Can you write about the internet if you hate the internet?
A little sip from the bottle; a tiny nibble on the hand that feeds me.
I don’t hate the internet, I suppose. It’s more that I feel about it how a recovering alcoholic feels about an ice-cold Heineken at the end of a long day. Here be dragons. But just a few delicious sips?
To be honest, I move to Substack with mixed feelings (some honest-to-God excitement, some dread) and not entirely of my own volition. I was recently shunted from a much leafier suburb — permanent, salaried employment at an online magazine, with paid holidays and sick leave — and watching that ideal recede, on both an individual and societal level, fills me with despair. I’m grateful, deeply grateful, whenever one of you kind micropatrons grants me $8, but on the macro level, this is a precarious way to organise work. I’m not thrilled to join the OnlyFans of writing, even as I stand behind the quality of my nudes.
Still, there’s a lot to like about Substack: the coffeehouse discussions are lively, there’s so much freedom to roam, and some of the best living writers are on these streets. Bummer, then, about the bottle shops going up on every corner.
Substack is fast becoming a social media platform as addictive and focus-sapping as the worst of them. It combines the promise of Twitter circa 2012-2014 — a warehouse party attended by the buzziest writers, intellectuals and comics across the globe, that you’re invited to — with the “wait, this could actually be my livelihood” allure of influencer nurseries like Instagram and YouTube. If Twitter was crack, Substack is cocaine: it shoots up the noses of classier people and produces a slightly less manic high, but it still breaks down your nasal septum in the long run.
A lot of serious Substack writers groaned when the company introduced its microblogging function, Notes, in April 2023. They’d been at the Twitter party of the early-to-mid 2010s, but they’d weathered the cluster-headache comedown of 2015-2018, too: the buzzkill influx of shrill social justice warriors from Tumblr, then the 4Chan backlash, then the c****** w**; the deadening of humour that once felt fresh at the hands of GIF plugins and rapid meme cycles; the next-morning embarrassment about being openly horny and depressed on main; the creeping realisation that spending all day on a microblogging app is nothing like being at a real warehouse party, and actually lame. These writers had grown up and moved on. They wanted to perfect their craft in earnest; they weren’t here to fuck around on Twitter 2. Then one by one, they all started posting Notes.
Must the pokie machines be dragged into every online space? In the halcyon days of 2021, it was simple to use Substack without addling your brain: you carefully curated a list of newsletters and read them at a pace you controlled from the privacy of your own inbox. The online bustle of daily news, memes, petty squabbles and trend forecasting didn’t have to touch you.
In 2025, you can’t have this experience without exercising a tonne more self-control. Every new development makes Substack more frenetic and addictive, as same-samey as other social media: previously, it routed good writing straight to your inbox, now it nags you to hang out on its app. It brought in microblogging and DM functions. If you thought you could go somewhere on the internet that didn’t force-feed you thin gruel recommended by an algorithm, think again. Substack promised an oxymoronic “algorithm for quality”; sure enough, it failed to deliver. Left to my own devices, I use this platform to read pessimistic, ornate, excessively long essays penned by curmudgeons living in Europe. Substack won’t stop recommending me the viral, Ritalin-fuelled ramblings of 23-year-old Americans, unpacking the Thought Daughter trend and signing off with “I love you”.
I hate this, so I take great pains not to check my feed at all. But that’s the point: I have to take great pains.
And that’s just the front end. On the back end, writers are exhorted to NEVER FORGET THE NUMBERS: we’re bombarded, on an unavoidable ‘dashboard’, with the same intellect-dulling ‘analytics’ and ‘data insights’ that are the scourge of mainstream newsrooms, with a level of detail that invites obsession — and of course compulsive checking. Writers know the cities our readers live in, how you found us online, how many times you open our emails. You’re all automatically arranged, I shit you not, on a children’s sticker chart of engagement, from zero to five stars.
A Substack author can theoretically tune out all this noise, but again, it takes a tonne of self-control. Practically zero writers have enough. I know, because I’ve watched them. They all crack eventually, even the most devil-may-care iconoclasts, nervously checking their ‘Unsubscribes’ tab for feedback from flouncing readers and running pleading surveys about whether their posts are too long. “Yes, your posts are too long.” I thought you wanted to read! Goodbye, $8.
Enough about the landscape, though. Let me tell you a story about me.
