The elite capture of Substack

Who you read—and pay to read—is a budding social signal, a way to broadcast sophistication and align you with a niche intellectual tribe.

Substack’s promise is that the best writing will rise to the top. But, in reality, the best writers—on Substack or anywhere else—aren’t just creators of content; they’re mirrors for aspiration, revealing something... See more

The thing I didn’t understand going into it was that Substack wasn’t just about an economic trend of power flowing to individual writers thanks to the leverage technology gives them—it was about creating a morally superior playing field that could help heal our minds from the damage done by social networks. The Substack model wasn’t just a business... See more

Are you reading the words of your favorite writer, their intern, or their intern’s ghostwriter?

At scale, I suppose performative thought isn’t a bug—it’s a feature.

As Emily Sundberg deftly noted: “Substack is making everyone into writers the way Instagram made everyone into photographers, but there’s one big difference ... the point of Substack is ... See more