Platform reality

Back in May, Ted Gioia wrote about the wave of cor­po­ra­tions and celebrities joining Sub­stack. Long­time internet readers will note the clear echo of 2000s blog tri­umphalism and/or 2010s Twitter energy, which is to say: enjoy it while it lasts.

I think it’s a notable that Ted’s post, though it’s titled Sub­stack Has Changed in the Last 30 Days, is really about how the out­side world’s con­sid­er­a­tion of Sub­stack — the oppor­tu­ni­ties therein — has changed. But Sub­stack has also changed, and Sub­stack will con­tinue to change, and those changes have been, and will con­tinue to be, per­fectly plat­form-ish.

Expect enclosure; expect a few big winners; expect advertising, with all the attention-hacking that will demand. Expect, also, that writers will con­tinue to mold their work to fit Sub­stack’s par­tic­ular ecology, rather than “merely” use the tools to pursue their inde­pen­dent visions and ambitions. We learned this about plat­forms a long time ago: fol­lowing the old news­paper schematic, they aren’t the printing presses, but rather the assign­ment editors.

I’m con­scious of the fact that it is, in some sense, stupid of me not to be on Sub­stack. At the very least, I could be sending my newsletter for free, instead of paying a hun­dred bucks a month! Yet I sup­pose I think it’s the stupid choices that are the impor­tant ones. And I sup­pose I think a stan­dard for art is that it doesn’t just play a game, but invents one. On an internet crowded with cre­ators eager to obey each plat­form’s demands, follow their Best Prac­tices (which harden into manda­tory genres: quick-setting concrete), there is, I believe, an incan­des­cence to stub­born specificity.

For the record, my long-ago job was explaining such Best Prac­tices to cor­po­ra­tions and celebrities! (See: 2010s Twitter energy.)

There’s one plat­form for which none of this is true, and that’s the web plat­form, because it offers the grain of a medium — book, movie, album — rather than the seduc­tion of a casino. The web plat­form makes no demands because it offers nothing beyond the oppor­tu­nity to do good work. Cer­tainly it offers no attention — that, you have to find on your own. Here is your printing press.

Like I said in my post about home-cooked apps:

There will be no sudden redesign, no flood of ads, no pivot to chase a user­base inscrutable to us. It might go away at some point, but that will be our decision. What is this feeling? Independence? Security? Sovereignty?

P.S. Ted Gioia’s recent newsletter style is a key example of 2020s ven­ti­lated prose, an unmiss­able tex­tual trend. I under­stand and appre­ciate writers using the tools that work; at the same time, man, is this really the end of the paragraph? The twi­light of the com­pound thought? Do not go gentle, etc!