Why I Keep Writing About Substack

Politics | Recovery | Current Obsessions

On nostalgia, precarity, and the long arc of journalism’s hustle culture

In June, I wrote a newsletter critiquing Substack and over the weekend it got a Silicon Valley co-sign from the OG tech blog Daring Fireball (where it got a nod of approval), which pushed the piece into Hacker News, where it definitely hit a nerve.¹ Substack is the latest container for a lot of anxiety about the future of media, technology, society, and politics.

I keep coming back to it not because it’s the villain, but because it’s a crossroads.

Newsletters in general and Substack are a particular obsession for me because there’s been so much short-term success—and that could have been me.² I’ve been the flavor of the month before.

Regarding Substack, I had conversations with the founders in 2019. I sat in an expensive mid-century modern chair in the enormous bedroom suite I shared with my then-husband in a loft apartment that belonged to a life I’d outgrown without realizing it. So when I see the discourse around Substack, I feel it not just intellectually, but viscerally. It brushes up against my career arc, scarcity, ambition, exploitation, freedom, why I continue to do what I do, and what I’ve been through to get where I am.

I’ve lived through a lot of Next Big Things for journalism. I was at MTV during the “pivot to video.” I rode the Crooked Media podcast boom. The blog era at Wonkette. I did a stint at AOL as an editor of a city guide. I remember early paywall debates at Time. I remember HotWired’s³. celebration of “the active desktop” and CD-ROMs. At the same time, we at Suck.com wondered whether we should put ads on websites at all. Each new wave brought optimism, enmity, and sometimes real opportunity. But over time, each one also revealed what it couldn’t do: fix the business model, protect the labor, create permanence, or make the math work.

And here we are again.

I’ve been writing about Substack because the hope is familiar. The marketing language is familiar. The disappointments are familiar. The sense of déjà vu is suffocating. And because, at least for a little while, the platform really did offer a sense of direct connection and autonomy in a media environment where pressures to conform and penalties for dissent grow every day.

But I’m also writing about it because right now, the coming bust (and it will come) feels apocalyptic. A New Yorker piece asked in 2024, “Is journalism ready for an extinction-level event?” And Betteridge’s law of headlines tells us: Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.”

In the past, I’ve reinvented myself for each next wave, biding time between high-paying gigs by freelance writing. In this lull, freelance writing won’t pay my bills anymore. The dollar a word that I drew as an established writer in 2010 has become the standard across the industry. In 2010, it was a rate that assumed experience. Now it’s close to a ceiling.⁴

In 2022, I started a writing workshop not because I had a burning desire to become a coach or teacher, but because I needed a revenue stream. The workshop helps people tell their own recovery narratives and build toward memoir. It’s turned out to provide both stability and joy. Maybe I’ve invented my future main gig. It’s meaningful work that I want to do more of. But it exists because journalism doesn’t pay. (Next session starts Sept. 2, early bird pricing ends tonight!)

I also co-host Past Due, a podcast about all of this: media, money, narrative, capitalism, collapse. Substack keeps showing up in our conversations (including conversations with people making it work on Substack) because it makes the problems legible. What gets funded. What gets ignored. Who gets to create. Who gets paid. What it feels like to land a windfall and what it means when the windfall ebbs away. What gets called “success.”

I’m not cynical. I’m skeptical. I’ve seen enough cycles to know that no platform saves us. I’ve seen that hustle culture and blaming individuals for their lack of stability makes things worse for all of us. Our social safety net is dissolving and everyone reading this is one viral Trump Truth Social Post away from #lookingforwork and giving up the little luxuries like being able to cover dinner for friends, sick days, and regular dentist visits.

But I’ve also seen how the stories about survival can knit us together. The way to build something that works for everyone is to admit what is failing so many.

So when I write about Substack, I’m really writing about all of that.

I got a bunch of new subscribers from the Daring Fireball and Hacker News links, so welcome to everyone who hasn’t been here before! Here’s a brief introduction.

Here’s all my media infrastructure coverage (lots of Substack asides!):

• Cable News at the End of the World: “24 hours of anything, including fear, will acclimate you to it. You don’t necessarily feel it less, it becomes a part of what you feel all the time.”

• Op-Eds at the End of the World: “This opinion could have used an editor. It’s nice to get it to you in a hurry, but I’m going to miss mainstream media, and I think you will, too.”

• Pushing Up Nazis: Substack “promised journalists independence but they’re optimizing for oligarchs.”

Some of my favorite Past Due episodes:

• Paul F. Thompkins

• Adam Conover

• Jamie Loftus

• Josh Gondelman and Maris Kreizman

• Ian Danskin

• Lyz Lynz

Personal stuff about financial precarity:

• Foundations: The leak “moved slow enough to hypnotize me. I’d pick up a rag and see the water creep along the concrete, absorbing slightly into the foundation (“those things are like a sponge”).

• Death Watch: My mother “died ugly and she died owning three houses and a Rolex watch.”