Sublime

I'm not so naive to believe that Substack is the answer. It was a historical anomaly that any of us were paid to run fanzines in the first place. But right now, Substack more and more closely resembles the constellation of DIY blogs and websites that made new music so exciting to me 20 years ago.

Here’s the rub: for Deep Research to live up to its promise, we have to burn the internet down and make it good again.

But whether Substack is good for writers is one question; another is whether a world in which subscription newsletters rival magazines and newspapers is a world that people want.

Substack has built a fantastic platform for independent writers to not only reach their audiences directly, but to support themselves financially while doing so without having to depend on increasingly stultifying media institutions.

The recent history of the Internet, however, warns that we shouldn’t necessarily expect the endearingly homegrown nature of these 1,000 True Fans communities to persist. When viable new economic niches emerge online, venture-backed businesses, looking to extract their cut, are typically not far behind. Services such as Patreon and Kickstarter are j... See more