writing is hard; inciting flame wars is easier

don't fall for the numbers game

This letter is about the Current State of Substack (I know, bleh) as it continues to grow and the contradictions inherent between the practice of writing, algorithmic social media, and financial incentives continue to fester.

I’m not sure how to feel about it, but there’s been a steady increase of infighting on substack recently.

To be completely fair to the state of play on this app, the high tensions do seem to resolve themselves neatly in a window of seven-to-eight business days as the object of vague discourse is beaten to death by enough cultural essayists to clean out a trader joe’s in minutes. 

Summoning up a full-length post on a trending hot topic sucks, especially when having to account for dozens of other writers also trying tooth and nail to procure up some sort of hot take based on the same vague muse of the Substack-cultural imagination, whether that be that Thought Daughters or Demure Fall (if we’re still even doing that), and it’s fun imagining up a good take, of course. But it’s a common pitfall to think you should say something without saying anything at all. 

In the bookstore near my apartment, above the scant fiction section, there’s a sign that says “READ BEFORE YOU THINK” and I’ll stare at it for a couple seconds with my mouth slightly open when I go into this kind-of-not-that-great bookstore. This is a stupid sign; it would be worse if it said, “WRITE BEFORE YOU THINK.”

As my good friend Adam once said, “literature in a vacuum tends to get sucked up its own ass,” and isn’t that the truth? There’s so much writing about writing on Substack,—but then again here I am writing about writing about writing, so I guess it’s a wash at the end of the day.

There are brilliant writers on this app,—I’m myself deeply honored (and a little baffled) to be friends with a number of them. And there is a real novelty to rediscovering writing through this place. But at the same time Substack’s a unique test case for long-form social media platforms because (well) there’s a clear and steady monetary incentive here, right?—Substack has a similar problem to the American Dream. Grind and you can make it. And hey, maybe you actually can. But the numbers game is a crazy drug; it finds ways to worm into an aspiring writer’s head.

That’s not to say, of course, the monetized aspect isn’t a wonderful thing in its own right. Writers are, for maybe the first time in two decades, being paid their due without the middlemen of publishers and publishing houses who sometimes flat out refuse to pay for commissioned pieces.

Writers are putting wonderful work out on this platform and are (sometimes) able to make a living entirely from this place,—that’s incredible!—but there’s also the issue of social media psychosis turbocharged by the vague hope of grinding into success by writing and, when writing’s too difficult, throwing shade on one another in an attempt to stir up a discourse frenzy large enough to boost their numbers.

Certainly this is true to every social media platform based on engagement, but it’s all the more true for this place with its monetary aspect. Everyone wants to be a paid writer but nobody wants to write.

Because (well) writing is hard work. It’s agonizing, it’s dreadful. It takes time. It takes steady concentration. It feels like having a conversation with a white-painted wall for a couple hours a day. It’s a lonely way to go about living in an age of constant communication.

Beckett’s the Unnameable, in my eyes, sums up language on its own terms perfectly: the entire novel’s nothing except a steady stream of words which occupy only themselves, completely detached from character, from time, from narrative. The point of view comes from within the voice itself and the words have enough of an awareness of themselves that they know when they stop eventually at the end of the novel,—and they realize they will stop eventually, hence their tremendous fear,—that they will no longer exist, so they carry on, never stopping. It’s a mad desire at holding onto life and significance despite signifying nothing, merely a holding on. It’s maybe the most frightening book I can think of. I could only read about half of it before it became crystal clear what it was doing to my brain by reading it. But this it still remains in my mind the most cognizant description of writing as a disembodied force. Writing about writing is self-derangement when it enters the realm of desperation.

And anyways, it is a truly mortifying act to write or publish literally anything, to have one’s words exist on their own terms. No one wants to write. It’s a need, an urge, an inkling not to distant from that behind a death drive. A lot of the people on this platform ignore how agonizing the actual work can be while they’re trying to push their personal brands to a point of profit. Any social media site is a number’s game, a competition. Everyone wants to make it and whoever gets a checkmark first wins.

And then, once the topic of popular circulation’s been beaten to death, once the outstanding essays on the topic at hand have properly diagnosed the issue, once I feel as if I would rather defenestrate myself rather than read another piece about brat summer,—and boyoboy if I didn’t feel like throwing myself out a window when I tried my hand at it last week (but of course there were other things going on for me at the time),—it’s back to business as usual on this app which by most accounts is a place where twenty-somethings come to write a post or two about how disappointing their dream internships turned out to be before vanishing completely from the platform.

But that’s changing,—Substack’s been growing,—there’s an exponential uptick in people who’ve found this place to be their new digital home, myself included. 

But the big thing to keep in mind with all of this is that there’s a remarkably (sometimes terrifyingly) broad spectrum of communities of people self-publishing on this app who are only starting to notice one another.

Different communities are writing posts with a lot of (um) sick burns for different audiences to repost said (um) sick burns separated out from the context of the piece, floating in the ether of Notes, disembodied, and this leads to exactly the situations you would expect…

A fragment about how white women should “shut up about pilates” made it over to a white woman who writes about pilates who is now writing a piece about this perceived slight against her,—and I wonder if she’ll the original author.

A post about how to handle relationships with difficult men was discovered by a handful of defensive, reactionary (let’s be honest) grown-boys who took to haranguing the original authors (sarah cucchiara and

Amanda!

) with snide comebacks, insane DMs, general sickening comments. The list could go on of course, but these are just what I’ve noticed in the past week.

To all you substack-headed people reading this, you’ll remember Feed Me’s article from last month, The Machine is in the Garden, now paywalled, in which

Emily Sundberg

discusses influencers beginning to self-identify as writers. The post received incredible circulation from those who agreed and from those who skimmed and self-identified as a victim. That’s not to say that the Feed Me piece set the trend, but it certainly presented a stark example of what was to come.

It was the first time, I think, that many of us who’ve started writing here in earnest this past summer have seen anything like it happen. Everyone was talking about the Feed Me article on Notes, in DMs, for what honestly felt like a whole month and a half. It was fun in a way. It was exhausting. 

And we should probably be ready for a lot more of this kind of surface level flame war. Substack’s growing up. Like any platform based on discourse, once it hits a certain size, a twitter-like factionalism emerges. This is not just natural of social media platforms but it’s natural of urbanization in general. While Substack, before Notes, represented an agrarian town of loosely connected cottages, individual newsletters vaguely connected to one another, it’s rapidly become a dense urban environment of takes and long-form opinions.

But, paired with the monetary aspect of Substack, some people (mostly men, I’ve noticed if we’re being real here) have and will go kind of insane,—and a certain level of craziness is rewarded by the algorithm. Like Twitter Psychosis, Substack Psychosis is as real as it is distorted by the potential to go paid.

At the end of the day it’s so much easier to start a flame war with a larger account than it is to write anything with its own merit. Some writers desperately hungry for attention from the algorithm based on seeing like counts and subscriber counts have become snarky reply guys but for longform, sometimes very vulnerable pieces. Dogpiles are starting to happen too, but it’s sometimes tied up deeply with someone’s vulnerable telling of personal trauma.

Not to beat a dead horse here, but writing is hard. It’s so much easier to bait people into arguments and back and forth fights than it is to write anything profound because that takes time and effort.

The effects of this are most clearly visible, I think, in the recent brigades on the Girlhood essayists (complimentary) by misogynists with subscriber counts in the dozens who so deeply love the sound of their own voice that they’ll go completely feral when they see any young female writer with more than a hundred likes on a post or more than a thousand subscribers on a publication.

A lot of men, especially those who value their ~intellect~ or whatever solipsistic bullshit they espouse to themselves in private, really do hate to see women, especially women who are younger than them, find success for writing essays and diagnosing problems in any way might seem to refer to them. And boy do they lash out.

Luisa

wrote an incredible essay yesterday detailing her experience being brigaded. She can explain it much better than I can, here you go:

why are there weirdos in my comments?

And it’s a good idea, I think, to recognize this and keep levelheaded about it all going forward, because while there’s a lot of harmless contrarians floating about there are also whole sides to this platform filled with neofascists, eugenicists, and other assorted brokenheaded weirdos who should really not be fucked with,—to be clear here: if you receive a hateful comment on a post coming from an account that’s been posting shit like poetry about ethnic purity or establishing a fourth reich, DO NOT ENGAGE. 

Substack has made it very clear that they will do nothing about hate crimes in people’s comments. They won’t do anything about slurs in DMs. You bring it up on Notes and suddenly a bunch of weirdos come after you calling you a fascist for wanting to “suppress speech” or whatever before retreating back to suck on Elon Musk’s toes or whatever they do with their freetime.

Most of you all are here to write, and so many of you are digging into your practices deeply and profoundly,—a heck yeah is in order for that,—but you don’t need to get into fire fights with anyone really, even if it’s sometimes fun. Please please please, though, specifically avoid starting shit with some of the accounts you see. Substack represents much more of an intimate space that twitter did, and any seriously mentally unwell person can fixate on any profile and hate-read someone’s posts until they’re in enough of a frenzy to spiral into obsessions with the poster themselves, their life, and their wellbeing. Again, DO NOT ENGAGE in such circumstances. 

You don’t need to debate people in the comments. You really don’t.

Becoming a face of ridicule seems to drive some men, especially those who’ve compensated for past trauma with a sense of extreme machismo, or some weird fetishism for the Romans, absolutely batshit. Please watch out and keep yourself safe. Check in on one another when you see things happen on Notes. Like with any platform, with substack, we have a whole new spectrum of ways to be weird and creepy online.

SOME LESSONS FOR THE WANDERING READER ON HOW TO AVOID SUBSTACK PSYCHOSIS

1. Read widely, even outside of this place. I think it’s an intrinsic and not-talked-about-enough point that Substack reading doesn’t and shouldn’t replace sitting with a book for a couple hours.

   1. There are a lot of books to read and if you find yourself reading a lot of girlhood essays here you should find a copy of joan didion or eve babitz; if you find yourself reading feminist social commentary, check out susan sontag or, for fiction, octavia butler.

   2. And then when you read those books, be they essays or fiction, if another author and/or another book is brought up in the book you’re currently reading, even if it’s only a name in the footnotes, if it seems like something you might want to read, track it down at your local library! I’ve found some of my favorite books, Nathalie Sarraunte’s The Golden Fruits, only because it was in the footnotes of some other book whose name I can’t remember.

2. Slow incremental growth will always do better for your headspace than potshots at virality. Write what you would want to read and ignore the pressures to “make it,” or whatever. If you do end up making it, then great! Good for you! But in terms of mental health, it’s tough on yourself to strive towards exponential growth based on a personal brand. Take it a post at a time, you know?

3. Read others and support them even if that means reposting their more profound quotes. I’ll drop a couple incredible essays that went into inspiring this (shortish) piece:

I Am Not an Internet Cultural Critic

How To Lose A Subscriber In 10 Days

they still hate us

Anyways,

Until next time the next time,

Xoxoxo

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