Sterling Proffer

In its early days, Substack primarily catered to a certain set of internet-savvy writers and journalists, lured by the promise of monetizing a direct relationship with their readers. But as it morphs from a niche publishing concern into a heavyweight start-up mentioned in the same breath as Twitter and Facebook, its user base is proliferating... See more

I have occasionally been asked why I’m obsessed with brands. The answer is that brands are things made out of belief. They are amorphous *meanings* that structure our relationships; they are already the same sort of thing that a religion or a culture is. With the cultural production service economy, and now with cryptocurrencies, all of the... See more

The further from goods and services you go, the closer you get to ideology and belief. If it’s the case that the goods and services are a means to a different end rather than the other way around, the question is: what are you leading your subscribers towards?

The civic fathers who presided over the industrial cities of the late nineteenth and early and middle twentieth centuries—the Rockefellers and Carnegies who built the museums and libraries and concert halls—supported culture as an end in itself: a public good, a social value, a point of local and national pride. Today’s planners and plutocrats... See more

14. Reward Your Biggest Fans