[Corrected] Wrapping Up 2023. Looking Toward 2024

And thinking about Substack's "Nazi problem."

Note: This post is too long to appear in full in most email clients. Click through to the web version for the full text.

I also had a dumb brain fart in an earlier version in which I confused the indispensable labor reporter Hamilton Nolan with Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie. I’ve corrected that in this version and have deleted the previous version.

The year that was.

This has been my best year of writing ever.

Between my Chicago Tribune column, this newsletter, my blog at Inside Higher Ed, the book manuscript I just turned in, and a handful of freelance assignments, I produced approximately 275,000 words for publication. I did more than a dozen public talks (mostly on the impact of ChatGPT on writing instruction), and consulted with a handful of different entities about their approaches to handling what writing means in a ChatGPT world. As an entirely self-employed person, not going to lie, it feels pretty good.

Not everything I tried here in 2023 worked out. Bringing on Derek Krissoff to curate additional content failed to generate much additional audience or new subscribers despite the content itself being exactly what I wished for. It’s been difficult to find people who can take the time and attention to write for the space at the rates I’m able to pay at current levels of revenue. It was definitely worth a shot, and if nothing else, it got Derek here, where he’s been writing his own Book Work newsletter, which I recommend readers check out.

I also found it shockingly hard to give away books, another initiative I thought might drive increases in paid subscribers, but did not move the needle. Oh well, it’s all been worth trying.

It’s hard to overstate how much this newsletter has meant to me in material terms.

My post on how “ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything Worth Preserving” from late in 2022 continued to pay dividends throughout 2023 as people who resonated with my point of view sought me out to connect and converse. It had a direct role in a good portion of both my 2023 and future income and really kicked off my own thinking about the subject matter that would become my next book. A good chunk of the ideas that took final form in the book itself were ones I first wrestled with here, making it considerably easier to write the manuscript in a significantly compressed timeframe. Some of the newsletters I read here, including, but not limited to Marc Watkins Gary Marcus AI Snake Oil Dan Meyer provided me with fodder that considerably helped me own thinking.

I know when Austin Kleon has shared one of my newsletters because I get an immediate spike in subscribers. I think he’s done more than any individual to bring my writing to the attention of others.

It is with these things in mind that I lament the possibility that I might not be able to keep writing on this platform.

Substack’s Nazi Problem.

Writing about inside baseball is one of my least favorite things to do and by “least favorite” I mean I actively avoid it if at all possible because it’s not the kind of stuff I want to spend any time thinking about, but it’s unavoidable in the present case. Some readers will be well-versed in this, while others will be hearing about it for the first time, so I’m going to try to be as brief as possible while also providing context and links for those who would like to know more.

Substack has “a Nazi problem” as in they have a number of newsletters which feature explicit white supremacist and Nazi content. Writing at The Atlantic, Jonathan M. Katz showed how Substack’s limited content moderation policies (essentially no porn, no explicit targeting of individuals with violence) had made it possible for Nazis to not only find a home on Substack, but monetize their newsletters. A group of Substack writers organized by Marisa Kabas and others wrote an open petition to Substack founders Hamish McKenzie, Chris Best, and Jairaj Sethi requesting a response as to why they believed actual Nazis should be hosted and monetized on Substack’s platform.

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie responded in a Substack note:

I just want to make it clear that we don’t like Nazis either—we wish no-one held those views. But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don't think that censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse.

McKenzie went on to defend his choice to interview Richard Hanania, a right-wing troll with an overt white supremacist past that has (barely) morphed into a more respectable bigotry on the Substack house podcast.

I ultimately don’t regret having him [Hanania] on the podcast. I think it’s important to engage with and understand a range of views even if—especially if—you disagree with them. Hanania is an influential voice for some in U.S. politics—his recent book, for instance, was published by HarperCollins—and there is value in knowing his arguments. The same applies to all other guests I have hosted on The Active Voice, including Hanania’s political opposites. 

Issues around content moderation are incredibly complex and in defense of Substack they have provided both writers and readers a significant number of tools to block unwanted commentary and content. If a Nazi wanders into my comments section I can ban them permanently with the click of a button. If I don’t want to be exposed to certain writers (for whatever reason) in Substack’s notes app, I can make sure I never see their stuff again. The tools work well.

But this does not change the fact that Substack hosts and profits from the public activities of actual Nazis. It also doesn’t change the fact that Hamish McKenzie’s notes response is disingenuous at best and that the idea that allowing Nazis a platform to organize and generate revenue for their activities is somehow better than not giving Nazis that platform is laughably bad.

There’s been a lot of great perspectives on these difficult questions including from Marisa Kabas, Radley Balko, and even Margaret Atwood. The one that’s closest to my own feelings and tackles the issues I care most about better than I could is from Ken White in which he gets down to brass tacks in terms of what’s motivating Substack’s founders.

Substack Has A Nazi Opportunity

White puts his finger on what’s really going on:

That’s what Substack is up to: branding. They’re betting they attract more people than they repel with the “we don’t believe in Big Tech choosing what you can write or read” brand. They’re betting that the “we are the intellectual and moral superiors to the woke left” brand is profitable — and it is. They calculate that getting involved in constant disputes over what content is acceptable on their site would be a big waste of time and money and focus. Maybe they’re thinking that the Overton Window has shifted such that a substantial portion of mainstream American thought is kind of Nazi these days and that they can’t afford to lose that market.

He also captures the key source of my irritation not at Substack’s policy, but Hamish McKenzie’s positioning of it as a moral stand, a transparently empty rationale.

McKenzie’s apologia deeply annoys me because it treats me like I’m a moron. It’s the equivalent of yelling over the wall of my walled garden “don’t worry, those guys three gardens over really just like Hugo Boss, and also they have some points on tax policy.” There’s a difference between the ethos of “we’re a platform that’s decided not to make value judgments about offensive speech, if that’s okay with you, you’re welcome” and the ethos of “we’re a victim of cultural Marxism and we see that a lot of these guys are not that bad and we’re doing a service to humanity by platforming them and listen to their guest spot on my podcast.”

It would be sorely tempting to just ignore all of this, keep producing my newsletters and just go about my business, but speaking personally, I’m past that. It has to be dealt with one way or another.

Substack is not a writers utopia.

I do not begrudge for a moment the writers who have found the Substack platform a good place to share their work and even make a few (or a lot) of money from it. How could I? I’m one of them. But I also think it’s important to get underneath the founders’ rhetoric about Substack being a haven for writing and writers that shows up in the occasional triumphalist post from those founders.

Here’s one example:

It is not actually true that Substack has shown that good writing is more valuable than legacy media markets, certainly not in a lasting and sustainable way.

Substack is not profitable. There’s folks who understand more about this than me that believe the model they’ve adopted will never be profitable. (It has similar problems to Uber.) Outside money funds the current operations. They recently pulled back from an attempt to raise more money. They are in the early stages of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” process, where everything seems like a good deal for writers now, but ultimately, if this is going to be a profitable business for the people who run and fund it, more revenue must come and the sources of that revenue are either readers or writers, and it’s reasonable to believe that the cost of doing business for we writers on here will change for the worse over time.

A small monthly fee for free newsletters is entirely possible. Changing the scale of what Substack collects depending on audience and revenue is an option. Look at the ways Uber is now squeezing revenue not just out of riders with algorithmic pricing, but drivers as well by giving variable fares depending on individual behavior, and you see what can be done to writers on Substack. Everything is on the table. Consider how Amazon is now going to start either showing you ads or charging you more money to not have ads on the Prime streaming service. Imagine a future where Substack will force ads onto individual newsletters unless writers part with additional fees from subscribers. Substack would be holding to their pledge to be an ad-free forum, you just have to pay for it. Imagine, as JD Goulet has, that Substack will monetize the large corpus of writing by selling it off to train large language models.

If legacy media continues to decline, Substack will be able to set whatever terms they want and it will be very difficult to resist whatever changes they impose. For all the high-minded talk about empowering writers, Substack ultimately exists in order to make money for the people who provide the capital to the operation. Whatever rhetoric they produce around empowering writers is a sales pitch, not a contract. The laborers (writers) are vulnerable in all the ways any laborer is vulnerable, perhaps more so as we are entirely unbundled.

Substack is not a community of stakeholders. It is s fiefdom run by McKenzie, Best, and Sethi funded by Silicon Valley venture money. This is the money that currently makes the revenue writers enjoy here possible. If that money goes away, all the high minded notions of freedom and individual empowerment are meaningless because either they will be obliterated, or the site will simply cease to exist.

The discoverability and algorithmic fate of one’s newsletter on the platform is a total black box controlled by Substack. There is a significant incentive to cozy up to the founders, an incentive I ignored both by being deliberately antagonistic to Hamish McKenzie for treating Richard Hanania like something other than the gutter cretin he is, and also by mocking an empty tech aphorism from Chris Best, (“The right machines make us more human,”) in a previous newsletter, a mocking that Best decided mertited blocking me from viewing any of his content on Substack (as is his right, obviously).

I try not to be paranoid, and don’t pretend I’m really important enough to warrant any headspace among the Substack triumvirate, but it strikes me as not great if one of the fellas who owns the place has blocked you.

What is a guy to do?

Stay and fight?

There is no clear and definitive moral path going forward for those of us disturbed by Substack’s decision to host Nazis and allow them to monetize their newsletters. People whose work I deeply respect are leaving for other platforms. I can’t criticize anyone who doesn’t want their work to appear on a site that profits from Nazi content. It’s possible a site that is Nazi-free will be tough to find, but it’s clear Substack’s leadership, in Ken White’s words, sees a “Nazi opportunity.” It seems sort of inevitable that the problem will only get worse. Sticking around to find out may be sticking around too long.

Other people whose work I deeply respect have decided to stay. If publishing on this site is how you make a living, it would be a very difficult thing to risk moving elsewhere at this time. (That said, if Substack becomes Twitter, a place primarily driven by cultural grievances of the anti-woke, staying becomes equally fraught.)

In terms of financial and professional incentives, I’m somewhere in the middle. Losing the income I make from this newsletter would sting a bit, but it would not throw me into any kind of dire financial state. I also am hugely prone to inertia. The interface here works very smoothly. Setting up somewhere else would be a hassle, I’d probably screw it up in some way that loses a bunch of people in the switch and I will have shot myself in the foot.

At the same time, I got no time for Nazis and the Substack leadership has really touched a number of different nerves.

It made me think of senior year of high school when I started writing for the school newspaper and quickly became a thorn in the school administration’s side by doing nothing other than saying some things I thought were true about stuff that bugged me.

I didn’t like that certain students were prioritized in access to the dedicated college guidance counselor, a person whose job (as I perceived it) was to make sure the school could boast as many elite university admissions as possible. I wrote an op-ed asking why there wasn’t someone equally dedicated to the B students? I found another proposal to create an “honors gym” course that would be eligible for an increased weighted GPA absurd, a sop to athletes to boost their GPAs absurd, and said so.

What bothered me about these things was that they were bullshit dressed up as moral goods. I did not like that the administration was lying to us about the genuine motives of these initiatives and said so. This earned me an audience with our school principal, Dr. Duffy, a kind-faced man who was probably steelier than he looked given the milieu in which he worked for a long time. I don’t recall many of the specifics. I was intimidated, which was maybe the point. Dr. Duffy laid out the reasons he thought I was wrong in my opinions. I recall him asking if I had some kind of personal grievance with him or the guidance office and I told him the truth, that I hadn’t thought about him or the guidance office for a second when writing those op-eds. My values were offended. Our journalism teacher told us we should write about things that mattered to us, so that’s what I did. I kept doing it until I graduated, maybe even taking a little extra pleasure in knowing that Dr. Duffy might be holding his breath to see what I’d produced each week. I’m sure I was annoying as hell and probably got some stuff wrong, but what was the point of shutting up in order to make someone who held the lion’s share of the power more comfortable?

I find myself in the same headspace 35 years on. I have no personal enmity for Hamish McKenzie or Chris Best, but I find their public-facing comments on these issues not wrong, exactly - there is actually plenty of gray area about the specifics here - but rather absurd and even offensive in how they choose to share these things with the Substack community. They’re treating me like I’m an idiot, just like my high school administration did.

For whatever reason, this has always been the kind of thing that gets me most amped up for a fight because I have a self-righteous streak that I haven’t been able to squelch no matter how much I try. I’ve already irritated the management. I might as well stick around and see what kind of thorn I can be in their side, at least for the time being.

Please note, this stance could change in an instant as events develop. I’m not convinced this is the right thing to do. Welcome to my world.

Now, after this post, what I will pledge to you, the reader, is that unless and until I decide to leave the platform, you will not be hearing about these disputes in this newsletter. These topics are not why I decided to write in this space. I’m here to write about books, reading, and writing, the stuff that matters most to me. Tech bros with limited understanding of the dynamics of the world are not on that list.

But if you are on Substack notes, barring getting squished by Subatack management’s moderation, you’ll find me challenging anything I find problematic, and even using other platforms in whatever way I’m capable to make things uncomfortable for Substack leadership.

I’d love to see Substack become the writers’ utopia they already claim to be. It would be fantastic for people like me. But I’m not going to sit around and imbibe the Kool-Aid and act like this is already true, when it clearly is not.

Links

This week at the Chicago Tribune I share my entirely original, completely idiosyncratic Biblioracle Book Awards for fiction.

LitHub has tallied the number of times books have appeared on best books lists and released a definitive list.

LitHub also has a compendium of the “most scathing book reviews” of the year, if that’s your kind of thing.

New books never stop coming. Here’s 18 that will be available in the month of January.

McSweeney’s is counting down the most-read pieces of 2023. Coming in at number 13 is Jonathan Zeller’s “Introducing Total Crap, the First Magazine Written Entirely by AI.”

Recommendations

1. Island by Aldous Huxley

2. Lancelot by Walker Percy

3. Complete Flannery O'Connor Short Stories by Flannery O’Connor

4. Valis by Philip K Dick

5. The Last Shadow by Orson Scott Card

Jacob D. - Hilliard, OH

For Jacob I’m recommending a rather strange book that’s stuck with me for the 20 years since I first read it, The Magus by John Fowles

1. You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay 

2. Kindred by Octavia Butler

3. The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra 

4. The Wisdom of Sundays by Oprah Winfrey

5. Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Aleshia M. - St. Louis, MO. 

For Aleshia, a book that’s inspirational and wise, Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal.¹

To my knowledge the request queue is officially empty. Ready to start fresh for 2024. Get those requests in at the link below.

On December 31st of last year, this newsletter had 2597 subscribers. As of December 30th of this year the number of subscribers is…

That means the number of subscribers has more than doubled in a year. One way of thinking about subscriptions is that they are a kind of currency that may be usable to influence Substack management. At the same time, I don’t judge those who hesitate to subscribe at a website welcoming to Nazis. Either way, I very much appreciate the support of my work.

Mrs. Biblioracle and I will be spending a very quiet night at home this New Year’s Eve. I hope all of you have exactly the close to 2023 and entry to 2024 you’re hoping for.

John

The Biblioracle

1. All books linked throughout the newsletter go to The Biblioracle Recommends bookstore at Bookshop.org. Affiliate proceeds, plus a personal matching donation of my own, go to Chicago’s Open Books and the Teacher Salary Project, which is advocating to establish a federal minimum salary for teachers of $60,000 per year. Affiliate income is $328.88 for the year.