So, here’s the deal.
I’m getting tired of the Internet.
When I was a baby, back in 2010, digital self-publishing was the way of the future. Get on Facebook; get on Blogger; build yourself an audience, and parlay that into a six-figure job as a published author or a New York Times columnist. We’d all have flying cars and robot housekeepers by the time Obama finished up his third term.
Easy.
You didn’t need any real-world experience. There were no editors standing over you, with their unrealistic expectations about “deadlines” and “punctuation” and “readability.” You barely needed a degree! Just a few clicks, and you were on your way to becoming the next Truman Capote.
A decade has passed. It seems like that model—to the extent it was ever realistic in the first place—is in terminal decline. The digital publishing landscape has become something like the world of Mad Max. These days, “social media” is made up of a few peaceful retirement communities, encircled by a digital desert filled with mutants, warlords, and turbocharged gangs of zealots, all locked in an endless running battle over territory and vanishing resources.
The brass ring for most writers nowadays is a chance to become some sort of slop-content influencer, stabled on one of the remaining big media estates that still seem to be financially viable—or elbowing through the crowd of hustlers, bots, and trolls in order to make a (very) modest income as an independent producer.
When I first got on Substack, it felt like one of the last remaining oases where long-form prose was still valued.
That looks to be changing, and now the trend seems to be headed toward the same enshittification that consumed every other platform: hyperactive short-form content, memes, and low-effort grinding for KPIs, all of it now hopped up on A.I.
And I am, in the immortal words of Danny Glover, too old for this shit.
So, just out of curiosity, as a pure hypothetical:
Interested to hear your thoughts.
It would cost a lot to mail to the Antipodes
One of the challenges of Substack is that there is so much content it’s hard to focus on a few quality features. Plus one has to be tethered to the technology to access the content unlike print which can sit quietly on the coffee table.I love print. I’m also aware there are significant costs and an increasingly unreliable mail delivery system. So maybe the pdf via email is the better option.