push me to experimentation with it...
Guiding this strategy would have to be the juxtaposed questions,
Has the medium perverted the message? Or is the medium simply in the way of work that still has voice, perspective, and depth to be received?
In lieue of me changing my reading habits though, more writers could change their writing and delivery habits.
The construction of bespoke, intentionally-crafted, personal sites for writing (in short, a blog) would solve my dilemma.
I've begun writing about this as my own journey with my site and the independent web has progressed, but it bears repeating here:
Individuals can steer the web back to its original architecture simply by having a website.
And the framing of that website, the medium you build to shape a reader's understanding, matters.
A line from the infamous founder of Wikileaks may be worth citing here,
"The Internet is self destructing paper. A place where anything written is soon destroyed by rapacious competition and the only preservation is to forever copy writing from sheet to sheet faster than they can burn..."
~ Julian Assange (2006-12-05), "Self destructing paper"
Substack epitomizes this problem as I click through my inbox of newsletters and burn (read: delete) each one after a cursory skim-through.
The platform was never made for depth, for pause, for engagement with the art form beyond "pledging support" and growing a follower count.
I don't have answers to what lies beyond the profit model of a sub stack. I don't yet see a way to make a living from the work that I do here.
Casey Neistat uploading to Youtube consistently again has got me thinking though, and one line he said wraps this post up with more of a provocation than a prognosis...
You don't do the art to make a living,
you make a living to do the art.
A few blogs off Substack to inspire...