(2020-11-25) Monahan Why Are Public Thinkers Flocking To Substack

Sean Monahan: Why are public thinkers flocking to Substack?

I started a Substack two weeks ago

The best reaction was an encouraging tweet from fellow Substacker, Michelle Lhooq: “Let us all welcome [Sean] to the Substack stripper pole, where writers dance for our readers loose change and tell ourselves we’re the future of media hehe

input from editors is inevitably just replaced with the pressure of analytics. As teen YouTubers, who were the earliest to experiment with commodifying their personalities confess, the quantification of attention both positive and negative quickly influences our decisions

But no matter how you feel about it: we live in a personality-based economy now. Cancel culture and platforming, the two discourses that help us navigate the dynamics of our social media ecosystem both point back to this state of affairs.

Personality is upstream from institutions in the same way culture is upstream from politics. Substack has clearly taken note of this. Consider Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein’s personality is lightning in a bottle. It flows from him, not the media properties he has founded.

There’s a tedium to the hamster wheel of personal branding, and as so many have noticed the causality from followers to funds is opaque at best, a con at worst.

For many people, the issues surrounding Substack strike at the heart not only of what free information has done to society – but what free information has done to the media industry

Substack is a pragmatic response to one issue plaguing an industry in crisis – a collapsing ad-based revenue model. Rather than propose more voodoo innovation, it addresses the issue head on with the straightforward transaction of a subscription

In a few years’ time, I predict we may look back at the chaotic information ecosystem of the 2010s as a sort of social media interregnum.

Sean Monahan is a writer and trend forecaster based in Los Angeles. He co-founded K-HOLE.