Maybe you don’t got it bad

Every few months, Substack is evil and everybody needs to leave right now. In fact, if you stay, you are bad and stupid and don’t understand the economy or art. The subscription model is busted, no one is making money anymore. Writing is being lost in the app which is now Twitter. To filter your writing through social media you must be a fool. One person leaves—this confirms everything.

Yet some of the biggest voices remain. They just keep growing. I really am not big on here, and I’ve only been at it in earnest for less than two years. While it ebbs and flows across axes, however—followers, subscribers, paid subscribers, email open rate, views—in that time my growth has been relatively frictionless. Every few months you reach the end of a barrel: all the straight guys from film Twitter have already found me, so that field is now barren. Someone was curious and paid for a year but they didn’t actually ever look at my Substack, so now I have to replace that person and go find a new one. It gets harder and then it gets easier, over and over again forever. But my voice matches the platform. I’m 29 and grew up with a phone in my hand and have always loved to write. Me and Substack just seem to get along.

I don’t ever grow with much purpose, however. In fact, someone recently told me I write “in ReStackable quips” and it offended me. I don’t mean to do that and wouldn’t know how to try. My writing on and off Substack flows from me without a consideration of money. Yet I understand what’s driving the ebbing and flowing. And in a world where one-bedroom apartments cost thousands and thousands of dollars, to come home from my full-time job and write until 11 PM, I understand that and how my writing must be marketed.

Substack is becoming less of a newsletter delivery service and more of a social media platform. This is offensive to people who want to write and not sell themselves, or who don’t want to have to learn that Phone-World-based skill. I understand missing the boat of people getting health insurance at Buzzfeed might frustrate someone, or that class and generational gaps can make it difficult to relate to people’s desperation for money. But I don’t know about all that. I was a child when podcasts became popular and I was too preoccupied with finding a boyfriend to start making zines, or whatever I was supposed to do to start my writing career before the age of 27.1 When I started this newsletter as a hobby, it was because I was too poor to leave my house.

I also understand that the gig economy is evil, but I don’t really know how much more evil it is than being utterly reliant on a company for all of your prosperity. Socialist utopia would mean no one is a writer-by-trade, at all, and that we can all just live and hang out—but there are no phones. That’s not really what Substack and phone alarmists want, though. They want to be famous without being personalities. They want to excel at capitalism without being perceived, or perceiving themselves, as participants in it. They want to have been born into phone fluency without having to learn a new language. They want magic.

If I ever get the sense that there is a different website or approach with more promise for me, I will leave Substack and posting for money in the dust. My joy and income as a contractable personality or writer are not utterly dependent on one website, and I recognize short-form video is bad for our communal livelihoods.

But I don’t get that sense. In fact, I—anecdotally and in terms of the little bit of data I encounter—get the sense CSVs are not as valuable as they once were. In college, they are teaching kids AEO now and not SEO. These kids also have to take classes about influencer marketing. My point is simply that it is not 2012, and it isn’t even 2019. Selling yourself is no longer a choice; it’s kind of just like graduating and getting a job—something you just do to live and make sense of the world. Maybe some of you expert geniuses can tell me otherwise, but I just get the feeling my currency here is my voice and digital acumen, not only the amount of email addresses I fool digital pedestrians into handing me over the years. Substack as a platform seems to be aligned with that, so I’m staying put.

A while ago, my friend Ben Empey said that a large reason why people hate on Taylor Swift for silly things is because they cannot relate to winning. I cannot stop paraphrasing this because I believe it.2 On a different scale I think it also applies to people like Kareem Rahma, who is handsome and funny and had a lightning rod of an idea with Subway Takes. This hurts peoples’ feelings, because the show is not conceptually effortful but the wind just keeps falling. Heaven forbid someone makes money from a really good idea that is completely inoffensive. I wish I had that idea. It feels good to watch it take off.

No one online embodies the Winning Enemy more, however, than Emily Sundberg. I read Feed Me every day and I learn a couple things or am charmed by the musings of someone I’ve never heard of before. I look forward to it. Emily is beautiful to look at and, despite her success, she cannot conceal an edge—it’s charming. She is a good writer and had the early, good idea of aggregating links for a particular audience of people. There’s nothing ideologically, aesthetically, or culturally wrong with any of that.3 The vitriol that pours from people toward her therefore always makes me laugh.

A lot of the time I think it is subconscious, but there is a certain type of person who thought the world was owed to them: that they were due to become Andy Sachs, the fictional character from Devil Wears Prada, because they had passion and virtue. Now they carry chips, because their salaried criticism can’t easily produce writerly fame in Phone World. So they blame someone who never thought they were owed anything, who made something good that people like. These naysayers aren’t bad writers, and they aren’t unsuccessful. They could do something else, if they wanted.

My boyfriend made all my Substack assets on his phone in five seconds, half as a joke, and I haven’t looked at them for two years. It’s always in the back of my mind that I have to fix it. I take this seriously, and I really appreciate my readers and love the community I’ve built here. What, I can’t commit a little of what they’ve given me toward making my product less slapdash?

Recently, Emily (Sundberg) posted:

I will use this as a moment to advise any person trying to find success in media at large, or specifically on Substack, to think more about design. If you like how a brand looks, develop the language so you can articulate why you like it. The reasoning behind my investment in Feed Me’s branding is twofold: I respect my readers too much to put something ugly in their inboxes… and I identify as an artist before anything else.

With respect to my own edge: I’ve been telling people I identify as an artist before anything else, and it’s killing. I digress: I’m not building a media empire but, Emily, you’re so right. I will not relearn how to use Photoshop, because I am graphically challenged and don’t believe in trying to be good at everything. But, since reading your post, I have engaged a friend to redesign my Substack and will give him a vanity title when it’s done.4

Just as I was making this decision, my growth badly dipped. Rather than blame the website, however, which I’ve used to make all my favorite friends and begin my writing career, I considered what I could be doing differently to make my readers stay. How I need to be more thoughtful about this, if I want it to be sustainable for me to do what I love: making friends through my phone, meeting people and becoming a better writer and thinker. I came to several conclusions and am making minor changes which amount to moving a paywall around in the Substack word processor. I’ve corrected the dip.

I’m excited about this, to navigate the challenge of figuring it out, and to take risks with the craft I am good at. It was getting boring anyway, doing the same old thing. If I fail, I have the voice and the CSV and the connections. I love to write and I love to be on my phone. There’s really nothing to worry about.