twitter, c. 2007

there is still time, relax

There’s no reason to think Tumblr wasn’t like this in 2009, or that Twitter wasn’t like this in 2007.

Not to say i was online for much of that (i was eight years old in 2008 lol), but there was a time when tweets were called “microblogs,” and the hashtag feature was first pitched by a user and was very nearly rejected because jack dorsey felt hashtags were “too nerdy”.¹

how archaic!

Ok ok i know that substack officially began in 2017 and hit its publicity peak maybe in 2020 during the pandemic, but at the same time i’d argue that the platform’s current permutation as a proper social media site really only began roughly a year ago with the introduction of notes².

My biggest takeaway from one year on substack in its notes era (and with only one month of posting like at all regularly) is that you mustn’t think of this place as a personal blog, or as a column in a newspaper. Substack makes a lot more sense once you realizes it’s mainly a publicly performative revival of the old-school and long abandoned practice of writing long letters to one another.

Please don’t approach this place with a hustle/grind mindset or whatever,—if you want to make money here, fine, whatever.

But if you’re on my notes feed and clearly just doing everything you can to get as many subscribers as possible while writing surface level, could-be-AI prose underneath clickbait headings about how to maximize SEO to bolster subscriber count, you better know that i’m going to block your ass. Really no offense, but i don’t want to see that on my feed. I don’t care about your subscriber count.

But i do care about you.

I hope you understand the difference there, between my not caring about your subscriber optimization and my caring about you as someone with an ability for congzient thought,—don’t let this place and your aspirations you brought with you make you into a robot is all i’m trying to say.

As Amanda! of TCRD said, “There are still humans behind every screen,” and I think most of the humans here with us today are here for a reason beyond search engine optimization.

I want to read what you’re thinking about today; i want to read your responses to others’ thoughts; i want to see you inspired by them; i want to see you disagree w something and i want to see you clap back; i want to see you radicalized; i want to see you push back on ideas; i want to see you discover some strange esoteric mode of thought, performing rituals and writing about it; i want to read your communist poetry; i want to see you experiment with style; i want to see your do strange new amalgamation of gonzo investigative journalism; i want to listen to the albums you review; i want to read the books you rec; i want to follow the back-and-forth of what forty years ago would have been a long form correspondence between two people over the mail, except here instead of two there are dozens writing responses to one another over email, building real ideas together.

We’re at the start of this thing, whatever it is. We can build something great as long as we don’t forget about one another; nobody’s an island, especially not here.

In the first year-and-a-half of twitter, nobody there knew what was going on: only through a general openness to experiment with dialogue and communication, through users messing around with the open-source code to make improvements and test ideas for features, did twitter become what it became before it died an unseemly death at the hands of the apartheid electric car guy.

But at the same time, y’know, substack is different. The platform works under a different set of rules and dictates than 2000s blogging or oldschool publication, or even twitter or tumblr. Twitter’s mandate was less than 140 characters. That was the limitation that shaped it into what it became. Substack uses the opposite metric and allows a space specifically for the longform and therefore the rulebook is entirely different and demands new formats of interaction.

And though it does seem at times that most substackers are here for money and money alone,—ofc the hustle mentality of the pandemic internet has infected this place like it has every other online space,—there are so many good writers working here with (what i would consider) to be the most correct use of this site: again, writing letters to one another in public.

And isn’t that awesome?? Forget about the money, forget about making money here,—this is an experiment! This is posting on social media expressly not in a vacuum. No more yelling into a void. Let’s yell into the void together. Let’s make it a regular thing.

Because, best case scenario: down the road, substack allows for the creation of new, actually new, literary subculture. This is possible. Literary subcultures have blossomed before us and they will blossom after us (no matter how much NFT guys stomp their feet and say art is dead); i think that it’d be cool if we had blossomed here between you and me.

The real truth of any writer you admire from any period you may yearn for is that those writers were writing in response to, writing for, and writing with one another. There’s no telling if it will ever actually happen, but hey fingers crossed.

On a personal note I’ve found using my small substack platform as “public performance of an old-school letter writing practice” to be fulfilling enough to keep posting myself and my thoughts and experiences without the anxiety i feel everywhere else online.

I can spend time thinking about and reading over friends’ work, thinking down the various rabbitholes their pieces have stirred in my head, and i can spend time responding. Idk about you, but i don’t need to be paid for any of that; it quite simply makes my life feel more fulfilled in the day to day humdrum mundanity of it to be here for the conversation.

We have time. We have years, probably, until its inevitable IPO. Let’s take our time and make this into a cool place to hang out.

Collaboration is the key to all of this. I think the death of the author was overblown; the author is merely diminished back down to the size of the reader. We’re working on this culture thing together and you can certainly write back to me in response to this post, whoever you are reading this right now, you can write back to me being like “smh, briffin, go back to huffing your glue and stay outta this w your stupid takes,” and hey, if the style hits i’ll be there for it.

Anyways, i wrote this in response to my friend Amanda’s amazing piece for her publication The Certified Readers Department which you should read all of right away. She writes here that Substack seems to be filling up with starry-eyed hustlers falling into a vague delusion of becoming a self-made writer on this platform by way of optimization and a sort of brute force, LinkedIn-ish approach networking. You should read this piece, but like also subscribe,—she’s great and her style hits.

How to be ‘Substack Famous’

In a week’s time i’ll turn 25 (insane! scary!) and i’ll officially be in my mid twenties, traditionally the time wherein a person has their most productive years, and whooboy can i feel it coming on. Happy to be here with you for it, anyways.

xoxoxo,

briffin

1. Look i’m still full on the bully-the-nerds train but to clarify, hashtags are not nerdy, hashtags are cool and hashtags 00’s internet coded, which hey i think is neat,—my own simmering nostalgia for the internet as i first discovered it in childhood told me so,—but jack dorsey is absolutely a nerd and thus bullying is warranted. Especially as he continues to kick it w Elon, another huge nerd who should be relentlessly bullied imo. Let’s not get it flipped, here. Sidenote: “too nerdy for jack dorsey” rhymes nicely.

2. And notes has honestly changed everything on this platform, in a way: precisely because it provides a secondary space to explore a voice, connect, and generally shoot the shit in an explorative way outside of the more tight-voiced manner of a regular newsletter. The note and the newsletter go hand-in-hand for developing voice, one an informal watercooler gathering and the other a more formal address to fellow writers.