On March 21st, I’m hosting a meetup at the Bushwick Public Library dedicated to bringing creative professionals (or semi-professionals) to talk about their relationship to social media - and, ideally, to start planning for a future where they don’t need to rely on extractive digital platforms to run their creative practice.

I am using “creative professional” in the broadest sense possible here: active, former, or aspiring artists, writers, musicians, actors, documentations, clowns, and multidisciplinary wunderkinds are all welcome to attend. There will be a light structure guiding the group through some key questions about platforms and their impact on creative life, but the meta-objective of this gathering is to start building a network of creatives that are all interested in moving their respective practices “off-platform” - and, eventually, building the new institutions that will let them do so.

You can RSVP to the event here. Looking forward to seeing (some) of you!

This is a post in my “from the archives” series, where I pull older pieces from the Down The Ladder blog to post for my newer Substack audience that hasn’t seen them. This piece was originally made for YouTube, but I’ve re-posted it here because my Substack audience is almost certainly more interested in the subject matter than my YouTube subscribers.

Originally published: March 27th, 2024

In 1967, you could support yourself and your sickly gay boyfriend with one part time job between the two of you. This used to be a real country.

I’ve written a companion piece for this video that dives into the hard numbers that Patti Smith mentions in Just Kids to see if the economy truly is worse for art than it was in the 70s. I’ll give you a hint: the answer is probably yes. You can read the companion piece here.

The original Down The Ladder Piece on “Homeless Jesus” can be found here.

Credits

Written, Edited, and Produced by

Damian Thomas

Featuring the voice talents of:

Rory Booth (as Patti Smith) - https://linktr.ee/roryboothvoice

Works Cited

“The Axe Forgets,” Star Wars: Andor, Disney+

FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul. “Homeless Jesus Sculpture Is so Realistic People Are Calling 911.” Www.youtube.com, 23 Jan. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZfXWpwau7E. Accessed 26 Mar. 2024.

Leila Atassi, cleveland.com. “‘Homeless Jesus’ Proves His Point in Bay Village, When Call to Police Goes Viral: Leila Atassi.” Cleveland, 23 Oct. 2020, www.cleveland.com/opinion/2020/10/homeless-jesus-proves-his-point-in-bay-village-when-call-to-police-goes-viral-leila-atassi.html.

PBS NewsHour. Patti Smith Reads from “Just Kids.” 12 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJWu0uCLVTk. Accessed 26 Mar. 2024.

Schmalz, Timothy. Sculptures by TPS | Homeless Jesus. www.sculpturebytps.com/portfolio_page/homeless-jesus/.

Smith, Patti. Just Kids. New York, Ny, Ecco, 2010.

Star Wars: Andor. Disney+, Episode 5.

Taylor, Walton. “Presidential Address: On Resisting the Narcissism of the Present.” Springermedicine.com, 10 Jan. 2019, www.springermedicine.com/breast-cancer/breast-cancer/presidential-address-on-resisting-the-narcissism-of-the-present/23045026. Accessed 25 Mar. 2024.

Logan Paul Vlogs. “So Sorry.” YouTube, 2 Jan. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwZT7T-TXT0.

TLC. “Jon & Kate plus 8: Assigned Seats.” Www.youtube.com, 5 June 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5SIsVm1nmw. Accessed 26 Mar. 2024.

In my latest video, I used a ton of excerpts from Patti Smith’s Just Kids where she cites specific amounts of money she spent on things like rent, food, and supplies. One may assume that the numbers are only so unusually low because of inflation. One would be wrong - and I can prove it.

Read more

For those who don’t know, outside of this outlet my primary pursuit is being a part of the platform resistance: supporting and building the social organizations and technical infrastructure needed to build a society free from the corrosive influence of Silicon Valley and the demons it has foisted upon us. My main project¹ in this field is Unplatform, an interactive guide and recommendations database to help people leave social media that I launched almost exactly a year ago at time of writing. Unplatform has been a success by most measures. Emails trickle into my inbox from around the world on a semi-regular basis from people whose lives have been improved by the project, and if the unique visitor stats I see on my analytics panel are to be believed, there’s an even greater number of people who have gotten value out of the project who just haven’t gotten the time to reach out.

However, in the year since I’ve launched Unplatform, something has become abundantly clear to me: the load-bearing piece of social media (and platform capitalism more generally) is not merely individual participation. In my conversations with people in real life about why they stayed on social media platforms that they generally hated, I would get one of two answers. Either I was speaking to some kind of creative professional who stayed for fear of losing access to their audience or community, or I was speaking to someone in one of those audiences or communities, who feared losing access to the work that mattered most to them. It struck me immediately how near-universal these answers were. Even the responses I got that were not explicitly about cultural production were still in some way anchored in fundamental concerns about access to their immediate communities - not, as the discourse on this issue can sometimes imply, about problems with “addiction” to their algorithmic feeds².

These conversations were deeply instructive for me when thinking about where to take the Unplatform project next - but there was just one problem. I didn’t write down any of them³. More importantly than that, I didn’t have enough of them - the vast majority of people I spoke to were folks in and around the underground arts and culture scene in Orlando, Florida, where I lived at the time. In order for Unplatform to evolve from “good resource for helping an individual person to log off” into “explosive dynamo of the platform resistance,” I need to speak to as many people as possible to get an idea of how communities around the world experience and interact with social media. That’s where you come in.

Over the next few months, I’m looking to talk to:

1. Artists, writers, musicians, actors, and any other creative professionals who’s careers or communities primarily exist on social media platforms⁴;

2. People in hobbyist spaces, identity-based social or activist groups, or other niche communities where the desire to leave social media exists but for whatever reason hasn’t been acted upon;

3. Organizers and activists in civic or political organizations that rely on social media to reach their constituencies;

4. People who host or organize events for any of the above;

5. Any other person who is interested in the Unplatform project and would like to support.

I’ve created a form where you (or anyone you link it to) can express interest in being interviewed for the Unplatform project. Don’t get too hung up on whether you fall exactly into one of the above five categories. Not only is the more the merrier, but the urgency of building the infrastructure for a post-platform society has never been higher, especially as the platforms continue to fuse with the present regime at an alarming pace.

Thanks for reading - happy to answer any further questions over email. Have a good rest of your week.

1 Unplatform is actually a spinoff of my indie web newsletter, From The Superhighway, which might be of interest of you if you like finding good things on the internet.

2 Now, of course, many people did tell me they had developed maladaptive relationships with various social media platforms that may resemble addiction if looked at superficially. But even people who would explicitly cop to having problems with “brain rot” would say that the factor keeping them on their platforms was not the “brain rot” itself but everything apart from it. A common refrain was something along the lines of “most of TikTok / Reels / Shorts is garbage, but I occasionally find videos from [creator] that are genuinely moving or educational, so it’s hard for me to completely want to leave.”

3 Some of them were written down via DM, but are now lost to time on my now-deleted Instagram. My bad.

4 For the purposes of this project, Substack doesn’t count, but the question of whether it should remains something I’m conflicted about.

Below is my rejected application to The Onion’s writing internship from April 2025. I did not expect to get the position given the tremendous level of talent I was probably up against, but I do think that it would be a waste to not share my application materials here, given that I spent a significant amount of time working on them. We were asked to come up with 25 headlines, and then we were directed to take two of them and turn them into News-In-Brief articles. This is what I came up with.

Headlines

1. To Combat Tariffs, iPhone 18 Is Just an Aluminum Brick Full of Cocaine

2. New Season of Undercover Boss Sees Factory Farming CEO Engage in Oviposition; Milking

3. Experimental Male Birth Control Allows You To Inject Microplastics Into Your Balls at Home

4. Kanye West in Talks To Star As Hitler in Triumph of the Will Remake

5. New K-BBQ Restaurant Lets You Wash Your Own Dishes, Too

6. Espresso Consumption Down 30% As Consumers Fear Being Too “Woke”

7. New App Lets You Bet on Which of Your Family Members Will Be Bankrupted by Gambling

8. Ivy League Schools Concerned About War Criminal “Brain Drain”

9. OpenAI Builds Giant Cube Adorned With ChatGPT Text; Points All Server Farms Towards It

10. Snow Lepoards, Black Bears Campaign To Stop “Affirmative Action” for Pandas

11. Democrats Reveal Initiative To Make a New Committee To Make a Commission To Explore Investigating Misconduct

12. Elon Musk’s Paid Accounts Stir Controversy in “Cookie Clicker” Community

13. Nintendo Launching “Filthy Gaijin” Switch 2 Model Region-Locked to U.S., Costs $1776

14. Local Stoic Isn’t Even That Passionate About It

15. Leaked Video Shows Chinese Spies “Chilling, Vibing” on American Soil

16. Serial Killer Starts World’s First Live True Crime Podcast

17. NIST Distributes Instructional Pamphlet About Proper Angles, Timings for Nazi Salute

18. “Skaters 4 Hostile Architecture” Advocates for More Leaning Bars, Pungee Pits

19. Time-Traveling Founders Enraged To See Constitution Working As Intended

20. Brian Johnson Posts New Video of 24 Hour Morning Routine

21. New Cybertruck Model Comes With Mounted Mini-Gun for “The Haters”

22. “Severance” Revealed To Be Viral Marketing for Business That “Actually Does All That Shit”

23. JFK Assassination Files Reveal That President Was Shot in 1963

24. Physicists Say Failing To Fit Round Peg Into Square Hole Is “Skill Issue”

25. Gallup: 30% of Men Think It’s Gay To Like Women

Articles

1. Serial Killer Starts World’s First Live True Crime Podcast

Shortly after shaking up the slaying scene with his recent sextuple homicide, Florida-based serial killer Jacob Donaldson has decided to take his talents to the world of podcasting. His hit new show, Superpredator: Live, promises to treat true crime junkies to an immersive slaughter experience. “We really wanted the fans to be able to get closer to the true crime experience,” said Sasha Marks, the show’s editor and producer. “With conventional true crime content, viewers and advertisers have to settle for exploiting the victims of family annihilators and pedophiles after the fact,” Marks said. “With our show, we can create new harrowing tales of depraved sin in real-time - and deliver them directly to our dedicated fan base.”

Since the show’s debut in January, it has gained over fourteen million listeners on Spotify, with a significant portion of them subscribing to the podcast’s Patreon for additional content. “I love the opportunity to let fans feel like they’re part of the Superpredator experience,” said Donaldson. “Our $10 members get the chance to send me their name, address, and location so I can come and brutally kill them on a future episode. I’m always proud to see them apply the knowledge they’ve learned from Superpredator and other true crime shows in the moments before I watch the life drain from their eyes.” Donaldson is currently in talks with Netflix to create Superpredator spinoffs for the international market.

2. App Lets You Bet On Which of Your Family Members Will Be Bankrupted By Gambling

Seizing on the rapid disintegration of the American family, upstart gambling app FamDuel looks to give the nation’s disgruntled spouses and progeny the opportunity to make a bit of extra cash off the debilitating addictions of their formerly loved ones. “FamDuel is just about the only thing keeping me sane these days,” said Patricia Martins, whose husband recently lost their entire life savings on a series of ill-advised DraftKings parlays. “It was like being able to hedge my bet on this marriage - like, sure, he might totally crash out, but at least I can walk away with some cash in the separation.”

For FamDuel CEO Eloise Whips, this is all part of the plan. “I came up with the idea for FamDuel while watching The Big Short,” Whips said. “I saw those guys become multi-millionaires off of the total destruction of the American economy and thought to myself: ‘what if I could do that to my Uncle?’” At press time, FamDuel informed The Onion that they were launching a new service that allowed users to pool their bets on their hopeless kin together and re-sell them as “Collateralized Dumbass Obligations.”

There’s a certain unspoken social contract that I’ve always felt applies to legacy applications. Windows Notepad, for example, does one thing: it edits plain text documents. It has been editing plain text documents for over 40 years. That’s all it does, and that’s all it needs to do.

It’s because of that — and perhaps a bit of naïveté — that I really did not expect Microsoft to make Notepad part of their AI offensive. When I learned of this development, I had to do a double take and make sure I wasn’t reading an Onion or Hard Times article. Microsoft (and the entire tech industry) have pursued the AI craze with a frenzied intensity that eclipses almost any technology trend that I’ve witnessed in my lifetime, but, yet again, I find my worst nightmares totally eclipsed by the course of current events.

It might not immediately be apparent to you why Notepad in particular is such a red line, especially in light of the other extremely absurd controversies Microsoft has been embroiled in with regard to AI. The reason I find the Notepad encroachment so worrying is the same reason I found the Neocities AI assistant “Penelope” worrying — it’s because these generative AI tools are being shoved directly into the faces of the people who are least prepared to interact with them.

I don’t know about you, but Notepad was the very first text editor I interacted with in my entire life, and its unparalleled simplicity and singular use-case is exactly why it’s been pre-installed on every Windows OS in the last four decades. A literal child can operate Notepad, and I know that because I did operate Notepad when I was a literal child, as did many other folks who grew up using Windows operating systems. It is (or, at least, was) a critical flash point for digital literacy. But now, the children (or the digitally illiterate adults) using Windows today are very soon going to have to contend with the constant presence of an AI tool that they don’t have the technical ability to understand, vet, or control — and that tool is going to be presented to them by a corporation that can’t really control it either.

This is, of course, if kids are being taught how to use “computers” in the classical sense of the word in the first place. Just a few years ago, the percentage of adults that can answer basic questions about the current technology paradigm was not encouraging. How many kids know how filesystems work? How many kids are actually using web browsers instead of mobile apps provided directly by the platforms? How many of them know basic knowledge about how to correctly use Google search — and how many of them are going to bother to learn, now that AI overviews clog up the top of each search query by default?[1] I suspect not many will, and as the years march on and The Platforms™️ continue to abstract away actual twig-and-leaves computing basics away from their users, the digital literacy barriers that protected new users from the worst excesses on the Internet will continue to dissolve.

And, to be clear, that is not a good thing. It was good that you had to understand how the filesystem worked in order to save content, because it meant you would be able to troubleshoot problems and detect abnormalities later. It was good that you needed to know how browsers worked before you could access the “superhighway,” because it made you understand that “the computer” is actually just a device that lets you interface with a bunch of different vendors and not the sole proprietor all your digital interactions. It was good that extracting meaningful information from Google Search required you to learn how to use queries and keywords, because the alternative is to ask it a question like it’s a human — something that kids are less likely to understand isn’t true.

The enshittification war has many different fronts, and while it’s important to focus on the ones that directly affect you, the future of the digital world is going to ultimately be decided by the people being introduced to it right now. It’s essential that we keep their experiences in mind, because the enshittifiers certainly haven’t.

Footnotes

1. Furthermore, how many of them know that the first few results for a wide variety of queries are themselves full of incorrect, AI-generated slop even under the official AI summary? Turning the summaries off requires technical knowledge too — can they install uBlock plus, search for the Reddit thread that tells you what filter to use to disable it, and successfully implement those instructions?

Originally published: Jul 18, 2023

I have always had an admiration for artists who work with physical space. It demands a level of commitment that I often struggle to muster - every decision carries more weight because of the enormous difficulty of starting over. Works meant for populated urban environments are even more fraught, as the artist has little to no control over the context they are presented in. People, cars, other buildings, and the entire city are in constant metamorphosis, and the piece itself has to fight tooth and nail to retain its originally intended meaning.

A few weeks ago, I saw a piece lose that fight.

I saw the piece shown above a while ago while finishing a downtown trip with my mother. The picture you are seeing was taken well after I saw it for the first time, intentionally framed to capture the entire piece - but when my mother and I passed this statue, it was at night, and we did not have the time to stop to examine it. Nonetheless, we both noticed the installation from down the sidewalk as we approached it. We assumed that it was a homeless person sleeping on a bench, but as we drew closer, it became clear that it was merely a statue depicting a homeless person sleeping on a bench.

My mother and I exchanged looks of mutual bewilderment and kept walking. I racked my brain to find a reason why someone might build something like this, but my memory was jogged on the way back to the car when I saw an actual bench, and it looked like this.

An park bench with a metal separator in the middle.

As we walked back to the car that night, I convinced myself for a moment that this statue was not a statue, but a bold new innovation in hostile architecture so boundlessly cruel as to be almost comical: building benches with the homeless people pre-installed. I wanted to believe that such a thing would never exist, but the story of the last five years has been a series of underestimating the world’s capacity for lunacy and being spectacularly proven wrong with the nihilistic glee of an Always Sunny cold open. “The Gang Builds A Fake Homeless Person” was just slightly too plausible a premise to dismiss out of hand.

As with most random minutiae that infuriate me, I took my findings to the group chat, and was informed by a friend that this bench was not a bench at all - it was an art piece. The person on the bench wasn’t just “a homeless person”. It was meant to be Jesus Christ.

“Homeless Jesus” is an installation by Canadian sculptor Timothy Schmalz that was first installed at the University of Toronto in 2013. As it turns out, it is not intended to be the extended end-zone dance on the homeless that I originally understood it as. It is actually intended to force a confrontation with Western society’s lack of compassion for the less fortunate.

Schmalz was very consciously trying to challenge the traditional depictions of “the Christ of glory, enthroned in finery.” The sculpture paints a picture of Jesus closer to the way he is frequently described in the Bible. “We believe that that’s the kind of life Jesus had,” said Rev. David Buck, a rector who supported installing the statue at his Davidson, North Carolina church. “He was, in essence, a homeless person.”

“Homeless Jesus” has been, by all accounts, wildly successful in making the point that Schmalz originally intended - both through its proponents and its detractors. The statue has been installed in several dozen churches, universities, and public spaces around the world, and it has provoked exactly the kind of reactions that Schmalz wanted to provoke - most notably when a Bay Village, Ohio resident called the police on the statue in October 2020, having mistaken it for an actual homeless person. Schmalz would be well within his rights to declare his artistic mission fully accomplished.

In theory, this new understanding of the installation, should have totally closed the book on my obsession with this baffling object, but it only amplified it. The message of the piece - that Jesus’s humble beginnings should remind us of the essential humanity of every person who’s been cast out by society - is not a bad one. It is as socially productive a message as any Christian church in modern America could be expected to muster, and given that I live in Florida, I see far less productive messages on the billboard of every highway. But understanding the purpose of the installation did not make me want to leave it alone, because it only made me ask a secondary question: if you’re a church leader who wants to demonstrate your commitment to universal love and generosity for the less fortunate, would it not be more useful to actually provide a real bench that a homeless person could sleep on, rather than an art display with the idea of a bench in it?

One must forgive me for assuming the worst of Schmalz’s statue. The landscape of hostile architecture in the United States is constantly and rapidly evolving, in no small part because it is a discipline that grows in proportion to our social maladies - of which we have many. New York City has street vents built with jagged surfaces to prevent sleeping on them. Literal spike fields erected under shaded entrances to buildings is not an uncommon sight. Many places have forgone the idea of “benches” entirely and instead installed “leaning bars” instead. This statue seemed like the logical next step - moving beyond mere practical cruelty and entering a bold new stage of self-conscious mockery. “You can’t sleep here,” the bronze Jesus says with a wink. “It’s already occupied.”

And, in spite of Schmalz’s intentions, the bench kind of does read that way - not because of how it presents itself but because of the context that it is presented in. Directly across the street from the statue is the Orange County Administration building, where one can find actual benches with separators in the middle to prevent the heinous crime of “laying in a horizontal position.” Standing on the intersection south of both of them, both the Homeless Jesus statue and the actual benches are in view.

A bench-shaped object outside of the Orange County Administration Building. “Homeless Jesus” is just out of frame to the top left.

I am a mere heathen, but I’d imagine that Jesus Christ would probably not want to hog one of the only benches in downtown Orlando without a separator in the middle to prevent sleeping. It would remain illegal to “lay in a horizontal position” per city ordinance, but surely a genuine commitment to charity would not be restricted by the petty decrees of temporal authorities, especially when it would be cheaper and easier than sculpting an entire fake person to lay on a bench.

“Homeless Jesus” did exactly what Schmalz wanted to do. The fact that his piece takes on a secondary, more sinister meaning when placed in the context of the ceaseless march of urban inequality isn’t his fault, and it isn’t his problem. None of that changes the fact that - assuming the housing crisis continues to accelerate - the meaning the piece was meant to represent will be slowly replaced by the meaning of what the piece actually is in physical space: just another bench that keeps you from laying down. The slumbering Christ is a symbol only to the people who don’t actually need to sleep on it, because if you actually were homeless and did need to sleep somewhere, the bronze Jesus doesn’t “symbolize” anything - it is an actual, tangible barrier to shelter and comfort. The fortunate see a statement piece, but the downtrodden see the state.

One of the most compelling arguments about technology that I’ve encountered in the last few years was Benjamin Bratton’s case against using the word “surveillance” as a catch-all for all social monitoring mechanisms in his 2021 book Revenge of the Real. To let him explain:

… It is worth asking questions about the critical discourse of “anti-surveillance.” Notions of “resistance” to surveillance, at once both fuzzy and axiomatic, credentialize entire art biennials, software movements, streaming documentaries, and political parties, and I am actually sympathetic to the bigger goals of many of these. But when the master concept is inflated and amplified to explain so very much about what’s what and why, it is inevitable that the surveillance bubble will soon pop as more precise concepts appear to make sense of sensing, modeling, and prediction as a social technology.

Indeed, the examples of “resistance” to surveillance that Bratton advances in the book are both fuzzy and axiomatic indeed: European professors urging their students to refuse COVID testing to avoid contributing to the kind of “big data biopolitics” that is “inseparable from eugenics, the colonial-era slave trade, AI bias, and the torture of Uighurs”; American tech giants hilariously refusing to de-anonymize user data for European contact tracing programs on the grounds of protecting privacy; once-admired philosophers desperately crafting strained metaphors to compare Zoom classes to Auschwitz; and so on. No doubt all of these admittedly extreme examples appear to you as obviously missing the point of surveillance state critiques, but that begs the question: what, exactly, is the point of critiquing the surveillance state?

What Bratton is elucidating in the quote above is that most left-of-center thinkers have deeply unsatisfying answers to that question, if they have coherent answers at all. He’s hit upon one of the many pernicious libertarian axioms that animates the politics of the “bottom-left” of the political compass - a general resistance to subordination to or quantification by any social system of any kind, regardless of the structure of the system, who is administering it, and for what purpose. To the kind of crypto-libertarian Bratton is critiquing, evil lies in the act of surveillance itself - not in the intent of that surveillance or the impacts thereof.

Optimistically, in the book, Bratton predicts that Soon™ the “surveillance bubble” will stop and we will collectively adopt a broader and more responsible view. CT Jones’s recent piece in Rolling Stone - about citizen recordings of ICE arrests - suggests we still have a long way to go.

Early in the piece, Jones sets up the supposed tension that they wants to explore through the lens of a viral recent ICE kidnapping in Worcester:

Even a few seconds captured the harsh reality: millions of people saw one of the worst moments of this young girl’s life — and they didn’t even know her name. Her story was important for the nation to know — but sharing it on social media highlighted one of the strongest conundrums of our digital age. People want to turn the government’s surveillance state back on itself — but how do they do that and keep their neighbors safe in the process?

Now, I want to be clear about one thing: by no means do I want to downplay the importance of operational security, particularly in the context of monitoring rogue state actors like ICE. It’s of course important to consider the ways that recording sensitive incidents can risk providing ammunition to bad actors. The problem is that Jones not only fails to persuasively demonstrate that citizens recording ICE arrests poses such a risk (or a risk greater than its immediate, very tangible reward), but in trying to draw a hackneyed connection between such citizen monitoring and the “surveillance state” reveals that they - much like the European professor who compared COVID testing to the slave trade - do not actually have a coherent critique of the surveillance state.

Jones’s argument seems to rest upon the idea that when we pull out or phones or pull footage from Ring cameras to document ICE arrests, we’re reinforcing an “unintentional reliance — and in many cases, investment — right back into the surveillance state.” They point out a few very true, very chilling developments in the world of surveillance technology: Amazon’s recent deals with Flock Safety, and ICE’s ambition to build a 24/7 social media surveillance team, among other things. In this climate, Jones argues “posting videos of ICE raids, especially those where protestors and deterrers have their faces fully visible … exposes people to the same surveillance state that the Trump administration has already proven willing to use in deportation cases.”

There are two key problems with Jones’s case. First, ICE - and government actors in general - already have the surveillance tools that they need to pursue their goals. It is not as if people started buying smartphones or installing Ring cameras for the express purpose of monitoring ICE arrests. These technologies already exist, already provide public and private actors alike with unimaginable amounts of data at a moment’s notice, and already are used to police dissent. If everyone in the vicinity of every ICE arrest put away their phone or taped over their Ring camera, is that going to make a dent in the titanic vault of data that Flock collects from over 5000 communities in 50 states, per their own statistics? Is it going to make life easier for people accused by ICE of obstruction of justice or assault, who would now have to defend themselves in the absence of multiple angles worth of videographic evidence? Is it going to strengthen the case made by the chorus of voices calling for the agency to be stopped in its tracks, voices that Jones themselves acknowledges have been bolstered by the widespread availability of arrest footage? It seems to me that the answer is obviously no, which is why Jones’s proposition that there is a dangerous trade-off between monitoring ICE’s activity and resisting the surveillance state is so confused to begin with.

But that confusion - the idea that the surveilling the state and the state surveilling you are part and parcel of the same system - is downstream of the bigger problem with Jones’s case, and the bigger problem with “anti-surveillance” discourse in general. The problem of modern society is not that there is too much “surveillance” in the aggregate. Indeed, there are many actors in society that operate in many corners with the reckless impunity that comes with secrecy: banks, tech companies, and, of course, state organs like ICE (and DHS more broadly). To return to the question I posed earlier: what is the point of critiquing the surveillance state? Frank Pasquale’s The Black Box Society (2015), at last, provides us with a persuasive answer (emphasis mine):

With so much secrecy so publicly in place, it is easy for casual observers to conclude that there is a rough parity between the informational protection of individuals and civil associations and those of corporations and government. … But I will attempt to overthrow this assumption. We do not live in a peaceable kingdom of private walled gardens; the contemporary world more closely resembles a one-way mirror. Important corporate actors have unprecedented knowledge of the minutiae of our daily lives, while we know little to nothing about how they use this knowledge to influence the important decisions that we — and they — make.

There you have it. The problem is not that surveillance exists, but that it is asymmetrical. The credit bureaus know everything about us, but we don’t know the algorithm that calculates the scores they give us. Google has enough data to predict your every whim, but they’re not required to disclose how they used it to generate the first page of your search results. The government can put you on a no-fly list without telling you that you’re on it or explaining what you did to get there. Surveillance is not merely about observation - it is about power.

With all this in mind, let’s return to the situation that prompted Jones’s article to begin with: citizen recording of ICE arrests. Jones has identified one of the precious few situations where the surveillance is actually being used to tip the scales back in the favor of the public. Ring’s doorbell cameras, Flock’s license plate readers, and the vast array of digital tracking services that your phone regularly rats you out to are already up and running, providing data to (increasingly indistinguishable) private and public actors alike as part of secret agreements that the public is often legally barred from knowing the details of. But in this very specific edge case, we have found a way to leverage the weight of some of the same digital networks used to watch us to watch the watchmen. Recording an ICE arrest (or reporting it in a local group chat or community forum, as has become quite common since the administration ramped up its offensives earlier this year) is one small way that we are able to even the scales of surveillance that are usually stacked so tall against us - a way to produce data for a purpose and at a scale that is actually useful for the public good.

But Jones is incapable of making this distinction, because the argument they’re advancing is in the same tradition of the crypto-libertarian view I criticized above: that the problem with the surveillance state is in the act of surveillance itself, totally independent from the purposes of that surveillance or the impacts thereof. It is a view that cannot distinguish between the political function of a CCTV camera feed monitoring your local playground and the cell phone footage of the George Floyd murder - or, for that matter, between COVID-19 contact tracing and concentration camps. And in this critical moment, where public documentation of and rapid response to the ongoing political crisis looks to be one of the most essential tools we have to combat it, it’s an unbelievably dangerous view that should have been left behind around the same time cops started turning off their body cams.

One of the catalysts for this interview series was book critic Becca Rothfield’s recent departure from Substack - I had followed her work here for quite a while, and I found her misgivings with the “influencer” model of publishing deeply relatable. She was kind enough to talk to me a little bit about her time on the platform, her motivations for leaving, and the direction of online publishing in general.

Q: In your first proper post on your Substack from 2020, you thank folks that “followed you off of” Twitter to subscribe to your blog. In your view, was your Substack initially a replacement for your Twitter account, and if so - in what ways?

Yes, I initially saw Substack as a replacement for Twitter and not much else, although I think it’s evolved into much more in the intervening five years. For me, Twitter was a place to concentrate all of the writing that I did for disparate publications so that readers could find it in one fell swoop, and I envisioned that my Substack would serve the same function. And it did, for a time.

Q: What motivated you to select Substack specifically, over another potential publishing platform like Wordpress, Squarespace, or Ghost? (I’m curious about your answer in particular, because one of the largest value-adds that Substack has is its relative ease of monetization, a feature that you’ve mentioned you were barred from using.)

Well, initially, I wasn’t barred from monetizing, because I didn’t work at the Washington Post yet. At the time, I was a graduate student and freelancer, and I could’ve asked readers to pay if I’d felt I was writing anything worth paying for. (For a time, I did attempt a paywalled series, but I gave up on it pretty shortly thereafter.) Honestly, I didn’t think too hard about where to go. Substack seemed to be where other people were going—and it sent emails out, which I don’t think Wordpress or Squarespace do, although I could be wrong, and obviously I didn’t spend a lot of time researching where to go—so that’s where I went.

Q: Much of your departure post focuses on the ways that the size of your following has changed, but in the four years you’ve been on it, has Substack itself changed in meaningful ways? If so, what were those changes, and how did they affect your relationship to the platform?

I think it has changed in a number of ways. More people have joined; more people have championed Substack as a viable alternative to mainstream media; more people are using it as a platform for publishing serious work, as opposed to chatty newsletters; and more publications are hosted on it. Most importantly, for me, it has more of the feel of social media. When I first joined, it was, in my mind at least, just a site that could send emails to a large group of people. Now, it’s more of a commons. I don’t think there’s been a single successor to pre-Elon Twitter, which gathered many people of different political persuasions in a single digital cesspool, but Substack is heir apparent to the extent that any site is. It’s where a number of writers have gone, anyway, which means that it feels like more of a parasocial place. The Notes feature is Twitter-adjacent, and commenters are more loquacious. I left Twitter mostly because I don’t like social media, at least when it comes to writing. I prefer cultivating distance between writing and response.

Q: Would you still recommend someone join Substack if they - like you - were leaving traditional social media and trying to carve out a space to share their work with their previous audience? If not, what would you recommend they do instead?

I don’t know, honestly. It depends on each individual writer’s tolerance for social media and its combative atmosphere. It depends on the degree to which you can resist getting sucked into squabbles. (I am bad at this.) As you can probably tell, I don’t spend a lot of time looking into the range of available options, and I haven’t migrated elsewhere myself, so it may be that there is some other website that preserves the features of Substack I originally liked, without the features that I don’t like. It’s probably fine as a place to send out emails of links to articles. For my own part, what I’ve been trying to do is tune out the noise to focus on the difficult work of writing, and that’s been good for me as a writer, though I don’t know if it’s been good for my audience-cultivation abilities.

Q: The core of your critique of Substack as a platform appears to be the way it promotes the hyper-individualization of media production (i.e. “influencers” over “institutions”). I know it’s a big ask, but do you see any platforms, organizations, or intellectual currents meaningfully pushing back against that trend? If so, what are they, and how are they doing it?

Yes, I think magazines and publishing houses are pushing back against that trend! That’s what a magazine or a publisher is: an institution. It’s worth noting that there are publications hosted on Substack, and some of these are attempting to conform to the institutional model. What matters is not really where the institution is hosted but how it operates. Are there editors? Is there some kind of communal publishing process?

This piece is part of an ongoing interview series called “on substack,” in which I talk to writers on Substack about the state of the platform and the future of writing on the internet. If you want to keep up with future posts, you can subscribe to the newsletter in the sidebar to the right.

Something to note: I wrote this article before I had upgraded to iOS 17, where they seem to have patched the specific Siri behavior I am talking about. I maintain that the fact this behavior was ever present still says a great deal about Apple’s design philosophy.

Originally published: Jan 29, 2024

Let’s begin this week with an exercise for the reader. If you’re an Android user, continue reading quietly and indulge in the smug satisfaction that you’re not victim to the petty tyranny I’m about to describe. If you’re an iPhone user, pick it up and say the following phrase:

“Hey Siri, set a timer for five pm.”

At time of writing, Siri will respond:

“Timers can’t be set for a time of day, so I’ve set your alarm for five pm.”

I have been thinking about this for years now. I can’t remember exactly when I noticed how strange this response is, but as soon as I did, I couldn’t help but intentionally trigger it every time I needed to set an alarm just to bask in its absurd passive-aggression. It tells a story about user interface design, the way we interact with artificial “intelligence,” and the way that tech companies frame our thought.

The story starts with a simple technical problem. When designing a service like Siri, Apple has to first decide how to translate all the iPhone’s existing functions into human-readable (and expressible) phrases. The iPhone’s clock app has two related but separate functions: alarms, which trigger a sound at a specific time of day, and timers, which trigger a sound after a certain period has elapsed. The only functional difference between the two is that a timer has a countdown that is visible within the clock app, and alarms merely have a toggle switch that tells you if they’re enabled or not.

Initially, Apple must have decided that this separation of functionality also had to be reflected in the phrases the user has to say to Siri to activate either function. And so, if it’s noon, and you want to set a countdown timer for thirty minutes from now, you say “set a timer for thirty minutes.” If you want to set an alarm for thirty minutes from now, you say “set an alarm for twelve thirty.” All is well and good so far.

But in normal human conversation, which artificial “intelligence” tools like Siri are in theory supposed to emulate, we often use the terms “timer” and “alarm” interchangeably. At some point, either in production or in the testing process, Apple found that a large portion of people were saying “timer” when they really wanted the “alarm” function. We know this because - as about half of those reading this just demonstrated - they have programmed in a fallback for this case: if you set a timer for a specific time of day, Siri will use the “alarm” function instead.

In many cases, that would be the end of it. As a programmer myself, I can confidently say most of the job is trying to translate the spirit of the user’s command into action rather than the letter. But where things get really interesting is how Apple has decided to handle this use case. Before following the command, Siri makes sure you know that you can’t set a timer for a time of day, despite the fact that from the user’s perspective, this is exactly what Siri has done. But it doesn’t matter, because even as Apple understands the practical reality that Siri should just follow the spirit of the user’s command and move on, it was clearly important to them that the user knows they are doing it wrong.

This is the part of the interaction that fascinates me so. There’s no technical reason Apple needs to insist that the user uses the “correct” terminology for the iPhone’s functionality. The motivation for this is entirely ideological.

Discussion of Apple’s “walled garden” - the way that they lock users into buying their products in perpetuity by adding integrations between all of their devices (and making it difficult to integrate others) - is common in tech circles. My personal favorite tech YouTuber, Marques Brownlee, gave the most succinct explanation of it in his video about the topic. In the video, Brownlee talks to other Apple users within the tech journalism space, and he asks them why they continue to use the iPhone. Almost all of them respond with some variation of the “ecosystem,” essentially admitting that they’re trapped within the walled garden, and that the transition costs of moving away from it would be too high to justify.

But this Siri interaction reveals something else: the walls of the garden are not exclusively technological. Siri will correct you on the timer / alarm distinction every single time you ask without fail, forever. And, as such, many users are likely to absorb it - to redefine the concepts “timer” and “alarm” in their own mind to align with the functionality of their phone, rather than human language.

This interaction is small, and on its own, largely inconsequential. But Apple designing software specifically with the purpose of social engineering is not limited to this. Most cynically, they have until last year refused to implement RCS - the new standard for text messages that enables advanced features - to ensure that iMessage retains its social power to divide people into a blue bubble / green bubble caste system. I am aware that description may sound dramatic, but consider that almost every Apple user Brownlee surveyed in that video cited iMessage as the reason they choose to remain in within the walls of the garden. Consider that the demand to circumvent the Apple exclusivity of iMessage is so large that an entire cottage industry of companies have sprouted up to fulfill it, mostly unsuccessfully. Consider that the social ostracization that comes with the green bubble is most powerful among teens.

Most of the time when we discuss the way technology influences our habits of mind, we talk about black-box machine learning algorithms whose directives are to increase engagement. Those algorithms are obviously still given those directives by humans with financial and social priorities - and discussion of how those priorities still carry human prejudices is ongoing and important. But Apple’s decisions about timers, alarms, and iMessage are not algorithmically driven - they are very straightforward and conscious choices to use their market share to shape society in their image. It is not enough for them to build a walled garden around your technology. They’ll build one around your mind, too - and that underscores the importance of staying aware of the way that they’re trying.

Welp, I’ve done it. I’ve finally caved. After three whole years resisting the allure of Substack, I’ve finally decided to make it the primary outlet for future Down The Ladder pieces.

To longtime readers, the email in your inbox (or the update in your RSS feed, when I get around to mirroring it) no doubt appeared to be at least a startling surrender, if not a betrayal. You are probably in want of an explanation for why I have properly joined this website just in time for everyone to start hating it loudly and publicly. I have taken a break from wiping copious amounts of egg off of my face in order to offer one.

The reason I opted to go the route of an independent, off-platform blog instead of jumping on the Substack bandwagon when I started Down The Ladder in 2023 was largely about control. Starting a Substack would have been far easier, but I was already suspicious of the platform’s trajectory (Notes had been recently introduced, and the stench of bloat and eventual enshittification was all over them), and, to be quite honest, I just liked the technical and aesthetic independence that came with having my own website with its own domain, and was willing to sacrifice some of the potential reach of my work in order to get it.

This independence, though, was largely illusory for two reasons:

1. It took quite a lot of time to spin up the bespoke mailing list solution that the blog used, and - to keep a very long story short - the solution that I eventually landed on was paying $20/mo to a glorified wrapper for Amazon Web Services for the privilege of sending out emails to a very small audience. I had done all that work to remain in a big tech ecosystem with extra steps.

2. I literally had a YouTube channel. I was not at all free from algorithmic pressure or the comorbidities thereof. Because the reach of the YouTube channel dwarfed that of the blog a hundred-fold, I found myself starting to select ideas for pieces that were more video-friendly, which naturally began to lead me away from the shorter, more conceptual pieces of social criticism that inspired the creation of the blog in the first place. The idea that I was going to accept dependence on Google for the sake of my work’s reach but draw a red line at Substack was an absolutely absurd position that only grew more absurd as the burdens of maintaining the site, newsletter, and YouTube channel grew.

My suspicion of Substack as a platform - from its editorial choices to its (lack of) profitability - hasn’t gone anywhere. What I’ve realized, though, is that I have to build infrastructure for each of my projects that actually serves the best interests of each of those projects, and Down The Ladder would clearly be better served as a Substack blog in dialog with other blogs and writers on the platform than as an indie web enclave (with a YouTube channel attached).

This is not true of my other projects: From The Superhighway and Unplatform have done quite well for themselves in their respective niches, and those projects have (mostly) off-platform tech stacks that serve their interests nicely. But, when I’m writing for to Down The Ladder - an outlet whose main purpose is to allow me to engage with contemporary discourse - I should probably put the writing where the contemporary discourse is happening. For better or for worse, at the moment it’s happening on Substack, so that’s where I ought to be.

(This interview was originally conducted over video, so there's been some minor edits to questions and answers for readability.)

Q: Is Substack social media? If so, was it always, or did it evolve into that?

Lyta: Y'know, it's funny, because it wasn't at first. It definitely started out as just a newsletter platform, and then I think they saw a way to “get in” on the social media element of it — especially as Twitter started to decay. It was a really smart business move on their end.

I am seeing it drive people to madness in the same way [as pre-Musk Twitter]. I have this one friend in particular — she's a really talented writer and a really bright person — and she'll tell me “I saw this thing on Substack—there's a fight going on, there's discourse, it's driving me crazy.” And I'm like, “you're so smart, don't look at it. Just don't look at it.” But she just does it — she just goes to it.

I don't often use [the Substack website]. I just wait for the newsletters to come into my email, and then I read them — I really love that feature. I try to avoid the social aspects because I'm so sick of social media, and I'm so sick of discourse … you don't have to use [Substack] like Twitter if you don't want to — if it doesn't show up in my email, I don't have to know about it. But then, of course, my friends are like “did you [see the discourse about] the Metropolitan Review?” And I'm like, “don't tell me! I don't want to know! I don't care about their shit!” I am seeing the same kind of Twitter madness — and it's driving me crazy [on behalf] of my intelligent friends being driven to madness because of it.

Q: Did you have an independent blog prior to the creation of your Substack? (I know you had a Patreon?)

Lyta: I kept Wordpresses over the years, but nothing really substantial until Current Affairs. I did Patreon first, but it really is more for visual artists, podcasters, video essays, etc. It wasn't amazing for writers, and the discoverability features weren't there as much — so I decided to switch over to Substack, because everybody was on Substack. Things are frustrating on Substack too, for reasons we can get into, but I think it is better for writers. That's really what it's for.

Q: You mentioned frustrations with Substack as a platform. What are they?

Lyta: My main frustration with Substack is political, and I've thought about getting off of it. Relative to other corporations' level of “evilness,” they're pretty evil. They give a lot of money and support to certain writers — in practice, this means that pretty heavily favor “anti-woke” people like Bari Weiss, and a lot of heavily anti-trans writers. At a certain point you have to figure that their leadership is on the anti-woke, anti-trans side of things. They're not doing this for leftists. There's no equal opportunity [for official support].

Q: Prior to learning of the platform's active support for right-wing figures, I perceived the platform as having a pretty liberal bent, just due to its demographics. Do you think there's a degree to which they're trying to counter-balance that perception with the figures they're throwing support behind?

Lyta: It could be, it wouldn't surprise me. The owner, Hamish [McKenzie] probably doesn't want [Substack] to be seen as the liberal bar full of smelly hippies. He's probably trying to align things more with his sensibilities. I'm sure if you went to him, and you were like “you're kind of a crypto-fascist,” he'd go, “oh no, not me,” but I'm sure he's paying Bari Weiss because he agrees with her. Fundamentally, that's it.

Q: Over the course of your time on Substack, have you observed any changes in the platform's culture or content? If so, what were they, and how did they affect your relationship to the platform?

Lyta: There's definitely more far-right stuff — I [recently] had my first racist comment that I had to ban. It was the first time that I got a notification telling me that there was a comment I had to moderate. I was actually impressed that it had an automatic feature to handle that and let me quickly handle it.

Q: How do you see your own relationship to Substack as a platform changing in the next few months or years?

Lyta: After the Bari Weiss stuff, I was going to try to get off Substack, but part of the problem is that my posts have been more popular lately. I don't know if my engagement is being boosted artificially [because I publicly complained] or if my posts are better, but it is harder to leave once they're performing better, and I'm getting a little more revenue. There's also network effects, the posts get shared [more on Substack] — I don't know if Ghost or Beehiiv have those kinds of network effects.

I think of posting on Substack as a way to keep my oar in the water of the literary community. I don't really make that much money from it, but it's a good way to keep my name out there now that I don't have, like, a magazine. It's really hard to give up those network effects — it is a problem.

Q: Would you recommend someone join Substack if they were leaving traditional social media and trying to carve out a space to share their work with their previous audience? If not, what would you recommend they do instead?

Lyta: That's such a hard question. [Substack] is so user-friendly, and the payment features are really functional if you're trying to make money off your writing — and I would never tell a writer not to make money.

I think it would depend on the individual person. I think if somebody is coming off of Instagram and Twitter with a big following, I might suggest Ghost or one of the others, because they're user-friendly enough that you're probably okay, and because you have a big following you won't need the network effects. If you have a smaller following, then I would probably recommend Substack.

One thing I would definitely tell a new user is: “do not use the social features.” You don't need them — you can just ignore them. Another thing that frustrates me is that [Substack] is always trying to show me my metrics and my engagement on a given piece, and it's like, “I don't want to know that — I just want the link for this piece.” It's presuming I'm more of a brand-builder and an engagement farmer than I actually am, when in reality I actually just want to put my writing somewhere.

This piece is part of an ongoing interview series called “on substack,” in which I talk to writers on Substack about the state of the platform and the future of writing on the internet. If you want to keep up with future posts, you can subscribe to the newsletter in the sidebar to the right. Next week’s interview, with book critic and former Substacker Becca Rothfield, is already available on the Down The Ladder blog.

If you are (or know of) a Substack writer who would be interested in talking to me for this project, send an email my way!

Q: Did you have an independent blog prior to the creation of your Substack? (I would count a Tumblr account as an "independent blog" if you frequently used it to make long-form text posts.)

Coburn: I was a Tumblr user for a long time, but I didn't ever have a traditional blog. I think I missed the boat, because independent blogging was popular when I was quite young. Most of my writing prior to Substack was freelance — for academic journals or magazines.

Q: You imply in one of your earliest posts that you joined Substack as part of a wider cultural "fever" - one that you compare to typhoid. This characterization feels slightly at odds with your more positive recollection of Substack circa-2022 in your most recent post. Can you elaborate a little on what this fever was like at the time, why you "swore" you would never succumb to it, and why you felt the need to justify doing so?

Coburn: I quite literally started using Substack in 2022 exclusively to hold myself accountable to a regular writing practice, because I hate the idea of writers who don't actually write often, and I was afraid of becoming one of them. I felt the need to justify it because I think there's an inherent shame and narcissism associated with asking people to read your work — not a value judgement, just something that I think is a driving force behind a lot of published writing. Obviously you want people to read it, or else you'd keep it in a Word document! But I felt like just another person expelling my pieces into the void, and so I was surprised when I started to gain readers. This made Substack feel like a great community for me around late 2023 — mid 2024.

Q: In your latest piece, you say that you think internet writing is a distinct "mode" rather than merely a vessel. Is Substack merely the latest expression of this "mode" or has it played a part in fundamentally changing it?

Coburn: I think Substack has changed the mode. It's too early to say that definitively, but not only do they explicitly encourage monetization, they make it very, very easy. This fundamentally alters the relationship between writer and reader. It's not the same as subscribing to a magazine because you like a lot of their regular authors — you are literally handing someone money every month. It's a tip jar. So naturally you start thinking about writing as a returns/rewards vs. effort dichotomy, which is why I think the listicle/wrap-up has become really popular. I myself write a seasonal wrap-up, mostly because I think it's fun, and also because people always asked me what I was watching/reading. I come from a cultural criticism background, so it was easy for me to combine writing about film/books/music with personal essay writing.

Q: Over the course of your time on Substack, have you observed any changes in the platform's culture or content? If so, what were they, and how did they affect your relationship to the platform?

Coburn: When I first joined, I mostly followed writers who had migrated to Substack as a way to supplement their already-existing freelance career, or who had been pushed there because 'staff writer' is such a rare position that has been nearly eliminated at a lot of publications. I felt that the quality of writing was really high, and I looked forward to my inbox notifications. Now, it seems like Twitter users have migrated to Substack to publish really short, unformed lists or diary entries — and to use the 'feed' feature instead of/in tandem with Twitter. I totally get it, and I'm not trying to be snobby or cliquey, but it has made the experience less enjoyable. It feels like you have to sift through a lot of nothing to get to anything real. Oftentimes the most successful writing is reactionary and predicated upon the reader's intimate knowledge about flash-in-the-pan internet trends. Seeing those get thousands of likes was, honestly, really depressing. It started to feel like the type of writing that I do no longer had a place on the platform. This is also not a quality judgment — I just write long essays, and I don't go into graphic detail about my personal life. I don't know if Substack users want what I'm pushing anymore.

Q: What's your opinion about Substack expanding its mandate beyond written publishing and adding additional social features like Notes and the Home feed?

Coburn: At first the expansion of Substack's social feeds made sense as a way to drive engagement and allow writers to a) interact with their readers and b) interact with each other. Despite any stated intentions, it sort of became exactly like all other forms of social media from which its user base might be otherwise trying to escape. The home feed strikes me as a replication of the Twitter feed, and I don't even really know who's using this feature, though apparently it's a lot of people based on the likes/restacks I see. I never adapted to the Notes functionality, which might be to the detriment of my blog's growth, but it really was not intuitive to me. I've noticed that a blog's growth seems directly related to how active the writer is on the home feed, too.

Q: How do you see your own relationship to Substack as a platform changing in the next few months or years?

Coburn: I don't plan to leave Substack any time soon, but I'm less focused on building an audience and more focused on feeling satisfied with my creative output. I don't see myself getting good at the 'notes' feature or re-stacking posts or whatever. I've met a lot of amazing writers through the internet, and I think we will always support each other's work, so I'm not focused on networking as much as I once was.

Q: Would you recommend someone join Substack if they were leaving traditional social media and trying to carve out a space to share their work with their previous audience? If not, what would you recommend they do instead?

Coburn: I would recommend Substack to writers looking for a way to hold themselves accountable to a regular writing practice — or to writers who need an outlet for their less categorizable pieces. I would not recommend it as an effective way to build a readership/audience if you're used to building it through more traditional social media, because it doesn't seem to be a one-to-one transition. I have used Twitter for over half of my life (scary), and I would describe myself as "good" at it (derogatory). But that didn't translate into self-promoting on Substack for me. Instead, I would recommend finding independent publications and pitching them so you can build a network of writer friends and share audiences/promote each other's work. For me and several other writers I know this has been very useful and much more constructive. It also just feels more communal. If you're looking for an alternative to traditional social media in general, I have recently gotten back into using Tumblr, and it is free from a lot of the insidious unmarked advertising/engagement farming that I see on Instagram and Twitter.

This piece is part of an ongoing interview series called "on substack," in which I talk to writers on Substack about the state of the platform and the future of writing on the internet. If you want to keep up with future posts, you can subscribe to the newsletter on the Down The Ladder blog, where new interviews are posted a full week before they arrive on Substack. The next interview, with essayist and author Lyta Gold, is already available on the blog.

If you are (or know of) a Substack writer who would be interested in talking to me for this project, send an email my way!

In July 2023, I finally decided that I had developed enough as a writer and a thinker that I could actually try my hand at publishing my stuff on the internet. I had written a piece about a controversial sculpture of Jesus that was installed near a church in Downtown Orlando, and I had reason to believe it was pretty good. The next step, then, was finding a place to publish it.

At the time, I was only faintly aware of Substack. I knew about some podcasts that used it, and I occasionally heard vague allusions to pieces hosted on it in the discourse of the day. I ultimately decided that it was nerve-wracking enough to be dependent on one monolithic digital platform for the video essays that I intended to (and eventually did) start creating, and it seemed like a total waste to not at least have my written work for the Down The Ladder project be hosted on my own independent website1.

So, I made that website, and I started putting up my pieces there. Over the years, though, I started to hear more about this “Substack” thing. I heard that the technical barrier to entry for getting a blog up and running was virtually non-existent. I heard that they had built-in newsletter functionality that was included totally for free, something that was somewhat alluring as someone who was, at that very moment, struggling to build that functionality from scratch. I heard that writers I admired had migrated there and that the platform had been immensely influential in making it financially viable to publish written work on the internet again in the aftermath of the “pivot to video.”

While I remained stubbornly committed to my own website, all these developments left me with a broadly-positive impression of Substack as a platform. Until very recently, I was experiencing every Substack blog exclusively through RSS, so I was totally unaware of what was happening on the platform beyond the narrow boundaries of the particular article I was reading. That unawareness remained until I read Kate Wagner’s recent piece about social media, which opens like this:

I need to be so real with you (the polity of writers, the reader, the editorial you, my mom, everyone alive) right now: I am being driven insane. I don’t know what other word describes the feeling I get when, every day I log on to Twitter (now known as X) or Instagram or Substack or whatever and witness an atavism that is ugly, cynical, self-serving, and varying degrees of brutal.

I was stopped dead in my tracks by this paragraph. It’s no surprise to me that social media is horrible and makes you insane - I’m well aware of that. What surprised me was the fact that, to Wagner, Substack wasn’t merely a blogging tool or a newsletter service. It was social media, and its status as social media was so self-evident that it was being used interchangeably with X and Instagram as a byword for “platform that sucks shit.”

This will probably sound tremendously naive to veterans of this website, but I was not at all aware that Substack writers understood the platform this way. I genuinely thought it was basically just a Patreon clone that was optimized for written work. When I logged on after reading Wagner’s piece to discover that the site had indeed replicated the functionality and political culture of pre-Muskening Twitter, I was astonished. How in the world did this happen? Was it always like this? How did people feel about it?

At almost exactly the same time that Wagner’s piece went up, we saw the Silicon Valley-Trump alliance begin in earnest. In response, I would see writers and creatives I knew in real life declare things like: “I’m getting off of social media - come follow me on Substack.” If it is the case that Substack is on a collision course with terminal enshittification - or if it has already reached it - it would obviously not be in the interest of Twitter and Instagram refugees to flock there in droves just so they could tie up their careers (and their audience) with another doomed social media platform.

With that said, the key word is “if.” I didn’t know much about the day-to-day experience of writing and publishing on this website, and I didn’t know if Wagner’s experience was universal. So I asked around and got some pretty interesting answers - and I think I’m finally ready to share those answers with all of you.

Over the last few months, I’ve reached out to over a dozen Substack writers to interview them about their experience with the site, how it’s changed since they’ve joined, and most importantly, whether they’d recommend it to newcomers. My original plan was to publish those interviews on the Down The Ladder blog, and I still intend to do so - but I decided that just for this project, I’d finally take the dive and crosspost these pieces to my heretofore dormant Substack.

To be clear, my priority will still be the official Down The Ladder blog, and I don’t plan to publish on this Substack after this project is over outside of particularly special occasions. To prove that, the first of the interviews (with Alexandra Coburn) is already live on the blog right now, and I plan to release all the interviews there a week before I release them here. The Down The Ladder blog has its own newsletter2, and if you have any interest in keeping up with my work beyond Substack, I highly recommend you subscribe to the newsletter there rather than the one here.

With that said, I’m cross-posting the pieces here for three reasons:

1. These interviews are obviously relevant to this site and its users, and I’d like them to be easily accessible and discoverable for Substack users who are interested.

2. As I said, I don’t have experience with the day-to-day experience of writing on this site, and actually publishing stuff here on a consistent basis for a little would give me some valuable first-hand insight.

3. I’m still looking to talk to people! If you are (or know) a Substack writer who’d be interested in talking about their experience with the platform, shoot me an email!

I think that’s enough preamble. I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations about Substack, online media, and independent writing that I can’t wait to share with you all. See you next week.