political economy

Substack is a Greenhouse

a colour photo of a large greenhouse with glass panels and rows of plants and bushes — Easton Greenhouse in the Uk, Creative Commons Source: Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.

Since 2017, the blogging platform Substack has been running the playbook “borrow lots of money, and spend it to pay people to post on your site, causing it to grow and your site to seem big and important.” The web boom of the 2000s was funded by Google which needed to give people reasons to make Google searches, see Google ads, and be surveilled by Google Analytics. In 2021 Substack spent $3 in advances to bloggers for every $1 they earned from those blogs. In the past this has always ended in tears, and the people who run and fund the site have shady ideas and ugly politics. You can find many people talking about specific Substack bloggers, their ideas, and whether Substack should host them.¹ Not as many people talk about how the site as a whole is weird in a way which feels normal to wealthy and influential people in New York City and Southern California.

Birdsite Was a Parade

Apparently twitter is in trouble (for readers in the future, twitter was a microblogging service especially popular from 2016 to 2022 with hundreds of millions of users, heavy representation among thinky talky Anglos and elected officials posting under their real names, where who people followed and clicked on and most of their posts were public; users were showed a feed of posts selected by a secret algorithm). Internet communities tend to be pompous about themselves, and pompous twitter users pronounce that it is a public square or a town square. I have another simile.