Doomberg Goes “All-in” on Substack's Network of VC-Enabled Grifters, While Others Decipher How to Ghost Substack

If you're anything like me then you take a keen interest in many things collapse – books, blogs, podcasts, etc. – and have probably listened to several episodes of Nate Hagens' excellent podcast The Great Simplification. Like me you may have also come across the Doomberg newsletter, a newsletter which I discovered early in its 2021 inception but then quickly soured on it as it appeared to have no recognition of biophysical economics nor any hint of a strong ecological take, it instead appearing to be little more than another run-of-the-mill financial publication with bear-ish aspects to it.

It was to my surprise then to learn that Hagens had interviewed Doomberg for an episode that dropped in early-August (italicised Doomberg will refer to the publication, non-italicised Doomberg will refer to the individual being interviewed), probably the only venue from which I could actually bear spending any time listening to Doomberg pontificate. But while a comment made by Doomberg about halfway through the episode made me burst out laughing and convinced me of the need to write a response, in preparation for that response... well... I kinda discovered a few things about Doomberg. And the more I looked, the more I found. And I found a lot.

But before we delve into the backstory of Doomberg, and since (a) I'd written a fair amount of what you'll find below before I'd discovered the meaty part of Doomberg's backstory, (b) I don't want to detract from the core of the Doomberg story by distracting readers looking to read about Doomberg with material that is mostly about online publishing, and (c) I've yet to actually complete the compiling, organising, and writing of that Doomberg backstory, I've decided to publish this as a precursor part 1 to the Doomberg-centric part 2.

Without any further ado, a few (tens of thousands of) words about the platform that Doomberg is most fittingly published with. (Please excuse the dryness of the first few sections, they're necessary to lay the groundwork for the more revelatory and rather jaw-dropping following sections.)

“All-in” on an awry experiment

As many of us are well aware, Doomberg is by far the most famous green chicken on Twitter, its Twitter profile page indicating that it has a significant following of nearly 260,000 "people" (this is Twitter we're talking about, so unless Doomberg staff have been weeding out all the OnlyFans followers they – like the rest of us – incessantly get, then the quotations may be rather appropriate). Otherwise, and as one would readily notice on the profile page, the account is said to be "no longer active".

Long story short, and as explained on August 2^nd in the linked-to "Notes on X" piece (the word "Notes" being a play on Substack's new Twitter-esque app, which will be elaborated on below), the Doomberg team "built this franchise at the nexus between Old Twitter and Substack", harnessing the former to drive readers – potentially transformed into paying subscribers – to their Substack publication. (For those unaware, Substack is an online newsletter platform founded in late-2017, "newsletter" to a large extent being a fancy term for a blog whose posts get sent out to subscribers by email.)

However, and to make a long story short, in early-April Twitter (purchased half a year earlier by Elon Musk) blocked tweet embeds from working on Substack posts, then blocked Twitter users from being able to like, retweet, and comment on tweets that included links to a Substack publication, followed up by marking all Substack links as unsafe. Although the blockages were rescinded a few days later, come mid-August Twitter's antics returned (or rather X's antics returned, as Twitter-cum-Twitter 2.0 is currently known as), this time via throttling links to sites that Musk disliked (which included Substack links). The throttling was rescinded after an analysis of the situation was published, although come mid-September throttling again began to occur against Substack links and those of other competitors.

Doomberg pointed out that "the mere mention of 'Substack' in a tweet leads to substantial de-boosting, and we suspect many accounts closely associated with the site are being punished by the algorithm." That de-boosting continues, as seen via a recent tweet made by physician-scientist and author Eric Topol in which rather than link to his Substack post "The BA.2.86 variant and the new booster", he states "See my profile for link; otherwise X-suppressed".

As Doomberg thus put it,

To be clear, the current owner of Twitter is free to do whatever he likes with his property. He has decided that anybody associated with Substack is no longer welcome, and after months of working through a bout of the sunk cost fallacy, we have decided it is time to move on. Starting today, we will be placing our Twitter account on Lurker mode and shifting our limited resources to Notes.

While Doomberg points out that the team "settled on Notes because the team at Substack has been our partner from the beginning" and that "in many ways, we have co-branded the words 'Doomberg' and 'Substack'", Doomberg's approach can pretty much be summed up in one overarching sentence published in its "Notes on X" piece: "We are now all-in on the Substack experiment."

And what of that "Substack experiment" that Doomberg is apparently so devoted to? Well, and just for starters, Twitter's early-April blocking and limiting of Substack links, tweets and embeds stemmed from Substack's launch of its new Notes feature, somewhat of a Twitter alternative baked into Substack which allows users to publish "posts, quotes, comments, images, and links", along with the usual likes, replies and reshares (known as "restacks"). In response to Twitter's blockages, in mid-May Substack's three co-founders stated that

[W]e recognize that – fair or not – this was probably inevitable. Twitter's actions are part of a well-established history of social media platforms limiting writers' and creators' ability to share their work. Ad-based social platforms want writers' and creators' audiences glued to their feeds, and they design their products to keep them from leaving.

Which is a bit rich. Yes, Substack users own all their content and can export their archive, email list, and payments information for usage on other platforms. And yes, unlike others, Substack isn't a social media network that has tried to incorporate publishing into its platform:

• Meta launched a Substack competitor, Bulletin, in 2021, but shut it down earlier this year
• Twitter purchased newsletter platform Revue also in 2021, which Elon Musk shut down in January 2023
• LinkedIn, not exactly a social media platform but somewhat comparable, opened up its newsletter system to the general public in late-2021
• Twitter 2.0's recent rebranding of Twitter 1.0's Super Follows (launched in September 2021) to Subscriptions can be seen as a quasi attempt to move in on the newfangled "creator economy" now that tweets can have 25,000 characters, although the venture is mostly floundering (although indications are that a more fleshed out newsletter functionality will be launching sooner than later)

Coming from the complete opposite angle, what Substack has instead done is take a newsletter platform and incorporate more and more social media aspects into it, to the point that one can already see writers such as Substack-stalwart Matt Taibbi who, "given the option of posting articles on Twitter instead", are choosing to quit Twitter for a deeper integration with Substack and its new social media-esque Notes feature.

Coinciding with the introduction of Substack Notes in April, Substack's co-founders stated that "With Substack, we have set out to build an alternative media ecosystem". That they're certainly doing, beginning with the fact that by turning on notifications in the Substack app (launched in March 2020) the app allows users to turn off email notifications, the very thing that was its key selling point as a newsletter platform. As Adam Tinworth of One Man & His Blog observed, "All of a sudden, instead of being an email service, Substack becomes a content app on your phone or iPad".

In mid-August Substack then took things one step further by adding a follow button, TechCrunch stating that the new feature "make[s the] platform feel more like a social network", and that "the addition of a Follow button indicates that the platform is serious about branching out beyond a newsletter platform". In fact, upon Facebook's and Twitter's initial announcement of branching into newsletters, Hamish McKenzie, Chief Writing Officer of Substack and one of its three co-founders, pretty much admitted to Substack's move in this direction.

[Facebook and Twitter] have announced very plainly that they intend to take our business.

All very well. They're in our sights too.

Or as put by Chris Best, CEO and another of Substack's three co-founders,

If we are correct about what we're doing – it's going to be very big. It's going to be more like Facebook-scale than New York Times-scale. That's how we're thinking about the company.

It's not too far-fetched then to deduce that the idea is to ultimately move in on the space occupied by current social media networks by having Substack somewhat morph into one itself, this all accomplished by what can best be described as the reverse engineering of a social media company. That is, Substack started off by making a name for itself by attracting writers that would normally use something like Medium, WordPress, Mailchimp or Patreon, then, having established a sizeable customer base, took a page or two from the social media playbook by adding features more akin to a social media network, features that when interconnected with one another contribute to disincentivizing writers from leaving the platform.

Best and his fellow co-founders like to call Substack a "subscription network", which is, in reality, a fancy way of describing a vertically integrated system. The non-integrated, do-it-yourself setup is probably epitomised by tech and media analyst Ben Thompson's Stratechery, which he built himself by combining WordPress, Memberful, Stripe and MailChimp. Substack's goal has been to create a platform that combines the functionalities of the aforementioned services into one system – "a combined experience that is different and better than would be possible at all if you just had a bunch of different things that were one little piece of that stack", as Best put it – which has now been added to with various social media aspects. Best describes it as a "new economic engine for culture".

Substack is neither an enterprise software provider nor a social network in the mold that we're used to experiencing them. Our self-conception, the thing that we are attempting to build, and I think if you look at the constituent pieces, in fact, the emerging reality is that we are a new thing called the subscription network[.]

With Substack's co-founders suggesting that the platform is neither enterprise software provider nor a social network, much like Facebook it supposedly isn't a media company then. As McKenzie likes to put it, "We're not hiring writers, and we're not publishing editorial. We're enabling writers and enabling editorial." However, while Substack tries to project a neutral stance in which it's somehow above other media companies that have come before, it's all the while trying to have it both ways, readily seen by its practice of supporting particular writers.

To be a bit more specific, in March of 2021 McKenzie announced that Substack had for some time been providing so-called "cash advances" for writers (what others would generally call "funding" or "paying" writers) under the moniker Substack Pro, in the process trying to brush it all off as no big deal by stating that the advances were "effectively an interest-free loan". Several writers were given up to $250,000 for a year's worth of content (which sometimes went along with access to editors, health insurance, as well as a legal defender program), Substack keeping 85% of subscription revenue during that first year. As McKenzie put it,

We see these deals as business decisions, not editorial ones. We don't commission or edit stories. We don't hire writers, or manage them. The writers, not Substack, are the owners. No-one writes for Substack – they write for their own publications.

As he also stated,

We do not approach this process from the perspective of a publisher, looking to gather a particular type of content under our brand, but with the eye of an investor, looking to stimulate a new generation of profitable media businesses. We want to help writers flourish.

There's plenty in those two paragraphs to go on, starting off with the notion that "no-one writes for Substack – they write for their own publications". While most people/publications writing on Substack forego paying the $50 to use their own domain with Substack and so use a Substack subdomain instead (for the intrigue that comes with being directly associated with Substack?), the common parlance is to refer to someone's "Substack", as in "I hear you've got a Substack!" No one ever says "I hear you've got a Medium" or "a WordPress" or "a Ghost" or what have you. In other words, the branding is very much attached to Substack rather than one's publication, suggesting that to a certain extent a publication isn't completely one's own but is actually a subset of the grand Substack brand. But that's hardly a pressing issue in this case.

What's more pressing is the suggestion that Substack sees its Substack Pro deals "as business decisions, not editorial ones". Because while Substack chose not to be transparent by refusing to disclose the writers it selected for the program (it instead passed the buck of divulging association with the Substack Pro program on to the writers themselves), the fact of the matter is that by choosing some writers over other writers Substack was inherently making editorial decisions from the get-go, and so had de facto made editorial decisions as any other publisher does. Otherwise put, Substack didn't randomly pick the names of writers out of a hat, it specifically chose writers that for one reason or another it wanted to be associated with the platform.

To make matters even more questionable, Substack used metrics derived from Twitter (calculated via its "Baschez score") to ascertain which writers did a good job of drawing attention to themselves, who they then attempted to poach. As one Substack writer put it, "Substack's recruitment strategy ... is to offer itself up to people who generate a lot of 'chatter' and outrage on Media Twitter", and that Substack had therefore recruited via "metrics derived from a platform like Twitter, where popularity is based on being loud, stupid, and ignoring context".

So although McKenzie described Substack as an "alternative to social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter", Substack's operators knew exactly what was needed to emulate a social media platform and so proceeded to select writers that had gained notoriety thanks to those social media platforms themselves. As seen once again, Substack has been attempting to move in on – if not reverse engineer – the space occupied by current social media networks while partially morphing into one themselves.

Working off of journalist Annalee Newitz's Substack piece (which was her last, and which was subsequently reproduced via Buttondown), an article in The Guardian by Oscar Schwartz questioned whether or not Substack was "a media pyramid scheme". Because as Newitz observed, the playing field was clandestinely rigged thanks to select writers – generally those who had already found success in pre-existing media structures – being given the resources that allowed them to write full time, non-Substack Pro writers having to "claw and scrape their way into a subscriber base that pays". In effect, what Substack has done is dangle its "successful" writers in front of its "rank-and-file membership" (what a New York Times columnist described as "the content-creation equivalent of Uber drivers") with the largely false hope that "You too could have a Substack that's as financially successful as this guy's Substack!" As Newitz then summed it all up, "Substack's business is a scam".

But as Substack has what Newitz describes as an "overall scammy business practice", the scammyness doesn't end with what goes on within the platform itself. Because having seen Substack create an app, launch a Twitter-esque social media system, and then morph into a content app on one's phone that eschews the externality of newsletter emails, it's become more than apparent that the aforementioned opinion of Substack's co-founders that the practices of "ad-based social platforms" that try to get people "glued to their feeds" and which "design their products to keep them from leaving" quite blatantly occur with ad-free social/content platforms as well – Substack itself. Because as Tinworth also described it, Substack is "building an attention moat", exactly what one would do if the idea is to get people "glued to their feeds".

As incorporating advertisements into a platform apparently isn't the common denominator that underpins products designed to keep its users from leaving, what then is? Well, as insinuated in another quote by Tinworth, and which touches on a topic we'll now move on to, the common denominator may very well be venture capitalist (VC) investment.

It always seemed unlikely the VCs backing Substack would be happy with it existing mainly in an open ecosystem like email. Well, now it has its app, and the beginnings of its own platform. That's going to make the VCs happy.

Why? Because if your audience is in their in-box, you can switch to Ghost or Revue or Buttondown or Beehiiv seamlessly, and lose nothing. If your audience is in Substack's app, as a writer, you risk losing that audience's attention by shifting. You are disincentivised to do so. It's a soft form of lock in, that will grow as the app usage grows – if it does.

Ponzi scheming venture capitalist styles

Doomberg's aforementioned statement of being "all-in on the Substack experiment" might have been a bit more accurate had of they said "we've always been all-in on the Andreessen Horowitz experiment, and we're always going to be all-in on the Andreessen Horowitz experiment". For those unaware, Andreessen Horowitz (also known as a16z) is a private American VC firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Amongst many other investments, it invested $80m into Twitter back in 2011, adding another $400m in May of 2022 in order to assist Musk's purchase of the microblogging platform.

Likewise, and following an initial $2m in seed funding upon Substack's graduation from Y Combinator in 2018, in July of 2019 Andreessen Horowitz led a $15.3 million Series A in Substack (coinciding with Andreessen Horowitz general partner Andrew Chen joining the Substack board of directors), proceeded by a $65 million Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz in March of 2021 (the company’s valuation then said to be $650m, 72 times its $9m revenue in 2021). That apparently wasn't going to be enough (be it for Substack's stated plan of moving in on the turf of other social media giants or what have you), so after having already secured $82.4m in funding over three years Substack then made a private attempt in mid-2022 to raise another $75m to $100m via a Series C, estimates putting the company's valuation between $750m and $1bn. But with the market for venture investments cooling and layoffs occurring across the tech sector in 2022 (and then persisting at a 50% higher rate in 2023), the plan was ultimately abandoned. (With The New York Times’ stock trading in 2022 at roughly 2.2 times its next 12 months’ revenue, Substack's $1bn valuation would have absurdly made its valuation more than 100 times its aforementioned 2021 revenue of $9m – with the company possibly not even being profitable, as will be elaborated on below.)

Washington, D.C.-based Substack spokeswoman Lulu Cheng Meservey (who studied counterterrorism at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, where she met her husband Joshua Meservey – a former research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a powerful conservative thinktank based in Washington whose activist wing Heritage Action for America spent $5.1m on lobbying in 2021 to block voting rights in battleground states) declined to comment to The New York Times for its May 2022 article about any funding conversations. Meservey did however maintain that Substack was still in growth mode, highlighting a web page listing more than a dozen jobs, including a head of growth. As Meservey succinctly put it, "My comment is www.substack.com/jobs".

In fact, nearly two months earlier, on April 6^th 2022, Meservey concern-trolled the following (presumably to whip up some contrived controversy and attention):

But what was that that Meservey tweeted four months, seven hours, and seventeen minutes later?

And that wasn't the only departure from the platform, Substack having laid off 14% of its staff in late-June of that year in order to conserve cash.

All in all, one might call Substack's abandoned Series C funding round a harbinger of things to come, what with the "subscription network" having jumped on the VC treadmill several years earlier and thus having locked itself into the incessant need for perpetual growth in order to provide returns to investors.

For those unfamiliar with the VC treadmill, it's generally regarded that there's two ways for VCs to make money: the less glamorous and more difficult route of finding and investing in a business that can be nurtured to profitability, versus the pump and dump route whereby an investment is hyped, its valuation balloons, and then later on down the track shares are offloaded (at a sizeable profit). The latter scenario doesn't imply that the business will actually succeed in the long term, the idea simply being to turn a quick profit irrespective of the business or other investors who believed the hype, bought in, and are left holding the bag when everything goes pear-shaped.

When it comes to Substack, with ready access to tens of millions of dollars the apparent idea has been to prioritise growth and deal with the cash burn later, similar to how Uber and Lyft had prioritised building market share a decade earlier by effectively subsidising rides. But while Uber and Lyft started off at a time when interest rates were near zero for a prolonged period of time, all of which provided a fertile environment for investment, when rates began their march upwards in 2022 and borrowing money became more expensive (I won't elaborate on the fundamental economic flaw implicit in the latter five words), Substack found itself unable to raise more funding. It certainly couldn't replicate its 2021 activities in which it burned through $25m of the $65m it raised that year, and so with its failed Series C funding round it resorted to layoffs and scaling back plans.

In short, while cryptocurrencies are as close as one can get to an investment based purely on hype, are utterly reliant on bounteous supplies of money that low interest rates engender in order to increase their value, and then tank (as they did in 2022) once those rates rise and the money dries up, Substack and its "fat startup" model fell victim to the exact same process and environment. But instead of cryptocurrencies losing their value, it was VC-driven tech firms that not only saw their viabilities decrease but in some cases saw their valuations slashed by as much as 95%.

If this process all sounds a bit like a Ponzi scheme to you (in which a continuous supply of investors are needed to provide funds to pay off initial investors), there's a reason why our growth-based economic system (in which the vast majority of money in circulation is created by banks loaning it into existence, and which due to the interest-based system must be continuously created and loaned out in order to – at the very least – pay the interest on previous loans lest the system implode in on itself) is nicknamed Ponzionomics. Moreover, with the VC process not only being a subset of the greater economic system but also vigorously paralleling its mechanics, there's no shortage of those who describe VC investment as veritable Ponzi schemes. To list off just a couple,

• a columnist on Fortune.com stating "Forget the occasional Ponzi scheme. Venture capitalism may be the greatest scam going"
• a Silicon Valley tech investor stating that "We are, make no mistake … in the middle of an enormous multivariate kind of Ponzi scheme", that we're in a "bizarre Ponzi balloon created by the venture capital industry", and that "the dynamics we’ve entered is, in many ways, creating a dangerous, high stakes Ponzi scheme"

There's even those that not only admit to VC investments promulgating Ponzi schemes but who proclaim that they should be taken advantage of as such.

Let me start off with something that might sound a bit cynical: Venture Capital firms are in the business of making money for their clients and they don't give a hoot about your startup's idea, narrative, or cause – those are just packaging.

The only thing early-stage investors care about is whether you will grow quickly enough to be attractive for another round of funding and increase the value of their initial investment.

Much like Ponzi schemes, the gains of previous investors are paid for by the new entrants, who are wooed by friends, promises, half-truths, and strategically crafted narratives. The reality matters less than the pitch.

That might actually be a bit naïve and simplistic, as there most certainly are occasions where VCs are more interested in the manner in which their investments can foster the steering of societies in the direction they desire. That'd include Andreessen Horowitz, which has been described in Columbia Journalism Review as having "aspirations to dismantle the traditional media" and which is said to have "talked about creating its own media entity", to Marc Andreessen himself who, lumped in with Peter Thiel, Marc Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, have collectively been described in Vanity Fair as "American oligarchs, controlling online access for billions of users on Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Instagram, and WhatsApp, including 80 percent of the US population".

These four men have long been regarded as technologically progressive heroes, but they are actually part of a broader antidemocratic, authoritarian turn within the tech world, deeply invested in preserving the status quo and in keeping their market-leadership positions or near-monopolies – and their multi-billion-dollar fortunes secure from higher taxes.

While the machinations and grander plans of supposed tech saviours will be elaborated on in a subsequent section, the more mundane fact remains that when it comes to Substack's investors at large, and as stated in that same Columbia Journalism Review piece, "venture capital lenders tend to have very specific expectations about the financial returns expect[ed], and they are not above pressuring the companies they fund to change the way they do business in order to produce these returns".

As it's safe to assume that Substack's three co-founders would like to at least keep up the appearance that they're the ones ultimately in charge of the platform, in early-2023 the publishing platform had little other choice for keeping the momentum and hype going than to spruik a new venture. That is, pitching retail investors at large – such as its own writers – with what might appear to some as a last-ditch-effort for securing more funding (which technically became an extension of its $65m Series B round). "Own a piece of Substack", the sales pitch went.

But what the pitch didn't do was reveal to those writers-cum-co-owners any of Substack's recent financials – what its monthly net income was, what its cash burn was, or even how much runway it had left. The most forthcoming statement Substack did make was to essentially give its prospective retail investors similar advice as that given to gamblers upon entering a casino or the like.

Substack is a startup on an extremely ambitious mission, and success is far from guaranteed. You should not invest any funds in this community round unless you can afford to lose your entire investment.

What Substack did ultimately disclose (as legally required) were its financials for 2020 and 2021, although it refrained from voluntarily disclosing anything from 2022 – and possibly with good reason. Because while it had a gross revenue of $11.9m for 2021, by handing out large sums of money to lure in big-name writers it effectively burned through roughly $25m in cash. On top of that, in June of 2022 it had set up a $20m term loan and a revolving credit line with JP Morgan Chase, as well as another $20m credit line with another institution a month later (neither of which had been touched, said a spokesperson). Nonetheless, and as one observation went, the crowdfunding operation was a "terrible deal for retail [investors]".

Otherwise, a reporter for The Verge saw the crowdfunding venture as "a cynical ploy to rope people into identifying as helping writers in the absence of real financial information" and that it "doesn't strike me as a good omen for Substack's longevity", while an editor of Boing Boing opined that "Substack is on the ropes". But while Doomberg's About page states that "Family offices and c-suite executives hire us to deliver innovative thinking and clarity to complex problems", and so presumably know a good deal when they see one, the Doomberg team nonetheless "participated in [Substack's] recent author-led fundraising round, making us small equity owners of the company".

Although Substack managed to raise nearly $8m (raising its overall total haul to just over $90m), with interest rates not being what they were in recent years, banks collapsing, VCs decreasing valuations by as much as 95%, and investors looking for safer assets, it's not outlandish to imagine Substack getting squeezed as conditions deteriorate further in coming months and years. If so, there's two obvious questions that would arise from such an outcome:

1. What would happen to Substack?
2. What would Substack writers do?

Famous last words

To address the initial question first, it was stated on Substack's recent crowdfunding page that

If we have a successful exit in the future (like an IPO, merger, or acquisition) for more than that amount, you'll see a return on your investment.

A "successful exit" is of course by no means a guarantee, what with an unsuccessful exit due to a market downturn a very realistic possibility for Substack. That situation could similarly result in an acquisition, quite possibly by a predatory third-party that wouldn't mind rolling into its platform all the content from the newsletter platform that has quickly become the go-to for independent writers. While Meta – following its failed attempt with newsletters via its homegrown Bulletin platform – is one possible suitor, another possibility of who that third-party could be is of course Elon Musk and his nascent X outfit, and not just because the acquisition could in one way or another be facilitated by the VC firm that has stakes in both companies.

(In late-2022, and in an article about Musk's possible purchase of Substack, The Information stated that going by The New York Times' valuation of 2.2 times its projected revenue for the next year, and generously supposing that Substack's revenue had double to $18m, Substack had a valuation of about $40m, not $650m. Going by Shopify's stock trading at 7.2 times their next 12 months’ revenue, Substack would still only be valued at $130m, five times less than its estimated value.)

Yes, there was the aforementioned early-April incident in which Twitter temporarily blocked all links to Substack and deemed them unsafe, as well as the more recent incident in which Twitter throttled access to Substack (and several other sites), suggesting that there's no love lost between the owners of the two platforms. There is however also the fact that one of Substack's co-founders, McKenzie, wrote a book in which he glorified Tesla, and even worked as a writer in the company's communications division between 2014 and 2015 (inciting some to call Substack "controlled opposition", which is kind of pushing it).

Otherwise, some self-described "tinfoil hat rationale" opined that Musk "wanted to prove [Substack's] reliance on him" so as to convince Marc Andreessen to merge Substack into Twitter/X, which is at least less of a stretch than the previously stated theory. Meanwhile, although Musk tends to throw around the words "I'm open to the idea" rather willy-nilly (such as in response to the suggestion to buy Silicon Valley Bank during its collapse), he did state last year on more than one occasion that he was "open to the idea" of purchasing Substack.

Later that month:

A couple of years prior to Musk's ownership Twitter did in fact attempt to acquire Substack, although the idea was in no uncertain terms quickly put to rest.

Shortly after Substack co-founder McKenzie publicly shot down the idea, Twitter then went ahead and purchased the newsletter platform Revue instead (which, as mentioned earlier, Musk shut down soon after purchasing Twitter).

But although Best stated that "We're really attached to our baby and we think that it can be a strong, independent company. So we're putting all of our efforts into that, and we have no intention to sell", if push comes to shove, and having not put in the tens of millions of dollars that investors have, Substack's co-founders may ultimately not have too much of a say in the matter (which ultimately lies with Andreessen Horowitz's "deal team and its seven general partners – the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong", as The New Yorker put it). Moreover, if some kind of merger with – or acquisition by – Twitter/X did in fact occur after a market downturn forced the hand of Substack's now-enfeebled-to-their-investors co-founders, it wouldn't be too much of a stretch of the imagination to envision something along the lines of what's happened with Twitter-cum-X occurring to Substack-cum-Xstack (in short, users leaving in droves for competitors amidst the hijacking and insertion of far right material into online mainstream conversation, the turning of the platform into a haven for Nazis, and the funneling of money to embolden and support the far-right grassroots).

Which segues into the second question of what would Substack writers do amidst such a situation, a question that isn't quite as simple to answer as it'd require said writers taking various factors into account in the attempt of forming a decision, which in this case means factors that are stretched across the next eight or nine sections.

Supremastacks: A feature, not a bug

Many current Substack writers would of course stick around for a Substack 2.0 (or an Xstack or whatever it would be), even revel in a gravitation towards the far-right as Twitter-cum-X has done. In fact, doing that, as well as making a shift over to outright charlatanry, wouldn't be completely out of character for Substack as its short existence has readily shown.

Using the (ongoing) SARS-CoV-2 pandemic as a litmus test, the past few years have seen social media companies like Meta/Facebook and Twitter deplatforming users for the spreading of disinformation, often for their anti-vaccine conspiracy theories and outright SARS-CoV-2 charlatanry. Although there isn't necessarily a shortage of platforms which these users (some of whom were writers) could have gravitated towards, it was soon discovered by many that Substack was not only amenable to their grifts but was willing to welcome them (and others, such as white nationalists, QAnon influencers [which there's lots of], etc.) with open arms. This was so readily the case that Wired described Substack as "a playground for the deplatformed" while Spencer Ackerman of Forever Wars (formerly on Substack) described the platform as a "pandemic-disinformation vector".

"[P]ioneer of the anti-vaccine movement" and SARS-CoV-2 grifter extraordinaire Dr. Joseph Mercola (who has encouraged huffing on bleach) stated on his Substack (who conveniently removed material from his website and set up a paid Substack upon being called out for being one of the "Disinformation Dozen") that

The reason I chose a paid membership platform on Substack is because it will protect all of my content from censorship. For just $5 a month, or the discounted annual rate of $50 per year, you will have access to all of my articles, all the time[.]

While payment facilities such as PayPal, Stripe and Square have restricted their services for those promoting hate and violence, content delivery networks like Cloudflare have blocked increasingly violent alt-right web forums, and domain registrars have even taken down websites of prominent white nationalists, several banned outfits have nonetheless found a loop-hole – and thus a safe-haven – for accessing the above services – or services similar to the above – via Substack. (There is the occasional exception for which this loop-hole doesn't work, such as a group of white nationalists that were forced to link to their SubscribeStar page through their Substack.) As one group of white nationalists proudly stated about Substack (emphasis theirs),

What we like most about Substack is that we can now communicate with you directly – no middle-man platform, no algorithm, no haters, no censorship.

Now we have complete access to and control over our ability to contact and engage with you, which means if Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or any other platform that disagrees with our message tries to shut us down we can still keep in touch with you and keep the momentum of our network going.

And it's not just white nationalists that gravitate to Substack but full-on Nazis, as thoroughly described in a late-November Atlantic article entitled "Substack Has a Nazi Problem", a couple of days later the article's writer Jonathan M. Katz then publishing a follow-up piece on his newsletter The Racket (which, for the time being at least, uses Substack).

Substack Has a Nazi Problem

The newsletter platform’s lax content moderation creates an opening for white nationalists eager to get their message out.

The AtlanticJonathan M. Katz

More on Substack’s Nazis

And a note about the future of The Racket

The RacketJonathan M. Katz

And for some additional "behind the scenes" info refer to The New Abnormal's recent interview of Katz, between 38:03 and 53:04.

According to Katz, sixteen of the newsletters he reviewed featured overt Nazi symbols (such as swastikas and sonnenrads) in their logos or other graphics, while various posts included a racist caricature of a Chinese person, promotion of the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory, plenty of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and more.

We'll return to Substack's penchant for publishing white supremacists and the like later, but in the meantime, and when it comes to SARS-CoV-2 grifting and charlatanry, Substack publishes:

• American entrepreneur and "misinformation superspreader" Steve Kirsch, who states that "The more vaccines, the higher your risk of getting COVID" (which is false)
• former New York Times writer Alex Berenson who states that mRNA vaccines have contributed to the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (which is false)
• Dr. Joseph Mercola, who has a piece entitled "More Children Have Died From COVID Shot Than From COVID" (which is false)

As stated by an American surgical oncologist, David Gorski, "Substack, whatever its virtues otherwise, is arguably worse than Facebook and Twitter. No wonder quacks love it."

Yes, Substack did in fact welcome physician-scientist and author Eric Topol as a writer in residence in late-2021. However, what Topol's presence on the platform has ultimately accomplished is the establishment of Substack as a platform practicing "bothsidesism" (presenting a false balance), what with Substack giving equal footing to and thus effectively legitimising writers like Kirsch, Berenson and Mercola, whose opinions are given the illusion of respectability alongside Topol's. (This is similar to the manner in which the arguments of a climate denier debating a climate change scientist in a one-on-one situation can appear to be of equal stature, when really, and according to NASA, 97% of the world's scientists agree that humans are causing climate change.) The misinformation and outright lies of charlatans and grifters effectively get treated with equal stature and credibility as that bestowed upon the scientific findings of people like Topol, Substack thus being the embodiment of a platform that gives false balance to opinions and arguments whose ultimate result – to give just one example – is creating a public perception that some issues are scientifically contentious when they are in fact not.

Albeit in an entirely different forum, Peter Hotez, scientist and paediatrician (and developer of a low-cost and patent-free SARS-CoV-2 vaccine for low- and middle-income countries), didn't fall for this scheme. For it was in June of this year that Hotez was invited onto The Joe Rogan Experience podcast in order to "debate" anti-vaxxer and all-round conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Hotez declined, well aware that RFK Jr. would have thrown around cherry-picked statistics and fabricated anecdotes, while simultaneously utilising the "Gish gallop" debate tactic. (Gish gallop is the rhetorical technique of unleashing a firehose of baloney arguments, overwhelming the opponent and rendering them able to properly address little more than a fraction of the torrent with nuanced scientific evidence, the charismatic and unhinged crank coming off better than the geeky scientist.) RFK Jr., after all, and like the rest of them, is after amplification and spectacle. Or as Hotez put it, regarding anti-vaccine information now being a lethal force, "I offered to go on Joe Rogan again – I've been on a couple of times – and have that discussion with him, but not to turn it into the Jerry Springer show with having RFK Jr. on."

So whereas Hotez smartly avoided a "debate" with RFK Jr. about vaccines, one might say then that Topol – and to a lesser extent those like Eric Feigl-Ding and Anthony J Leonardi – has effectively played right into the hands of anti-vaxxers by imparting legitimisation upon the platform they proudly make use of, the legitimisation of the platform then getting imparted on them.

Otherwise, Substack does in fact have content guidelines, but they're so broadly drawn that besides kicking off users for publishing pornography (white supremacist material yes, white supremacist-themed pornography no), and considering the kind of material that currently gets published on Substack which already violates its own terms, it's hard to imagine Substack actually enacting any of its policies besides occurrences in which material published on its website could find its owners legally liable.

While Substack's co-founders have explained their philosophy on content moderation, follow-up statements that Substack has given to various media outlets state that "being skeptical, controversial, or even wrong are not against our terms of service".

While we remove content that is illegal, calls for violence, doxxes someone, and other things you can see in our content guidelines, it's not against the rules to be disagreeable or wrong. This means erring on the side of free press and free expression, even for those we don’t endorse or agree with.

This approach is echoed in a piece attributed to Substack's three co-founders entitled "Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse." In it, the trio not only describe their distaste for their own content guidelines but effectively equate enforcement of those content guidelines with censorship.

While we have content guidelines that allow us to protect the platform at the extremes, we will always view censorship as a last resort, because we believe open discourse is better for writers and better for society.

In other words, and putting aside their lack of defining what their two usages of the word "better" are in reference to as well as their reluctance to substantiate their argument beyond that of "we believe", were Substack to actually enforce its own content guidelines (which include "credible threats of physical harm", aka abuse and harassment) then such an undertaking would apparently equate to censorship.

This laissez-faire approach is perhaps best summed up by a tweet made by Substack's CEO, seemingly echoing the attitudes of the far-right activist and social media platform owner that many have now become familiar with.

Because in parallel to the motives of Twitter/X's far-right activist, the notion of "thought police" is no less than a rhetorical dog whistle (that sets the stage for hate speech), readily seen by doing an internet search for "thought police" AND free speech.

Perhaps even more indicative than that tweet was an April 2023 interview that Best gave to The Verge, in which at one point Best was repeatedly asked what was essentially the same question about content moderation in relation to its new Notes feature: "So if Substack Notes becomes overrun by racism and transphobia, that's fine with you?" And: "I just want to be clear, if somebody shows up on Substack and says 'all brown people are animals and they shouldn't be allowed in America,' you're going to censor that. That’s just flatly against your terms of service." Best's answer? Well, he didn't actually give an answer, instead trying to dodge the issue with replies like:

• "we want to put the writers and the readers in charge"
• "I'm not going to get into gotcha content moderation"
• "I'm not going to engage in content moderation, 'Would you or won't you this or that?'"
• "We're not going to get into specific 'would you or won't you' content moderation questions"
• "I don't think it's a useful way to talk about this stuff"

Following his aversion to every attempt made to get a clear answer out of him, Best then not only attempted to sidestep the whole issue but even attempted to justify it all with the dubious claim of "freedom of the press" (which is somewhat strange, considering that Best and McKenzie have repeatedly claimed that Substack isn't a publisher).

We think we have a strong commitment to freedom of speech, freedom of the press. We think these are essential ingredients in a free society. We think that it would be a failure for us to build a new kind of network that can't support those ideals. ... We don't have all the answers for how those things will work. We are making a new thing. And literally, we launched this thing one day ago. We're going to have to figure a lot of this stuff out.

One might think that Best would know better. Or to be more specific, one might think that Best, as CEO of an actual business, understands that free speech has nothing to do businesses being required to serve each and every customer, or about a publisher (being a business) being required to publish anything and everything a writer wants to write about. On the contrary, the notion of free speech, in the American sense (which is where Substack is based), is intertwined with the First Amendment of the United States Constitution which, as stated by the Legal Information Institute of Cornell Law School, "protects the right to freedom of religion and freedom of expression from government interference". Again, free speech isn't a business issue (which Substack most certainly is), it's a government issue. Moreover, while the First Amendment gives publications and platforms the right to publish nearly anything they want, it also gives them the right to refuse to have their platform be used for the dissemination of material they don't want to publish or host.

The fact of the matter is that one can't simply walk into their local café and proceed to berate patrons with slurs, only to then excuse their actions by claiming that anyone attempting to put an end to their vileness is infringing upon their right to free speech. Because while free speech isn't limited to the rules that a business establishes on its own property, its primary concern is with government interference. Just like a café owner isn't infringing upon anybody's free speech by requesting that they vacate the premises, a social media platform isn't infringing upon anybody's free speech when they suspend or even ban them.

Because as many of us are well aware, holding aloft the notion of free speech as a defence against actions like content moderation is often not only an attempted thought stopper (the supposition being that anybody in disagreement with free speech is against freedom or is a communist or what have you) but little more than a guise for the attempt of destroying civil speech. In the meantime, so-called "free speech absolutism" (as Elon Musk describes his approach, which Matt Taibbi and others praise) is generally code for a high tolerance for bigotry towards particular groups.

By clamouring on about free speech the way he does, and whether or not he recognises it or even understands it, what Best is effectively doing is gaslighting people into thinking that a publishing platform and/or a social media platform can grant somebody free speech (suggesting that to some extent free speech didn't exist until Substack came along), when really we already possess it in spades – go ahead and say what you want in the privacy of your own home to your family, your friends, etc.

Likewise, the point of the gaslighting, as readily seen on Twitter-cum-X over the past year or so, is to promote the creation of an unmoderated dystopia dominated by hate speech, misinformation, and right wing (if not far-right) propaganda, which in the process simultaneously intimidates others and instills fear in them. It's for the avoidance of such outcomes (be it coming from the right, the left, or otherwise) that civilised societies have created rules, rules that outline what forms of speech cause harm – be it the taking away of other people's dignity, their voice, sometimes even their place in society. None of those rules are ultimately laid down by businesses (be it a café or a so-called "subscription network") but rather from democratic governance. For the owner of a business – be it a café or an online platform or whatever it be – to eject someone from their premises for bad behaviour isn't an infringement of anybody's free speech but rather is indicative of what kind of behaviour the business owner is willing to tolerate if not tacitly support.

Fact of the matter is, some speech isn't freeing at all but actually works to choke off speech at the macro level. This is of course the goal of bullies and brutes who want the freedom to intimidate and harass other people, all of which is partaken with ultimate goal of taking away the dignity and relationships of people as well as their place in society.

While complaints about a lack of free speech can start over "small" grievances (limitations on grifting via COVID charlatanry, limitations on writing about white nationalism, etc.), it's all but inevitable that these complaints eventually progress towards ideas that limitations on intimidation, aggression, and even violence are just as much of an infringement on one's "freedom". The simultaneous goal is for the distortion of politics into the defence of raw power as a democratic norm (which can ultimately take the form of fascism), people thus "freed" to lie and cheat, to be violent and brutish, etc. Free speech in time becomes something for "us" (the übermenschen) and not for the less human "them", the strong thus surviving by way of brutalising the weak while the weak have no choice but to listen to, accept, and obey the will of what may very well turn out to be fascists.

Returning to Best's interview, following more dodging of question after question the best that Best could come up with was the suggestion that they don't have all the answers and will have to figure things out later in the future. When it was then put to Best for the umpteenth (and not even final) time "You have to figure out, 'Should we allow overt racism on Substack Notes?' You have to figure that out", Best could come up with nothing better than "No, I'm not going to engage in speculation or specific 'would you allow this or that' content."

It was finally put to Best that "Actually, you're saying, 'You know what? I don’t want to state my values.' And I'm just wondering why that is." Which is an apt observation, resulting in yet another – and revealing? – "I think the conversation about freedom of speech is the essential conversation to have."

A week after the at-times disastrous interview with Best was published, McKenzie was all but forced to try his hand at damage control, stating on Notes itself that "We wish that interview had gone better", with the clarification that "And just in case anyone is ever in any doubt: we don't like or condone bigotry in any form." Which may very well be true, but like Best, McKenzie didn't actually follow that up with any kind of suggestion of how Substack would back up that sentiment, instead offering more of the same (emphasis added).

Instead of trying in vain to strike on the elusive content moderation policy that improves rather than inflames our broken discourse, we are addressing the problem at the root: by changing the business model upon which the media ecosystem is built. That means that we are building a system where money made by writers, not attention that is harvested by algorithms, drives the whole economy. It means we give communities on Substack the tools to establish their own norms and set their own terms of engagement rather than have all that handed down to them by a central authority.

Which is incorrect in several ways. For starters, Substack doesn't "give" anybody any tools but has rather permitted writers to use its tools, a permission that could last indefinitely but which could very well turn out to be temporary (or the terms for usage of those tools could be altered at any time). Because while a writer's "terms of engagement" with their audience isn't "handed down to them by a central authority", the ability for writers to use the platform ultimately is handed down by a central authority. Unlike a tried and tested (albeit bloated) platform like WordPress of which users can download, install wherever they please, and not have to deal with any kind of central authority platform-wise, the very existence of all Substack-using publications are ultimately dependent and reliant upon the central authority that Substack itself ultimately is.

In other words, when Best and McKenzie (and their third co-founder, CTO Jairaj Sethi) conceived, designed and built Substack, they specifically chose to give the platform a central authority (which was initially them, but which is arguably now its largest VC investors) in which the possibility exists for flicking the switch on or off for any Substack. This isn't a philosophical issue, it's a technical issue, and unless there's something we're all not aware of, nobody forced the trio to construct Substack in this way. (The reality of Substack's centralised ecosystem is elaborated upon in more detail in the subsequent "Centralised vs decentralised ecosystems" section.)

But having created Substack in such a manner, and having wilfully entered the information space, doing so inherently implies a duty of making the effort of confirming that the information being put forth is accurate and just. But rather than take responsibility for the structure of what they've created, Substack's three co-founders have instead succumbed to a dereliction of duty by repeatedly hiding behind what are un-tested and therefore hollow and fatuous claims about "addressing the problem at the root: by changing the business model upon which the media ecosystem is built".

This opinion wasn't a slip-up, Best having basically said the same thing in a 2020 interview with The Verge (emphasis added).

It's not like you can tweak the Twitter algorithm and make all of our online discourse lovely because the way that it works now stems from the underlying economics of how those platforms work. The only way to make a real change is to change the underlying laws of physics that apply, change the rules of the game, change how people are making money, have a new and better business model for independent writing and make that thing work.

It's not clear if Best actually understands what the word "underlying" means, because the fact of the matter is that not only does Substack work with the exact same "underlying economics" that Twitter/X does of being funded by VCs, but they're even partially funded by the exact same VC firm. That is, the "underlying economics of how those platforms work", both Twitter/X and Substack, is the appeasement of the returns expected by VCs (be those returns monetary or not).

Best then goes on to claim that

We just started arguing about this, basically, and we came to this really simple nugget of an idea: what if we just made a dead-simple way for a writer to go independent?

"Independent" can of course refer to different things to different people, the definition that Best and company like to put forward being that Substack writers are independent by way of not having a boss and by way of not being reliant on ad-dependent corporate media models, ultimately culminating in writers being hired and fired by their very own readers. But how independent are Substack writers otherwise? Or to be more specific, how independent are Substack writers from the whims of those that control the actual Substack platform? This issue will be elaborated at greater length in a subsequent section, but suffice to say that with Substack's VC investors presumably expecting a return on their investments (which may not imply a mere monetary return), and with Substack writers ultimately having zero control over the future direction of the platform, the sense of "independence" that Best speaks of is not only a rather tenuous one but may ultimately prove to be nothing more than a delusion.

So while Best and McKenzie try to pass off Substack as if it's some kind of holier-than-thou, non-ideological entity (which is of course an ideology in itself), the stance of neutrality they try and project does little more than prop up previously existing power structures. As stated by Mozilla Senior Director of Content Carolyn O’Hara, upon Mozilla showing interest in the fediverse and Mastodon (Mozilla being the company behind the open source web browser Firefox),

We are saying out the gate that this isn't a neutral platform. We think that that's often used as this crutch to allow, or even amplify, really toxic content in the name of engagement… In some cases, platforms aren't just brave enough to actually just take things down.

But refraining to take things down can, however, be rather profitable.

Because while McKenzie professes that "we don't like or condone bigotry in any form", the fact remains that they do however have no problem taking money from and profiting off of bigots, and from all appearances are not only more than happy to take as much money from them as they can, but in turn are just as happy to help said bigots make as much money as they can. Because when McKenzie stated in his damage control piece that "we give communities on Substack the tools to establish their own norms and set their own terms of engagement rather than have all that handed down to them by a central authority", all he's saying is that on the one hand Substack's co-founders choose to abrogate any kind of responsibility they may have as the central authority by turning a blind eye to bigotry, while on the other hand Substack's co-founders are nonetheless more than willing to simultaneously uphold the role of the central authority when it comes time to cashing the cheques of bigots.

Which shouldn't come as much of a surprise, seeing how the architecture of the "underlying economics" they've baked into their platform isn't one of upholding some kind of standard of decency, but rather of placating their VC investors, however that may be.

That all being said, and due to what underlies the "underlying economics" of Substack (i.e. the need to satisfy VC investors), it may very well be that pandering to bigotry and the like is Substack's only path to long-term profitability. As one may recall, CBS Chairman Les Moonves stated in the lead-up to the United States' 2016 election that Donald Trump was great for his company, proclaiming "It may not be good for America, but it's damn good for CBS". As he elaborated,

Man, who would have expected the ride we're all having right now? ... The money's rolling in and this is fun. I've never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It's a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.

Likewise, while Twitter lost money in each of its first 11 years, it not only achieved its first quarter of profitability in Q4-2017 (which was just after an analyst estimated Trump's worth to Twitter to be $2bn), but then achieved what are still its only two years of profitability in 2018 and 2019. Although there's no singular reason for this, there is however a very large contributing factor.

No doubt Substack's co-founders (and VC investors) are well aware of all this, as much as they're also aware that restricting SARS-CoV-2 grifters and charlatans from earning what the Center for Countering Digital Hate's estimated of being $2.5m - $12.5m through Substack in 2021 would have cost the platform between $250,000 and $1.25m in earnings in that calendar year alone. And if the idea is to cash in on as much disreputable content as possible (bigots, grifters, charlatans, you name it) in order to pay for the expenses incurred when trying to quickly grab as much market share as one can (paralleling the desire to appease one's VC investors to the greatest extent possible), well, sometimes that requires compromising one's principles.

Supposing, that is, there were principles to be compromised in the first place.

Anyhow, an X-ified Substack would of course continue to attract many newcomers to the platform, much in the same way that Twitter-cum-X has attracted – and welcomed with open arms – a coterie of anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, white supremacists, misogynists, etc. At the same time, an X-ified Substack would undoubtedly also see many of its writers look for alternatives, similar to how Twitter/X has seen roughly half of those who regularly tweeted about climate and nature crises decreasing and even ceasing their usage of the platform after dis- and misinformation about climate change has risen (Twitter/X was ranked the worst social media platform in a recent climate change misinformation report), hate speech has dramatically increased, the platform got described as having the highest rate of disinformation by the European Union, and a general "uptick in the amount of fake accounts, trolls and hate speech on the platform" has occurred. As scientist and paediatrician Peter Hotez describes Twitter/X, "Now it's just a cesspool of trolls and bots".

That being so, and with cesspools being cesspools, if one's willing to trudge their way upstream through all the sludge the possibility exists that one might be able to get a glimpse at one of the sources – if not the source – of where the ever-growing supply of shit is emanating from.

The optimism of techno-fascists

Call it the most unimaginative hunch possible if you will, but lo and behold doing an internet search for "Joe Rogan Chris Best" revealed that yes, Chris Best, CEO and co-founder of Substack, has in fact appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast (The JRE). But before we get to the strangely revealing episode that that was, it turns out that just 15 episodes earlier none other than Marc Andreessen himself made an appearance on The JRE as well, and for the second time no less.

That is, Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz, the VC firm that helped raise tens of millions of dollars for Substack and which most certainly wants a return on their investment by way of an increasingly higher valuation of the platform in order to earn itself a lucrative exit. Unless, that is, Andreessen isn't so much concerned about a monetary return on Andreessen Horowitz's Substack investment so much as he's interested in a different kind of return. And that's not stretching it. Because as was stated by The Information in an article entitled "'These Guys Are Very Different': Inside Andreessen Horowitz's Rise",

“These guys are very different,” said [CEO Ali] Ghodsi from Databricks, a key Andreessen Horowitz investment that recently raised funds privately at a $28 billion valuation ahead of a planned public listing later this year. “The [traditional] VC game is about ROI,” or providing a return on the capital for the firm's investors. “These guys are about legacy. These guys aren’t about ‘How much money can we make this year?’” he said.

Or as investigative journalist Dave Troy more bluntly put it (and probably much more closer to the truth),

To be sure, Andreessen didn't appear on The JRE with the simplistic purpose of promoting Substack or any of his firm's other investments (the way that the Andreessen Horowitz-funded audio chat app Clubhouse is used "as a mouthpiece for Andreessen Horowitz partners broadcasting shows, as well as to promote the firm's portfolio company founders, who often appear on the same programs"), having not mentioned it even once in either of his two appearances. What he instead spent the majority of episodes #1840 and #2010 talking about was artificial intelligence (AI), the topic quite blatantly used as a Trojan horse for extolling the supposed virtues of his pet libertarian ideologies. I could of course spill another several thousand words about this, but as neither I nor anybody else wants me to do that, a few words about a couple of Andreessen's tweets should suffice.

What's going on here is Andreessen is attempting to create a false equivalency while recoding unrelated libertarian principles as an issue of free speech. The prevention of algorithmic harm is painted as leftist censorship, while the culture war gets used as a bulwark against the regulation of discriminatory technologies by governments. In other words, rather than the issue being about whether or not AIs can use racist terminology, the issue is about whether or not tech companies can develop – and corporations can deploy – AIs that discriminate against groups of people without being held to account.

In fact, when a venture capital industry group recently unveiled a set of guidelines for "responsible AI", designed to "foster trust through transparency" by invoking companies to to promote measures such as AI safety checks, Andreessen (along with Meta Platforms’ AI research chief Yann LeCun) was having none of it.

With this in mind it should be even more obvious that the underlying purpose of Andreessen's day job with Andreessen Horowitz isn't so much to earn a buck, but rather to foster particular technologies and steer their usages towards outcomes conducive to directions he'd like to see society move in. In a similar fashion, his appearances on The JRE can be best understood as little more than attempts to clandestinely dress up those goals as issues of freedom and then promote them to the wider public. As he stated to Rogan in his first appearance (2:44:14),

What we do is we're looking for technological change. Basically what that means is the world's smartest engineers developing some new capability that wasn't possible before, and then building some kind of project or effort or company right around that. And then we invest. And then we only think long term – we only think in terms of 10 years, 15 years, longer.

It can be presumed then that with Andreessen Horowitz thinking a decade or even several decades ahead, the purposes behind investing in Substack are much more than the mere allowance for writers to have access to a convenient publishing experience. As Andreessen then put it to Rogan in his second appearance (2:01:30),

All day long I meet and talk to these kids and people who have these ideas and want to do these things. It's why I can see the future kind of in that sense, which is I know what they're going to do cause they come in and tell us and then we help them try and do it. So if they're allowed to do what they plan to do then I have a pretty good idea of what the future's gonna look like and how great it could potentially be.

But it's not just that he can see the future, it's that he can shape the future. Because Andreessen of course doesn't just invest in any startup who tells him "what they're going to do", he's able to pick and choose those that fit his ideologies and if need be shape and steer them to better fit those ideologies.

A few words by journalist Moya Lothian-McLean – not about Andreessen himself but rather about "the gods of Silicon Valley" in general – sums up the situation quite well.

Silicon Valley and its missionary outposts are dominated not only by the pursuit of growth, which is a means to an end. The underlying raison d'etre tying these various tech titans together is their fervour for enacting their own personal theological outlooks in supposed service of the wider world. To do this, they must dominate and monopolise – remake society in their image, platform by integrated platform.

When we view these monoliths as businesses like any other, or allow them to claim global monopolies, we fail to realise that they are competing for more than our attention or our cash: they are competing for the right to dictate what our societies look like.

With that all said, it just so happened that a few weeks before this post about Substack was set to go live Andreessen dropped a 5,000 word screed to Andreessen Horowitz's a16z website entitled The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, a piece that's in part an elaboration on the second tweet of his relayed above in which he effectively calls for others to stop getting in his way and let him do whatever he wants. So although elaborating on Andreessen's thoughts on AI specifically wouldn't be thoroughly relevant to this piece about Substack, Andreessen's manifesto is however very relevant in these regards as it provides a deep understanding of the motivations behind Substack's largest investor, while simultaneously delineating what kind of future Andreessen might want to see Substack contribute to and thus why Substack has ended up with the reputation it's become known for.

If you've read enough of these deluded diatribes about technology (Kevin Kelly's eye-rolling book What Technology Wants comes to mind) it'd be hard to fault you for not wanting to waste another minute of your life on Andreessen's manifesto, physicist Tom Murphy's admission – on his aptly titled (and excellent) blog Do the Math – that "I didn't get far before dismissing it as a delusional toddler tantrum" being a very fair assessment. (Murphy did however get as far as to read Andreessen's statement that "We are told to denounce our birthright", Murphy then stating "Birthright? Hmmm. Calls to mind blood and soil", but we'll get to that relevant observation later.)

In fact, so mundane and predictable are these diatribes that one needn't even get to the body of Andreessen's manifesto itself to discover one of its fundamental fatal flaws, what with the second of three quotes that preceded even a single word by Andreessen already laying things bare. After a few sentences about humanity having gone from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists some 10,000 years ago, the final couple of sentences in a quote attributed to a Marian Tupy (presumably the founder and editor of Human​Progress​.org, and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity) stated the following:

Then, beginning in the 18th Century, many people's standard of living skyrocketed. What brought about this dramatic improvement, and why?

Being a manifesto about technology, it's safe to assume that the answer that Tupy (and thus Andreessen) would give to that question is "technology", if not the application of human ingenuity to the perpetual advancement of ever-advancing technology. But if you're at all familiar with this From Filmers to Farmers blog then like me you're probably aware that this is a load of delusional rubbish. First off, it's not technology, or even an advanced form of technology, that mysteriously appeared in the (late) 18^th century. What did make its appearance at this time (in appreciable levels, having already been put to use for centuries in tiny quantities for heating purposes) is none other than fossil fuels (more specifically coal), which are by far the prime factor for what brought about the dramatic improvement in the aforementioned standard of living.

Andreessen would of course disagree with that assessment, having stated a few paragraphs into his manifesto that the ultimate cause for growth is technology.

In fact, technology – new knowledge, new tools, what the Greeks called techne – has always been the main source of growth, and perhaps the only cause of growth, as technology made both population growth and natural resource utilization possible.

The Greeks, however, may choose to disagree.

Yes, the 18^th century adaptation of the Newcomen steam engine for pumping water out of coal mines for greater access to the fossil fuel was a marvel in technology, and was an indispensable step towards tapping into large amounts of energy then and beyond. The (Newcomen) steam engine wasn't, however, necessarily new, what with the Greek mathematician and engineer Hero of Alexandria having come up with the idea of a steam engine nearly two thousand years earlier (while Vitruvius described the idea a few decades prior to that).

The "Aeolipile", as it was called, was however relegated to nothing more than a philosopher's toy, thanks to the lack of a key ingredient to actually make it useful – fossil fuels. The Greeks of course could have used wood instead of coal to power the device, but while wood wasn't as abundant of a resource as coal eventually came to be (and certainly not as energy-dense), Greek nobility already had access to the energy – and thus the work – of human slaves and so had no overt reason to upend the structures of what was to them a beneficial societal setup.

In fact, not only is the vast majority of modern technology effectively a paper weight without fossil fuels to power them, but it's not "technology [that] made both population growth and natural resource utilisation possible", it's – once again – energy. Energy for food (cultivation, storage, distribution, processing, etc.), energy for medicines, energy for climate control, energy for transportation, and much more.

In short, whenever Andreessen states something along the lines of "before the temporary COVID disruption, the result was the largest number of jobs at the highest wages and the highest levels of material living standards in the history of the planet" (emphasis his), you can safely assume that – with money being a proxy for energy (or a call on energy, if you will) – energy is the fundamental driver behind it all. Yes, Andreessen does speak of energy in his manifesto, and some give him credit for some of the things he says, but upon closer inspection the manifesto's contradictory stances give the impression that Andreessen doesn't actually know what he's talking about. A passage (5:02) from a recent Frankly episode by Nate Hagens in which he cites the manifesto elucidates this (emphasis not mine).

“We believe energy should be in an upward spiral. Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization.”

On that I agree with him.

“The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be. We should raise everyone to the energy consumption level we have, then increase our energy 1,000x, then raise everyone else’s energy 1,000x as well.”

What!? This is so unbelievably energy blind.

But how can Andreessen believe that "energy is the foundational engine of our civilization" and thus that "the more energy we have, the more people we can have", when he also stated (as relayed above) that "technology ... has always been the main source of growth, and perhaps the only cause of growth, as technology made both population growth and natural resource utilization possible". Which one is it then? Is it energy that allows for more people, or is it technology that is the main source of growth and which has thus made population growth possible? Hagens doesn't mention this incongruity, suggesting that there may not have been anything in those first two sentences Hagens cited to be agreed with, and that Andreessen isn't just energy blind but also sloppy and extremely daft when it comes to the concept and issue of energy. (While also stating that technology can bestow "unlimited clean energy for everyone", you can be rest assured that the rest of what Andreessen states about energy is just as poorly informed and delusional – including nuclear fission, which will be elaborated upon in part 2.)

Those fundamentals aside (and thus the main premise behind Andreessen's manifesto revealed for being the fallacy it is), when one reads the body of Andreessen's manifesto it's hard to not bring to mind Steve Bannon's call to "flood the zone with shit" as well as the aforementioned rhetorical technique Gish gallop due to (a) Andreessen's manner of writing in single-sentence paragraphs of which resemble a giant tweet thread, (b) his provision of zero evidence for anything he writes (he instead states "we believe" a total of 113 times, similar to the aforementioned method by which Substack's co-founders justify the reasoning for their platform's mechanics), and (c) his propensity to present everything as if it were all self-evident truisms. While this certainly isn't the place to drop tens of thousands of words comprehensively rebutting fallacy after fallacy of Andreessen's, it is however the place for expounding upon the portions relevant to this post and to Substack's emergence and place in society.

For those unfamiliar with the renowned venture capitalist, Andreessen is essentially Silicon Valley royalty, having started off as a 22-year-old co-creator of 1993's Mosaic (the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface) and then co-founder of Netscape Communications (which developed the Netscape Navigator web browser) in 1994, ultimately making a fortune in 1999 when the latter (where Ben Horowitz was a former executive) was acquired by AOL in 1999 for $4.2bn. Netscape Navigator was however eventually exterminated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer web browser, perhaps lending support for the manifesto's claim of being against monopolies and regulatory capture. However, with Andreessen having been a board member of Facebook for 15 years it would appear that Andreessen's problem isn't so much with monopolies and lobbying per se, but rather with monopolies and lobbying that he's not involved with.

Otherwise, having an estimated net-worth of $1.8bn (partially) thanks to Andreessen Horowitz's $35bn in assets under management across multiple funds (including in companies such as Facebook, Foursquare, GitHub, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more), Andreessen's significant investments provide little reason for being surprised by all the techno-populist rhetoric, nor should it come as a surprise that his namesake firm is known for its place at the forefront of inflating the Web3 hype balloon. Because while Andreessen and his firm have been making a hefty profit, a few words by Dave Karpf, Internet politics professor at George Washington University, rekindle some earlier points made about VC firms and Ponzi schemes.

The reason why people are calling for more regulation of a16z's investments isn’t because they’ve been “told to be angry, bitter, and resentful about technology.” It's because retail investors lost their life savings just last year by throwing cash at the Ponzi schemes that a16z was actively hawking.

Having a bit of a reputation, Andreessen's manifesto not only inevitably grabbed its fair share of attention, but it rather surprisingly got pilloried by virtually every media outlet that covered it, including the tech press (although several tech bigwigs did in fact praise it, including Shopify's Tobias Lütke and Coinbase's Brian Armstrong). Much of the derision derived from the manifesto's attempt to convince its audience that technological progress and trickle-down economics – powered by free markets – can and will solve all of the world's problems – poverty, climate change, inequality, you name it. Current Affairs in particular did a thorough takedown of the manifesto's numerous evidence-free assertions, stating that "masters of the universe" like Andreessen are "utterly detached from the real-world conditions of people's lives".

At the core of it all, what Andreessen is essentially arguing for is a self-serving system that perpetuates – and in fact exacerbates – the anti-regulation, anti-ethics hyper-capitalist growth model that's led to much of today's exploitative tech. He criticises academia for being "disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable – playing God with everyone else's lives, with total insulation from the consequences", when that's as good of a description of Big Tech as one can cobble together, particularly the hyper-libertarian manifestation that Andreessen so desires.

If one takes a look at the social media accounts of Andreessen and other prominent Big Tech, Silicon Valley figures (such as Y Combinator president Garry Tan, Y Combinator having provided Substack with its initial $2m investment), one might notice the term "e/acc" included on those profiles. The term refers to "effective accelerationism", which – being tied to the idea that technology should be developed as fast as possible, to its fullest potential, and with little to no guardrails – can be described as a meme-based version of techno-optimism. In this philosophy there are however also "decels" (which is short for "decelerationist"), a pejorative term used to describe those in disagreement with effective accelerationism. Or, what might one refer to as enemies.

Because yes, although Andreessen states in his manifesto that "We believe in an absolute rejection of resentment" and claims to be open to criticism via relay of the quote "I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned", the manifesto is nonetheless riddled with resentment – no less that its first line reeks of demagoguery: "We are being lied to". So averse is Andreessen to disagreement on AI's promises of technological bliss that he actually rhymes off a listing of groups that he considers to be enemies, a list that includes people involved with such things as sustainability, social responsibility, the precautionary principle, de-growth, and my personal favourite, "the limits of growth". (I assume Andreessen is referring to – and irresponsibly dismissing – The Limits to Growth, my rather lengthy take on its 50^th anniversary book to be returned to and completed... perhaps in 2025. Otherwise, being a big fan of the 1972 LtG study it's safe to presume that I inadvertently qualify as an "enemy" of Andreessen's.) In fact, since AI will supposedly save lives, anyone that works to slow down AI's development is equated by Andreessen as being no less than the equivalent of a murderer.

We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives. Deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder.

If all this talk about murderous enemies sounds like a preacher railing against the heathens, you might not be too far off the mark. For starters, listen to Andreessen's second interview on The JRE and you'll hear him openly, and repeatedly, extolling the virtues of cults ("generally I’m pro cult" he puts it at 29:13, otherwise found here in a short teaser clip on YouTube), little surprise then that Andreessen's revered "effective accelerationism" has been described as a cult as well. With the manifesto being filled with 113 declarations of "we believe", it's not too hard then to confuse the manifesto with a religious catechism or a chapter from a cult's Bible, declarations of the Techno-Optimist faith's core tenets being no less than an attempt to woo new members into the new Silicon Valley-based religious cult.

Which wouldn't necessarily be too bad on its own, what with cults often affecting no more than their own members, dependents that members have dragged along with them, and "associates" of those members (friends, family, the unlucky person on the street/subway who becomes victim to a nefarious act by a cult member). While cults can of course become quite large and have outsized effects (QAnon being a recent example), a situation that can quickly become much worse than a localised cult is what Murphy alluded to with his comment "Birthright? Hmmm. Calls to mind blood and soil."

For those unaware, the phrase "blood and soil" is a reference to the nationalist slogan espoused by German Nazis, entailing an ideal of a racially defined national body ("blood") together within a settlement area ("soil"). Seemingly an offhand remark, Murphy may have actually been more prescient than he thought with his comment seeing how – although there was nothing overtly discernible within Andreessen's manifesto in regards to Nazism – there's a strange instance in which Andreessen paraphrases a rather dubious poem. As Andreessen stated in his manifesto,

To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”

The manifesto being referenced is The Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marienetti, the original passage being the following:

There is no longer any beauty except the struggle. Any work of art that lacks a sense of aggression can never be a masterpiece. Poetry must be thought of as a violent assault upon the forces of the unknown with the intention of making them prostrate themselves at the feet of mankind.

One can readily see that the referenced manifesto was rather confrontational, which then went on to advocate for war and militarism, along with the destruction of museums, libraries, and feminism. For as the referenced manifesto also stated,

We wish to glorify war – the sole cleanser of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women.

That's the poem/manifesto that Andreessen referenced, whose style he also borrowed for his Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Otherwise, and for those who haven't caught on by now, Marienetti wasn't merely a poet who put together what one might think is little more than a quirky manifesto, but is someone who formed the Futurist Political Party in 1918, was the principal author of the Fascist Manifesto in 1919, and also joined the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italian for "The Italian Fighting League") in 1919 of which in 1921 renamed itself to the National Fascist Party (and whose founder was Benito Mussolini).

What one also finds is that the championing of speed, modernity, invention, disruption, industry, combativeness, etc. by the Italian Futurists finds a parallel in today's Silicon Valley in which disruption, moving fast and breaking things (Mark Zuckerberg’s motto, and Elon Musk's platform X for the past year) are seen as virtuous tenets, while the cars and airplanes that Futurists revered have been replaced by today's rocket ships and space travel.

Likewise, with Andreessen's manifesto having parallels to what has been nicknamed TESCREAL – an acronym coined by Emile Torres and Timnit Gerbu, which stands for "Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism"), and whose general idea is one of humanity being on a trajectory towards a great technological miracle that will not only encompassingly augment human capacities but produce endless abundance for all – it's hard to not see the Techno-Optimist Manifesto (and its adherents) as flirting with fascism and classical eugenics (as the manifesto does in fact also champion Nietzschean supermen).

So while the manifesto does purport to believe in liberal democracies, the truth of the matter is that Andreessen is actually arguing for a kind of technocracy founded on, in his manifesto's words, "economic strength (financial power), cultural strength (soft power), and military strength (hard power)". Or otherwise put, a vision of dominance in which concerns for the environment and ethics have been jettisoned, allowing Andreessen and cohorts to have free reign to develop, promote and profit from their inventions without intrusion by any (supposed) meddling bodies.

This is, in short, the worldview of colonialism. Not only people, but also nature is to be exploited and thus conquered for "growth". It's a kind of social Darwinism in which "smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure", a world in which wealth, force, and power are valued over any other measure.

To be sure, it's not necessarily only Andreessen that has all these views, just that he's one of the more outspoken. Paralleling Lothian-McLean's comment about "the gods of Silicon Valley" and how their goal is to "dictate what our societies look like", in 2015 (before Andreessen had full-on rebranded – if not outed – techno-optimism as techno-fascism) The New Yorker quoted the description by Andy Weissman, a partner at New York's Union Square Ventures, of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of techno-optimists with goals that find parallels in The Futurist Manifesto and thus The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.

Silicon Valley V.C.s are all techno-optimists. They have the arrogant belief that you can take a geography and remove all obstructions and have nothing but a free flow of capital and ideas, and that it's good, it's very good, to creatively destroy everything that has gone before.

With all that in mind, it might be wise then to take heed of what Wired warned about in a prescient 2019 article entitled "When Futurism Led to Fascism – and Why it Could Happen Here".

Today's most vocal voices in tech might not communicate their values with the same aplomb as the Italian poets, but they're often saying the same kinds of things.

Because while Ezra Klein warned in The New York Times about "reactionary futurism", perhaps, as stated by developer advocate Joey deVilla, "It's more honest to call it techno-fascism".

(Although I can't say whether it was an oversight or otherwise, Hagens mentioned none of the above, but did however say (7:07) that "I know a lot of people working on Wall Street and in tech. They're well intentioned, they're just absolutely clueless of the physics, the energy, and the ecology of our situation." Personally, I'm not so sure about Andreessen's good intentions.)

Taking heed of all that – the aversion to being held to account, the manipulation of the direction of technological progression in order to suit desired ideological outcomes, the poor understanding of energy's fundamental role for modern (and not-so-modern) technologies, the "do as I say, not as I do" approach to monopolies, the hawking of Ponzi schemes via a16z, the detachment from the real-world conditions of people's lives, the equating of those who think differently as enemies, the classification of those hesitant to jump on the unrestricted AI bandwagon as murderers, the propensity for cults, the quoting of proto-fascists (who later became outright fascists), culminating in the very real possibility of techno-fascism – and combining it with Andreessen's namesake company being the key backer of Substack , what role in all this might Andreessen – the guy who admits to "think[ing] in terms of 10 years, 15 years, longer" – be envisioning and possibly even preparing for the ever-expanding "subscription network"?

A bit of a crude indication of the kind of gravitation we might see Substack somehow experience is what's been unfolding on the other platform that Andreessen Horowitz has significant investments in, of which Andreessen was apparently extremely eager to get in on: Twitter/X.

As recently described by The Washington Post, Elon Musk, in the attempt to rid his newly-acquired platform of the so-called "woke mind virus", has tilted Twitter/X noticeably to the right. Dozens of crude examples could be given, which include Musk publicly endorsing Florida governor Ron DeSantis for president, hosting DeSantis' Republican campaign launch on Twitter Spaces, reinstating former president Donald Trump's previously banned account, etc. The analysis by The Washington Post then showed that while "dozens of conservative and right-wing influencers and media figures found that many saw their follower counts rise on the day Musk became owner and continue rising at a rate higher than under Twitter's previous ownership", the same pattern couldn't be noticed for dozens of popular liberal and left-wing accounts that were similarly examined.

In parallel, while Twitter/X's new CEO Linda Yaccarino did in fact personally intervene to remove a pro-Hitler post in early-November, on her first day on the job she nonetheless sought out former Fox News host Tucker Carlson's executive producer Justin Wells in order to "formalize the relationship and share advertising revenue" with Carlson who had been posting short videos for a few weeks by that time.

That'd be the same Carlson that's spouted antisemitic rants adjacent to Musk's Great Replacement conspiracy theory, Yaccarino herself forced to transition into damage control mode after Musk backed an antisemitic claim (which he later doubled down on). Upon several blue-chip companies pulling their advertisements from Twitter/X due to (as reported by the non-profit organisation and media watchdog group Media Matters) ads being placed alongside white nationalist and pro-Nazi content, Musk then promised to file a "thermonuclear lawsuit" against Media Matters and others.

In short, and while it appears that Musk is trying to scare his critics into silence so they don't expose what's going on on his platform, a few weeks earlier Anika Collier Navaroli, a former senior policy official at Twitter, stated that

It seems a lot like Elon Musk's version of free speech was for him and his friends to be able to do hate speech without getting in trouble.

So while the ultimate goal of Substack may very well be to amplify ideologies similar to those Musk has been amplifying on Twitter/X, Substack's predominantly hands-off approach, its lack of algorithms, it's lack of a "For you" feed, its lack of pay-to-play blue ticks – it's ultimate lack of a way of getting exposure for the opinions of favored marginal accounts in front of the eyeballs of the masses – largely handcuffs its abilities to overtly game the system via mimicking the aforementioned crude approaches taken by the owner of the platform similarly funded by Andreessen Horowitz. But just because Substack's setup precludes the ability to crudely game the system in order to promote particular ideologies, that doesn't mean it's not the ultimate goal or that it can't be achieved. And to better understand that is best accomplished by taking another closer look into the individual staunchly in the corner of – and one might even say obsequious to – Elon Musk.

The feigned concern for the future of democracy is certainly rather amusing, considering not only the company that Andreessen keeps but also the trajectory he's been on following his involvement with Mosaic and Netscape Navigator. And although much can be readily inferred from everything written above, making educated guesses as to Andreessen's ulterior motives isn't actually necessary thanks to a piece published by The Information in early-2023.

Citizen Marc: Why the Andreessen Horowitz Founder Can’t Stop Chasing Dreams of a New Media

The pitch was right up Marc Andreessen’s alley: a fledgling but buzzy digital media startup, which intended not only to produce its own content but to sell its content-management software to other publishers—and, if that worked, to scale its platform to anyone willing to pay. The co-founders?…

The InformationAbram Brown

Going back a decade or so to 2012 when Andreessen's VC firm was only three years old, the (paywalled) Information piece, written by senior reporter Abram Brown, describes Andreessen as someone who took a far different approach with the press at the time, partially because it was beneficial for Andreessen to play chummy with journalists in order to receive favourable coverage for his nascent VC firm. He made himself accessible to the press, made himself into a bit of a poster boy for the tech boom, and to prove his bona fides went so far as to put some personal money into Business Insider, Talking Points Memo and PandoDaily, while through his Andreessen Horowitz VC firm he invested in The Atavist, Medium and BuzzFeed.

More recently rumours have swirled around Silicon Valley that Andreessen may be interested in purchasing The Washington Post (were owner Jeff Bezos be interested in selling), which, to go along with Andreessen's investment in Substack (elaborated on shortly), prompted Brown to ask a rather pertinent question.

While Andreessen continues to harbor dreams of media domination, questions linger: Why does he want to control his own digital printing presses? What will he do with them once they’re finally his? And where did this media fixation come from in the first place?

Because while Andreessen used to play nice with the press and had an amicable relationship (see the images of various magazine covers above), he's more recently become antagonistic towards the popular press and turned what were generally cordial relations into outright scorn.

In fact, it wasn't until roughly around the time that Donald Trump was elevated to the US presidency that things began to change. According to Brown,

Then, around six years ago, Andreessen began to dramatically alter his intertwined publicity and investment strategies. He retreated from the public spotlight, severing those well-cultivated ties to journalists, and turned aggressively against the press. Today, he grants almost no interviews with established journalists, preferring to make pronouncements almost entirely through Twitter. ... The few interviews he does permit go to sympathetic writers and podcasters, such as Joe Rogan and historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland.

According to conversations with more than a dozen sources (friends, associates, past employees, and others in Andreessen's orbit), Brown states that there were a variety of reasons for Andreessen's change.

Emboldened by a Trump presidency, Andreessen began to embrace an anti-establishment, libertarian side of his nature, say those who know him. A newly anti-media side emerged, too[.]

And why would a Trump presidency have emboldened Andreessen? That should of course be obvious enough, and not just because Andreessen's recent techno-fascist pronunciations come at the same time that former president Trump's descriptions of opponents as subhuman and promising aggressive action against them were earning him the distinction of "echoing dictators Hitler [and] Mussolini".

As stated by Vox,

Trump is talking like a fascist, planning fascist policies, and staffing up with fascists.

...

The fascist ideological positioning is a signal of intent: Trump is coming for American democracy. No one can say they weren't warned.

And nor does it seem that anyone can say with assurance that Andreessen isn't positioning himself for such an outcome.

When Trump tells you he’s an authoritarian, believe him

He’s talking like a fascist. He’s planning fascist policies. He’s staffing up with fascists.

VoxZack Beauchamp

Along with Andreessen's emboldenment by Trump's presidency (and thus Andreessen's fascist positioning), Brown stated that an anti-media approach also came to fore, following the Theranos scandal in 2015 and the Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018.

A newly anti-media side emerged, too, as [Andreessen] ... became convinced that he no longer needed journalists to broadcast his thoughts or market his firm, a belief girded by a conviction that online publishing platforms had grown powerful enough to displace the traditional gatekeepers of information and reputation.

Although Andreessen is described as having provided muted support for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential run, behind closed doors was another story. Andreessen voiced anti-establishment rhetoric, while similarly echoing opinions of his fellow Facebook board member, Peter Thiel. "Like, 'Government is inefficient – why don't we just break government?'", one long-time associate of Andreessen's recalled him stating.

At roughly the same time as the final major interview he gave to an established outlet (a Forbes story in April 2019), Andreessen then decided he had little to no need for traditional journalists and so began his firm's investment in Substack. No longer bothering with traditional journalists, and in order to give the platform a bit of a boost, Andreessen then began giving interviews to Substack writers (such as this one and this one).

That practice of having Substack's primary investor give interviews to Substack writers is but one way that the platform has been able to parallel Musk's gravitation of his Twitter/X platform towards the far-right, a methodology that will be appropriately expanded upon in the section covering Best's appearance on The JRE.

In the meantime, and to be clear, none of the above is to suggest that opinions veering towards extremism can emerge from only one side of the political spectrum, but rather is to recognise that it's extremist positions from the right – that have become less conservative of late and more reactionary – that are currently overtaking social media platforms like Twitter/X. That is, less attention is being paid by those on the right to things like cutting taxes (traditionally a bread and butter centre-right issue) with more attention being paid to where society has supposedly gone wrong: the "woke mind virus", smug elites, experts, political correctness, weakness, etc.

That being so, while those on the left can certainly have their lower-case techno-optimist moments (United States Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once stated at a climate change town hall that "we need to invent technology that's never even been invented yet"), it'd be remiss to fail to point out that there are in fact elements from the left – one might even say the far-left – that have been playing into some of the aforementioned.

Figures on the extremities of the left are certainly nowhere near as numerous nor as prominent as those on the extremities of the right (such as former Fox News political analyst Tucker Carlson), nor do they have any pull with the United States' Democratic party the way their counterparts do with the Republican party. Media-wise one can find in the former group the anti-progressive left, made up of writers such as The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal and Aaron Maté (who used to have their material published on sites such as The Nation and Democracy Now! before gravitating to the conspiratorial fringes) as well as YouTube personalities like Jimmy Dore (the self-styled "comedy darling of America's Progressive Left").

Politically-wise one can find individuals who at times have called for the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, have voiced support for the Chinese and North Korean regimes, are associated with Russian state propaganda operations, and more, which includes those such as United States presidential candidate Cornel West, a former academic (Harvard and Princeton) and antiracism campaigner that mingles with far-left radicals (Lee Camp, Medea Benjamin, and others).

So while virtually nobody amongst the (United States') far-left spectrum are household names the way several on the far-right spectrum are, their stature and audience have nonetheless been slowly growing. Moreover, and counterintuitively, while individuals on the fringes of the left sometimes genuinely want a political revolution in which both major parties in the United States are overthrown, while at other times cynically and opportunistically seek a niche space in the media market from which they can play their grift, they're all the while not quite openly calling for the destruction of American democracy but are operationally right-wing and so working towards that outcome nonetheless.

As good as any vantage one can find to observe this would be the candidacy of RFK Jr., a conspiracy theorist extraordinaire (who was initially seeking the Democratic nomination before dropping the primary bid in order to run as an independent) that has been praised by both those on the far-right (Tucker Carlson, Steve Bannon, Alex Jones, etc.) and those amongst the anti-progressive- if not far-left (Jimmy Dore, Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, etc.).

Some might call this an example of the so-called horseshoe theory, the notion coined by French philosopher Jean-Pierre Faye in which it's purported that, like the left and right tips of a horseshoe, extremists are closer to one another than they are to the centre, the centre representing the system that both factions despise. Although the two extremes have differing opinions on how to overthrow the system, what they share in common tends to be an opposition to elites, experts, traditional gatekeepers of the mainstream press, and more.

But the horseshoe theory may be a bit too simplistic, this notion that, say, communists and fascists will – thanks to natural occurrence – inherently find themselves in alignment. Because while it may very well be that populist, anti-establishment elements from both spectrums on occasion find common ground (see Jimmy Dore's interview with a far-right Boogaloo Bois member just days after the attempted January 6^th insurrection on the US Capitol), it may be more correct to say that these alignments are engineered. That's much too far of a tangent to go on for this piece about Substack, but suffice to say this may be exactly what's been unfolding in Germany, an outside party attempting to create a far-left/far-right coalition (what some call a "red-brown alliance") in order to destabilise the country.

Applying the coalition between far-left and far-right elements to the neo-fascist elements of the manifesto by Substack's key investor – Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz – it can be seen to make sense that the root of the word fascism is fasces, a word that means "bundle", this bundle sometimes being made up of a collection of wooden rods with an axe in the middle with its blade(s) emerging, all of which represents collective power. That being so, the fasces, as it's called, happened to be the symbol of the early-20^th century Italian fascists, the bundle of wooden rods representing a bundling of aggrieved factions. Translated into our present-day political and societal climates, the fasces of fascism can be seen as the bundling of the aforementioned coalition of far-left and far-right elements.

Examples of this coalition are aplenty (Rogan has collected some of the greatest hits on his show – RFK Jr., Musk, Andreessen, Dore, etc.), Troy referring to Rogan as being part of "a coalition with full on neo-fascist intentions".

That all being so, there's one last passage from Brown's informative Information article that possibly sheds a bit more light on the Andreessen/Substack affiliation.

In 2021, Andreessen Horowitz led $65 million in new funding for Substack at a $650 million valuation, a “fat multiple” that was as much about the “ideological alignment” it shared with Andreessen Horowitz, an early Substack executive told me, as it was about economics.

It's unclear how much of what's been written above – and specifically how much of Andreessen's techno-fascist manifesto – Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi share "ideological alignment" with. It does, however, lend credence to the notion that Best knew exactly what he was dog whistling when he called for the need to "Defund the thought police".

Otherwise, and as we'll now move on to examining what other publishing options exist for Substack writers that don't exactly see eye-to-eye with the fascist creep coalescing around us, it may be worthwhile to keep in mind the techno-fascist beliefs of the individual who Substack finds itself in "ideological alignment" with as we simultaneously take a look at the myriad of other dubious shenanigans Substack's co-founders have undertaken these past few years.

Copycat rivals and the art of “cloning”

With most writers, and otherwise most people, not having much awareness of much of the above (nor of much of what's coming below), a worthwhile question to ask is Where might any possible disaffected Substack writers leave to, supposing they were even interested in seeking out an alternative in the first place? Fortunately there's no shortage of options, what with The New York Times having suggested that a slew of "copycat rivals" has emerged.

"Copycat rivals" is without a doubt a rather loaded term, suggesting that other platforms have taken various ideas of Substack's and roughly replicated them. But while copying a platform is one thing, cloning a platform – as in identically replicating one, like Dolly the sheep – is on a whole other level, something that Substack's CEO accused others of doing during his August 2022 appearance on The JRE. In regards to the issue of writers leaving Substack, Best stated that it's Substack's ethos to freely allow writers to do so if desired.

BEST (48:40): On Substack, as a writer you own all your content, you own your mailing list, you have a direct billing relationship with people, and if you want you can leave, and people do leave, and it's terrible for us, and we hate it.

ROGAN: People have left?

BEST: People have left.

ROGAN: And what do they do, they just leave and they start their own website?

BEST: They use one of the other clones.

ROGAN: There's other clones? I didn’t know that there's people that have cloned Substack. You don't have to mention names, but how many of them?

BEST: There's a handful. Twitter and Facebook both copied us very shamelessly. … The point though is that by tying our hands in this way the fact that the people on Substack can leave means that the only way to make money and grow is to make it good enough that they choose to stay. Other companies are like “we'll lock you in, we'll make it so that you can't leave”, and then that's how – that's great – but for us we're like “well you can leave, therefore we have to actually do the work to keep you”, and that means that in order to succeed we have to do the right thing.

Not only do Substack's head-honchos most certainly "hate it" when somebody leaves the platform, but they may very well retaliate if you try and do so.

But before that's elaborated on, Twitter didn't copy Substack. As mentioned earlier, it purchased the newsletter platform Revue in 2021, which itself was founded in February 2015, two years before Substack was founded.

Otherwise, yes, there are in fact platforms that lock writers/publications in. But what Best failed to mention is that while Substack allows writers/publications to export their content and customer data, the implication is there's other platforms out there that necessarily allow writers/publications to import that data. There's several of these open platforms (as opposed to closed platforms that do in fact "lock you in [and] make it so that you can't leave"), thoroughly explained on the Open Subscription Platforms website.

Open Subscription Platforms

A shared movement for independent subscription data.

Open Subscription Platforms

One of the most well-known alternatives to Substack is of course Medium, a platform that most certainly is not a "copycat rival" as it's been around since 2012 (five years longer than Substack). But as it's a closed platform, one can't simply export one's content and subscribers, never mind import said data from Substack.

Another closed platform that provides membership options but which isn't an overt competitor to Substack (although it does provide a setup conducive to writers) is of course Patreon, a platform that – hot on the heels of Substack, it would seem – updated its app in September to allow for member profiles and community chats, then a month later launched Patreon 2.0. This new iteration of the "creator empowering" platform has gotten a complete redesign (replete with a slick new video), while in similar veins to Substack is free of algorithmic feeds and has been described by the tech media as being "no longer just a paywall for creatives – it's also increasingly a social outlet for fans and a wide-ranging content creation tool" while "more and more, Patreon is becoming an all-in-one app".

In terms of platforms that do in fact fit the mold of being a "copycat rival", perhaps the most blatant of these would be Beehiiv, Beehiiv having launched in 2021 and, similar to Substack, successfully raised $12.5m in June via a Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Unsurprisingly, as one might imagine that their motive is to poach as many writers from Substack as possible, Beehiiv does in fact allow users to export all of their data as well as import data (from platforms like Substack). While Beehiiv recently launched its ad network (implying a drastically different monetisation approach than Substack's), and although there are in fact some stylistic similarities, there's coincidingly zero indication that Beehiiv has in any way ripped off – or "cloned" – any of Substack's code-base.

Otherwise, a bit of a safe yet arguably stale choice for an open platform would be the aforementioned WordPress, WordPress having belatedly launched paid newsletters in June of this year (some 20 years after it first launched), suggesting it too is not a "copycat rival" and certainly not a "clone". (It's worth nothing that while WordPress is already bloated and slow due to all the plugins the system inherently requires, adding more plugins for subscription features would only make the user experience even worse.)

There is however a platform that has in fact unashamedly done some actual cloning of another platform, but before it's revealed which platform that is it'd be appropriate to mention what is arguably the most full-featured, extensible, open, easy-to-use-out-of-the-box, non-"copycat rival" platform out there, that being the open source platform Ghost. Ghost was founded in 2013 (and is behind the Open Subscription Platforms website mentioned above), having since established such a strong reputation that – although it might not be the greatest of endorsements – it got recommended over Substack by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.

As insinuated in Dorsey's screen capture taken from Ghost's website, there's "no investors" and (thus) "no bullshit" when it comes to Ghost, as rather than being a platform funded to the tune of tens of millions of dollars by Silicon Valley royalty, it's a bootstrapped non-profit initially funded via a meager crowdfunding venture (to the tune of roughly US$300,000) and now funded by its customers.

To be a bit more specific, Ghost is open source software that can be freely downloaded from GitHub. This implies that anybody is free to set up a business as a hosting service (of which several already exist) in which customers are charged for the hosting of their publication(s), not a cent required to be paid to Ghost by the hosting company. Likewise, individual users with a bit of knowledge (or who know someone knowledgeable) can install Ghost on a VPS of their choosing (such as on Digital Ocean via their "1-Click App") to set up and launch their own publication.

But what's most interesting of all is the purpose for which Ghost itself offers hosting via its Ghost(Pro) service. That is, Ghost takes the proceeds from the hosting of publications to pay the developers who work for the non-profit Ghost foundation to build the software. The expansion of the platform then attracts more publications, who help fund more of the platform's development, and so on and so forth.

With the basics of Ghost explained, now would be a good time to relay some info about not just the closest thing to a "copycat rival" out there (Beehiiv), but about the one publishing platform that has not just figuratively but literally "cloned" portions of another publishing platform. A few words and images from a late-2022 tweet thread by Ghost co-founder John O'Nolan (who for a time was deputy head of UI at WordPress) will help elucidate things a bit. (FYI: clicking on any images will enlarge them.)

That's right, when CEO of Substack Chris Best stated to Joe Rogan that there are platforms that had "cloned" Substack (seemingly "shocking" Rogan in the process), Best was partaking in no less than the age-old practice of projection, what with Substack being just four months away from being caught "cloning" aspects of another platform (while possibly even being in the process of "cloning" Ghost's search functionality into Substack at the same time that Best was appearing on The JRE).

Best quickly responded to O'Nolan's thread, pointing out that the Tripoli theme (which I actually purchased in July of 2022 and have done some customisation work to for an upcoming usage) was purchased and adapted for Substack use. Which is fair enough (and fully legal), but the fact that what is purportedly a $650m company didn't have the resources to put together a theme on its own does come off as rather peculiar.

Best then went on to point out that "Substack is not 'powered by Ghost'" (a statement that only made O'Nolan's claim even more hilarious) and correctly pointed out that the Sodo Search library it got from Ghost (one might say "cloned" from Ghost) doesn't emanate from Ghost's own CDN as the JavaScript file is actually served via JSDelivr with a custom subdirectory (which Ghost presumably doesn't pay for). However, while Best then went on to state that Substack is using Ghost's search library "in a fully compliant way", he didn't actually explain where exactly Substack gave the requisite copyright attribution of which O'Nolan claimed (in the final tweet above) "they have not" done.

A link to O'Nolan's Twitter thread was promptly posted to Hacker News, the first comment shown in the Hacker News thread being a comment by Best himself in which he copied and pasted-in what he stated in his aforementioned reply on Twitter. Best leaves a few non-relevant replies to other comments on the Hacker News thread, the more relevant replies coming from Substack co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Jairaj Sethi. Sethi replied to ten comments, over and over (and over) again pasting in the same reply.

Hey, Substack CTO here. We don't distribute Ghost's code at all and the only piece of code included is a client-side search library used by the third party theme. But that library is actually hotlinked and hosted on jsdelivr (via npm) with no modifications made to it what-so-ever. This includes the line at the top with the license link as Ghost originally built it

But that's not quite correct. Because one comment that Sethi didn't reply to was a reply made to one of his comments, in which the user "bakkoting" states the following in response to a claim made by Sethi that "The files actually do have a link at the top to the license file":

And this is what that linked-to comment states (which neither Best nor Sethi replied to):

Although for some unknown reason the first file (via the first link [1]) doesn't actually contain the "For license information please see sodo-search.min.js.LICENSE.txt" line anymore, if you take a look at an archive.org capture of the file from December 12^th 2022, which is what Substack would have been loading when all the above would have been occurring, the file does in fact contain that line (which is the line that Sethi was referring to).

While that file [2] contains attribution information for several scripts via their MIT licenses, it's the third file that contains the license to the Ghost Foundation's Sodo Search library and which Substack is supposed to link to (if not mention in one way or another) for attribution purposes. Substack, however, does none of the above, implying that Substack's usage of Ghost's Sodo Search is not being used – as Best claimed – "in a fully compliant way".

If you're wondering "how should Substack know that?", well, if from the https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@tryghost/sodo-search@1.1/umd/sodo-search.min.js file that Substack links to one goes back two sub-directories one ends up in the https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@tryghost/sodo-search@1.1/ directory. And it's there that one sees the LICENSE that O'Nolan (and bakkoting) referred to, and which should have been linked to.

That all being so, it's not as if Substack hasn't been (inadvertently) compliant otherwise. Because if one takes a look at the source code for The Free Press one can see that Substack does in fact give proper attribution to another package, Modern Normalise (which comes via usage of the Tripoli theme).

modern-normalize v1.1.0 | MIT License | https://github.com/sindresorhus/modern-normalize

Substack, however, doesn't do the same thing with Ghost's Sodo Search. Nowhere in Substack's source code for The Free Press (December 3^rd, 2023 archived link here) does one find code that would look something like the following:

sodo-search v1.1 | MIT License | https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@tryghost/sodo-search@1.1/LICENSE

It's unclear whether this omission has been done purposefully, out of incompetence, or as a mere oversight. Regardless, what is clear is that while there doesn't seem to be any platform that has outright "cloned" any aspect of Substack, Substack has in fact come closer to having partaken in that practice than any other platform via the utilisation of Ghost's Sodo Search without proper attribution. Call it what you will (ripping off code, lifting code, grifting code, "cloning" code, whatever), but regardless of what you call it the fact remains that Substack – a $650m company with tens of millions of Silicon Valley dollars behind it and a vastly larger team – made use of some of Ghost's open source code, utilised it with zero attribution, and which without any public acknowledgement effectively tried to pass off The Free Press as a publication wholly put together by Substack Inc. One might say then that not only is Substack all about "free speech", but rather unsurprisingly, and having (from all appearances) given nothing back to the open source software ecosystem, it also seems to have a penchant for "free code" as well.

Otherwise put, while Bari Weiss, founder of The Free Press, was advised by her lawyers to choose a different name for her publication due to it being too common for trademarking (her Substack Common Sense, formerly found at bariweiss.substack.com and then commonsense.news, was getting rebranded), she probably should have been advised to choose a different name for other reasons. Because while the front page of The Free Press looks like this:

It'd perhaps be more accurate if it echoed its name a bit more and looked something like this:

To make matters even more amusing, if one takes a look at the source code of The Free Press one can not only see how much of an aversion Substack has to writing its own code, but how much it admires code made for the Ghost ecosystem. Because although it's commented out, one can see that Substack has linked to the CSS and JS files for a dropdown script made by another Ghost theme developer, themeix. As the JS file (hosted by Substack, archived here) states on one of its first lines, "A simple script for dynamic dorpdown [sic] & mega menu for Ghost Blogging Platform".

<!--
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://substackcdn.com/publication/260347/theme/e5f07878-205a-4aee-930e-305f31f53a4f/assets/css/ghost-dropdown.css">
-->

<!--
<script src='https://substackcdn.com/publication/260347/theme/e5f07878-205a-4aee-930e-305f31f53a4f/assets/js/ghost-dropdown.js'></script>
-->

To reiterate and add some clarity... Was Substack's usage of Ghost's Sodo Search "fully compliant"? I'm no expert on open source licensing, but it would seem not. Was it disreputable? It's hard to think otherwise. Were Substack's co-founders resorting to doing whatever possible to save money so as to avoid having to give up the reins to their "baby" due to a lack of money in the bank? That's a good question, and not just because Techcrunch recently alluded to startups in general facing that very problem, going so far as to suggest where they might "efficiently" find the code they need.

Amid an economic downturn and ensuing layoffs, software startups are leaner than ever. Those that were previously flush with funding now have their backs to the wall. With this in mind, startups can't be faulted for supporting the rapid pace of their software development by relying on open source code – an efficient and effective but inherently risky approach if done without proper management.

While Substack didn't actually integrate Ghost's code with what Techcrunch calls "proper management" (see the eighth tweet in O'Nolan's thread in which he mentioned that a change in Ghost's code could "brick their whole platform", which Substack rather incompetently didn't address – by locking to a version – until after Ghost's CEO and co-founder pointed this out), one can't help but question an entirely different issue: If startups with "their backs to the wall" have to "rely on open source code" to fuel "the rapid pace of their software development" during "an economic downturn and ensuing layoffs", who exactly are the open source projects themselves – like Ghost – supposed to lift code from during these times? And if the answer is "Ghost has no underlying need to lift code from others during harder times", one can't be faulted for wondering if perhaps Substack doesn't have a very robust business structure in comparison to Ghost's.

But while Substack may not have a very robust business structure, what it may very well have is a penchant for playing the victim. Because while Best has rather hypocritically claimed to Rogan – during an August 2022 episode – that other platforms have "cloned" Substack, it would appear that another of Substack's co-founders, Hamish McKenzie, has partaken in the practice as well. According to an article – an August 2022 article – in The Information about Substack and the creator economy,

“There was a time when Facebook was hot on Bulletin and Twitter was hot on Revue and that does seem to have cooled off a little bit. So there is some relief there,” McKenzie said. The bigger threat comes from startups who are “shamelessly copying Substack, like even down to the pixel in some cases.” He didn't name specific companies but the obvious contender is Ghost, where several popular Substack newsletters have moved to recently.

It of course wasn't McKenzie that accused Ghost of being the platform that had "shamelessly copied Substack", that being The Information that was quite obviously working off of some bad... information. Nonetheless, it was in fact McKenzie that, without mentioning any names or giving any evidence, accused other platforms of copying Substack "down to the pixel".

Considering that Substack's co-founders just so happened to accuse other platforms of "cloning" and "shamelessly copying Substack" in the very same month (which, from what I've noticed, they've never done otherwise), one might get the impression that this was a coordinated approach with the goal of painting Substack as the one true platform while all others are mere imitators. Moreover, if Best's and McKenzie's statements were more than mere coincidence, they certainly wouldn't be the only owner/founder to have accused others of having "cloned" their platform.

Although Musk's cloning accusation was made nearly a year after Best's and McKenzie's, it turns out that a few months before Best and McKenzie made their comments a few texts were sent to Musk by an unknown sender. The texts not only suggested that Musk purchase Twitter, but that he take a look at an article outlining a series of steps Musk should undertake to gain full control of the platform, the article appearing on a website run by a far-right blogger and former Trump White House speechwriter who was fired after he spoke on a panel alongside white nationalists.

Might have Best's and McKenzie's unsubstantiated accusations similarly been part of a playbook of sorts, potentially assembled by their largest investor (who they apparently share an "ideological alignment" with), potentially with the goal of gaining a larger amount of traction for their increasingly anti-establishment, libertarian platform?

Otherwise, while it's impossible to confirm any of the above (but food for thought nonetheless), and while business structures will be examined in a later section, the revelations made about Substack via O'Nolan's thread pale in comparison to the revelations extrapolated from Best's JRE appearance.

The Grifting Experience

What's vastly more interesting than the ins and outs of the code that Substack lifted from Ghost is the sheer amount of deceptive banter that Rogan and Best seemingly felt compelled to trade with one another for more than two and a half hours on The JRE. The first of these to be mentioned is the notion that Substack is "an independent company".

ROGAN (46:48): Are you a public company?

BEST: No, private company.

ROGAN: Do you intend on staying that way? It seems like that's the only way you could avoid influence.

BEST: I'm not sure that's true. Success for Substack looks like being an independent company. We're trying to bring this thing into the world that's new, we think it's got a real business model that works, we think we're onto something important, and the way that we can best serve that is staying independent and running it ourselves and making it into the best thing that it can be. And I think at some point you can go public and do that and there's ways to do it that don't subject you to those kinds of pressures.

ROGAN: How could you do that though if the whole business model is about – I mean, if it's a public company, and people buy stock in the company, you have an obligation to your stock holders to make maximum amount of money.

Putting aside the notion that Best's interpretation of going public may very well amount to Substack's recent crowdfunding initiative in which it raised roughly $8m from retail investors, Best seems to have a rather questionable understanding of what it means to be "an independent company", considering that he and his co-founders have taken tens of millions of dollars from VCs (specifically the one that was on The JRE just a few episodes earlier). What exactly is it that Substack is supposed to be independent of?

Secondly, Rogan's insinuation that only public companies have an obligation to "make maximum amount of money" is flat out incorrect (as explained previously about VCs expecting a return on their investments), as is, by extension, his other insinuation that "the only way you could avoid influence" is by not going public. This holier-than-thou attitude devoid of the recognition of actual facts is all rather similar to Rogan's take (26:15) that CNN could never compete with his favourite YouTube shows because CNN is "captured" by "executives, or the corporations that run them, they're not independent", all of which is rather laughable considering that Rogan took $200m for a three and a half year deal from Spotify's executives. (With Spotify's $30bn valuation being three times that of CNN's $10bn valuation, Rogan's problem is that CNN commentators haven't become so "captured" that their brains have yet to turn to mush?)

Regardless of Rogan's selective memory, and regardless of why Rogan suggested that others are "captured" while failing to mention his arguably similar "capture", if you listen to the entire JRE episode with Best and all its awkward (almost embarrassing) pauses – pauses which came off like Rogan was waiting for the "correct" answers to questions he teed up, and which he sometimes then had to answer himself when Best presumably fell short in playing his part – it's hard to not come away thinking that Best isn't exactly the sharpest CEO out there. Moreover, for a self-professed "tech nerd", "computer nerd" and "software guy" (7:02, 31:28, and 44:02 respectively), Best had very little to say about technology, the extent of his opinions being half-witted Silicon Valley-type tech-bro comments, exemplified by pronunciations in which we learn that "technology is increasing very quickly, it's unstoppable" (2:18:29).

But regardless of how sharp or dull Best actually is, the fact remains that besides what I – as a non-JRE listener – presume are a subset of pet topics of The JRE that Best and (mostly) Rogan spoke about (aliens, mind-reading software, Neuralink, becoming cyborgs, and more), Best and Rogan incessantly went on and on about what appears to be another subset of pet JRE topics, namely libertarian/anti-government talking points: free speech, censorship, cryptocurrencies (which Andreessen Horowitz and Andreessen himself have been some of the largest investors in), central bank digital currencies (what Dave Troy calls "The New Populist Bogeyman"), and more.

Rogan not only rhapsodised about the aforementioned by extolling non-Substack grifters like former JRE guest Jimmy Dore (who, aside from all the BS he posts to his YouTube channel day after day, got busted operating a sock-puppet account on Twitter), but also Substack acolytes – "the real journalists of the world" (27:01) – like Matt Taibbi (of the misleading and debunked "Twitter Files") and Glenn Greenwald (who has pandered to the MAGA crowd by becoming the leader of the anti-anti-Trump movement, and who quit The Intercept over a disagreement about editing of which may very well have been an attempt to garner subscribers to his new Substack).

Why is it that Rogan has become so enamoured with Substack? Well, like Best, who stated that "If you centralise that much power it's only a matter of time" (1:40:37), Rogan too claims to be concerned about centralised power.

ROGAN (2:26:01): I worry about centralised power in terms of one entity that has the ability to disseminate information but decides what is good and what's bad information.

The insinuation is that Substack fixes all of this, Rogan having also stated that "I think Substack is one of the most important things that's ever happened to journalism, in my lifetime" (1:06:46). Why is it that Substack is such an important event for journalism, and how is it that it'll address the issue of centralised power?

For starters, it's key to remember that the monolithic boogeyman for Rogan are the aforementioned entities (like CNN) that aren't "independent". Or rather, entities that are independent from what Rogan and Substack aren't independent from (or rather, what Rogan is aligned with): the techno-fascist Marc Andreessens, the libertarian political spectrum, the anti-government/anti-establishment crowd, etc.

What Rogan likes so much about Substack is that its modus operandi is effectively the attempt of establishing respectability in the eyes of the general public for an outfit aligned with the aforementioned, that respectability then utilised for gaining sympathy amongst the public for grifters and libertarians and (supposing that wasn't redundant) grifting libertarians, all the while dressing up the platform as some kind of ground-breaking "subscription network".

If that suggestion of Substack being a venue for grifters seemed a bit over the top, well, don't take my word for it, because that's actually not my description but rather the description of Substack's CEO himself, who in no small part actually admitted that Substack's success – one might therefore say its very existence – is thanks to grifters.

ROGAN (1:16:00): Some just lick their finger, and “which way's the wind going, I'm going that way”, and you can be successful that way too. There's a lot of people that are grifters, they're successful just grifting. You know, some of them, you know, they have a large amount of people that hate them, but there's enough people that pay attention that it pays the bills and they keep going. I'm sure you have that on Substack too, right?

BEST: It's the index fund of the whole internet, you get everything. We wouldn't be successful if there wasn't something for every niche or crazy —

— grifter?

Because while Rogan initially chuckles at Best's first sentence, it appears that when Rogan realises that in Best's second sentence he unexpectedly – and voluntarily – admits that Substack's success fundamentally entails profiting off of – and thus providing a platform for – grifters, Rogan quickly cuts Best off and changes topic.

So while Best openly admits that the very viability of Substack – its success – wouldn't be possible without "crazy [grifters?]", what's of particular interest is how this relates to a comment Best made a couple of years earlier in that initial interview he gave to The Verge. In response to the question "Do you have a runway? When do you think you will become profitable?", Best starts off by stating the following (with a link to the "framework" Best speaks of possibly found here):

The way that I think about this is through the YC [Y Combinator, a startup accelerator] framework of “default dead, default alive,” which is, if you continue on the track you're going, growing revenue at the rate you're going, and looking at your expenses, one of two things has to happen first. Either you're going to become profitable or you're going to die. And if you're default dead, you're actually in a very bad spot because unless you can raise money, the company is going to end. And that's a hard situation under which to raise money.

Which is pretty straight forward. If what you've initially proven is that your business isn't viable, or that "it will be viable, we promise, we just need a bit more investment to make it so", you're likely going to have a hard time raising money. Best continues.

So our focus has always been on being very comfortably default alive, which we currently are. Basically, if we continue to grow at our current rate, we would become profitable quite quickly if we didn't grow expenses. And then it becomes a choice of: given that we've got some money in the bank, do we want to grow expenses anyway because investing in the product is going to pay off returns in the long run? And what that means for me in practice is I want to be in a position where any money we’ve ever raised, we've treated it as the last money that we raise, so we can say, “if we never raise money again, this company is going to work and we have a healthy margin to do it.” And under those circumstances, the only reason you ever raise money is because it's going to help you accelerate and you're in a position of strength.

So although Best claimed in late-2020 that Substack was "very comfortably default alive" ("very comfortably" able to be interpreted by different people in different ways, particularly when he'd just insinuated that Substack wasn't actually profitable yet), it shouldn't be forgotten that much was written earlier about the possibility that Substack may not be currently profitable due to its aversion to voluntarily releasing information about its 2022 financials (upon the launch of its early-2023 crowdfunding initiative). That being said, it may very well be that Substack is in fact currently profitable, but with the platform possibly not being quite as profitable as its co-founders would like it to be they decided to forego with the voluntary release of information.

Nonetheless, if Substack is in fact "default alive" (be it by a lot or a little), the fact of the matter is that with Substack's success being attributed by Best to "every niche or crazy [fill in the blank]", this condition of being in the state of "default alive" can fairly be described as "default grift".

What's even more interesting is what can be extrapolated from Best's statement that "the only reason you ever raise money is because it's going to help you accelerate and you're in a position of strength". One would presume then that in mid-2022, when Substack was vying for another $75m to $100m via its Series C round, that its co-founders had all sorts of plans of how to use that money. As in, perhaps they had the idea to add theming functionality to the platform and even build some new themes – replete with... oh I don't know... new search functionality – and simultaneously may have even lined up a certain writer whose name rhymes with Dairy Rice and whose new publication would be the centrepiece of those new additions to the platform. But while Substack may very well have still been in the position of "default alive" when the market soured and its Series C failed, by Best's logic the lack of investment implies that the platform was no longer in "a position of strength" and no longer able to "accelerate" in the manner hoped for.

So what did Substack do in response to its failed Series C round? Well, we can't say for sure what its scuttled plans for acceleration were, but we do know that seven months later – when Substack (using Best's description) wasn't in "a position of strength" – that rather than utilise funding from its non-existent $75m to $100m infusion of cash to put together its own theme(s) and write its own code, Substack then paid what would have been a substantially smaller amount of money to license a theme from a Ghost theme developer, jigged its platform a bit to work with Ghost themes, and then alongside that saved an even larger amount of money by full-on lifting an entire piece of Ghost's (open source) code for search functionality. Or perhaps better described, it didn't do something that a "default alive" or even a "default dead" platform would do, but rather did something that a "default grift" platform would do.

This all somewhat parallels the recent hypothesis about Elon Musk's new business model for Twitter/X, put forth by Johns Hopkins political scientist Henry Farrell. As Farrell describes it ("people" referring to a platform's userbase/readership),

Some people are quite happy to be kept in the dark, well fertilized with horseshit. And that is the foundation for a business model. Not a rapidly expanding one of the kind that could allow Twitter's massive debt burden to ever be paid off. But it can keep on producing its cash crop, year in, year out.

Otherwise put, "horseshit" (which in Substack's case is the published material related to all the grifting going on) can very well provide a viable business model.

In Twitter/X's case, the execution of this was made possible by building off of Twitter's established foundation of a somewhat respectable platform that supposedly had a left-wing bias (but which its own study, published in October 2021, revealed that "the political right receive more algorithmic amplification than the political left") and then morphing it into the "horseshit" that Farrell speaks of, all the while obfuscating the whole enshittification of the platform (more on that term below) by claiming to be a platform promoting a supposed sense of neutrality.

In Substack's case, the execution of this was similarly made possible by building off of Substack's established foundation of a platform which catered to both political spectrums, if not more-so to the left. As McKenzie stated in mid-2022,

In the first two years of Substack's life, the most prominent writers on the platform were lefties, including Judd Legum, Nicole Cliffe, Daniel Lavery, Jamelle Bouie, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Emily Atkin, and Luke [O'Neil]. What we lacked were voices from the right.

For a while, we worried that Substack's left-wing lean would make the platform an unwelcoming place for people with different points of view. We weren't for any one particular ideology; we were for writers.

Regardless of the amount of truth in the stated prominence of left-leaning writers on the platform or of ideological neutrality, it wasn't too long before Substack became swamped by not only those from the right, but also by the alt-right as well as by grifters and charlatans (be they anti-vaxxers or otherwise). As per McKenzie, "It wasn't until October 2019 ... that the first major conservative voices arrived on Substack", which is when "the culture wars started to creep into Substack for the first time". In the following year, prior to Musk's purchase of Twitter,

[A] small group of antivax writers started showing up, realizing that while they might not be welcome on Twitter they could at least publish posts through Substack. We don't have the same content moderation policies as Twitter or Facebook because our system is fundamentally different to those amplification machines.

That is, McKenzie's usage of "content moderation policies" is euphemism for "issues with free speech", which is Substack's way of trying to claim – like Musk did in the tweet above – a sense of neutrality.

While Twitter/X has quite obviously taken a more crude approach with its wannabe edgelord using memes and adolescent humour to attract insecure young men and boys into his emerging cult who can then be weaponized, Substack has instead taken a much more nuanced and more highbrow approach via repeatedly publishing essays with titles along the lines of "Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse". These essays include statement after statement that have nice rings to them but which are completely unsubstantiated gobbledygook, such as "censorship of bad ideas makes people less likely, not more likely, to trust good ideas" (which objection to is the kind of thing that gets one falsely labelled as communist or against freedom or what have you).

The notion of being able to trust ideas isn't one that should be loosely thrown around though, especially when the three writers of those words happen to be the co-founders of a platform that outright deceive its users serfs.

Of media empires and feudal plots

With Substack's practice and methodology of grifting firmly established, Best also explains that Substack is a platform that enables grifters to be amplified in a way that otherwise wouldn't be possible (just substitute in the now-established term "grifters" for the two instances of "people", and "grifter" for the three instances of "great", for clarification in the following quote).

BEST (2:30:31): We want to let people have their own personal media empire, and then have this exist in this network of people that are in conversation with each other. That control their own piece of it and that help each other out, that talk to each other, and that ends up funding a lot of great writing, a lot of great thinking, a lot of great culture, that otherwise could not have existed.

Because, and as we'll now thoroughly see, to state that these people with "their own personal media empire ... in conversation with each other ... otherwise could not have existed" is certainly one way of stretching the truth.

Technofeudal serfdom

While Substack inconsistently provides paid editors, illustrators, health insurance, money for Facebook ads, a legal defender program, etc., to some writers and not to others, Substack isn't providing people with their own little empires but is actually running something more akin to a feudal system (or what economist, politician and author Yanis Varoufakis calls "technofeudalism").

In mid-2022 McKenzie claimed on the On Substack Substack that

The last era of the internet has been dominated by platforms owning people, but the next era will be about people owning platforms.

In late-2023, when Substack launched its new video capabilities, its three co-founders stated something virtually indistinguishable.

[Substack] is about starting a movement away from platforms owning people, and towards people owning platforms.

It's unclear what exactly "people owning platforms" means though. Was it a tease for Substack's early-2023 opportunity for retail investors to buy into Substack? Was it a tease of some kind of way in which Substack users will be able to purchase a copy of the Substack platform and operate it on a server of their choosing? And why "platforms" in the plural? Well, something similar was more than inferred by Patreon's CEO Jack Conte upon the platform's relaunch when he stated that

Creators don't have ownership and control on the platforms that they use, they're renting space from these other services. On Patreon, they own the surface. It's theirs.

Again, in what way are Patreon users supposed to have "ownership" of the platform?

Well, as there's no indication of a retail investment opportunity with Patreon as what Substack offered, nor any indication of being able to purchase the Patreon software for installation on a server of one's choosing anymore than Substack indicates such an opportunity, it's safe to say that both Substack's and Patreon's notion of "owning platforms" is at best marketing gobbledygook hollow of any actual meaning or substance, and at worst deceptive statements elicited for the purpose of attracting new users unfamiliar with the actual mechanics of the two platforms and what it means to actually "have ownership" of a platform.

Yes, the On Substack piece that McKenzie's quote comes from also states that writers "own the relationships with all the members", but conflating owning relationships with one's members to owning the actual platform itself is more than a little stretch.

Perhaps we should take heed then of the teaser that McKenzie left in the post's final three words: "Watch this space".

Well, if we take McKenzie at his word and do as he suggested, a day short of three months later the On Substack Substack came out with another post (also written solely by McKenzie) in which it was stated that

We believe that the next era of the social internet will be about deep relationships over shallow engagement; signal over noise; and ownership over serfdom. When people have the power over platforms, rather than the other way round, we can have more rewarding social experiences and healthier discourse, where we seek to understand our neighbors rather than score points against them. When the network is funded by paid subscriptions, not ads, trust relationships trump viral content.

We could very well assume that "ownership" is in this case referring to ownership of "relationships with all the members" rather than the platform itself, but this time around McKenzie contrasts "ownership" to "serfdom". For those unfamiliar with the notion of serfdom, serfs were Middle Age peasants between the 9^th and 15^th centuries. In the social and political system known as feudalism, kings owned all the land, portions of which were gifted to lords or nobles. These latter individuals made agreements with vassals to manage their portions of land (fiefs), including the management of serfs who worked the land and who couldn't be sold like slaves but which were however sold with the land.

What makes this all the more interesting is McKenzie's boast that "the network is funded by paid subscriptions", because as will be explained further below, that funding comes in the form of a 10% fee levied upon income made and received via those paid subscriptions. With that in mind, it turns out that while serfs didn't actually own any land and had to work the lord's land in order to live on the manor and for protection, they were however given small plots of land in which they could grow crops of their own of which they could sell. However, and as stated on Wikipedia, the serfs "usually paid 10% of their income to their lord".

In other words, these serfs didn't actually own the land they worked anymore than a Substack writer owns the platform they write on (regardless of what anything McKenzie or any other Substack co-founder likes to say), and these serfs paid the exact same percentage for usage of the land that monetising Substack writers pay for usage of the platform.

Ain't that all a coinkydink.

Anyway, while Varoufakis described the situation (albeit in regards to Amazon) as "A type of digital fief. A post‑capitalist one, whose historical roots remain in feudal Europe", Douglas Rushkoff, author of the book Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, explained it a bit further (emphasis added).

This is not capitalism, as Yanis Varoufakis explains in his new book Technofeudalism. Capitalists sought to extract value from workers by disconnecting them from the value they created, but they still made stuff. Feudalists seek an entirely passive income by “going meta” on business itself. They are rent-seekers, whose aim is to own the very platform on which other people do the work.

In a similar vein to which the existence of Substack's serfs is disingenuously described as not being a part of serfdom but rather as "owning platforms", Substack's talk about "free speech" is often little more than that – talk. Because as evidence reveals, if the kings/lords/vassals of Substack don't like what its serfs are doing, they will shut down their little feudal plots.

And why did Substack unilaterally shut down Sanchez's personal media empire feudal plot? If you read the final tweet in the thread that started off with the above tweet, Sanchez's Contrarian Frameworks "promoted a paid product that they didn't get a cut of that was not located on Substack".

Didn't anybody tell Sanchez that her lord expected a 10% cut on all products sold?

Anyhow, there is some good news, as according to Wikipedia there was in fact a way out for Middle Age serfs: "If they got wealthy enough, a vassal or serf could buy their freedom from the lord".

We'll get to the "out" that Substack's serfs have a bit later, because in the meantime there's a few other ways in which Substack's "media empires" aren't all they're cracked up to be.

Discourse within networks already exists

While it appears that Best was boasting that Substack's "personal media empires" are able to uniquely "exist in [a] network of people that are in conversation with each other", this condition is in fact nothing new. Since platforms like WordPress, Medium and Blogger have allowed their readers to use the same account for commenting across all blogs on the one platform, it's been possible for years – even for decades in the case of Blogger – for these blogs to "exist in [a] network of people that are in conversation with each other".

Network (d)efects

For years Best and company have liked to champion Substack as being free of algorithms (which they've recently decided to walk back on, possibly because their financial numbers aren't looking so good), Substack leaving it up to individual writers to decide what gets recommended off of their corner of their "personal media empire" via Substack's fabled "network effects". As Best stated on The JRE,

BEST (45:00): Some of the stuff that's working really well so far is this principle of putting the writers in charge, and putting the readers in charge. We added a recommendations feature, and rather than say “we're gonna figure out who you want to do” we let the writers pick.

That is, in April of 2022 Substack integrated into the platform its recommendations functionality, which it describes as being similar to what has traditionally been known as a "blogroll".

Writers cross-promoting each other has been the key to discovery on the internet since its inception, notably in the blogosphere, where writers' blogrolls helped unearth niche communities and build bonds of trust between writers.

But while blogrolls have existed for more than a decade now – Blogger has built-in blogroll functionality, WordPress has several plugins for blogroll functionality, and even Medium has blogroll functionality by way of "follows" – they're often set up in a way so as to allow their users to recommend blogs and sites found beyond the confines of the platform being used. Blogger and WordPress allow for this, but like Medium, Substack does not: "Writers can now select other Substacks to recommend when a new reader subscribes to their own publication", stated the aforementioned announcement post. So yes, Substack does allow writers to cross-promote one another, albeit on the strict condition that those being recommended are Substack writers.

But even if one is willing to turn a blind eye to Substack's freedom-limiting recommendations setup (more on that in a subsequent section), it turns out that Substack's fabled network effect may not be all it's cracked up to be, what with it being closer to the truth if Best's proclamation of "we let the writers pick" were extended a bit: "we let the writers pick, but we also let the bots roam free".

Because it was in February of 2022 that Gawker first reported that a bug in Substack was double-counting the number of people that opened their emails, imparting upon writers the impression that their open rates were 100% higher than they actually were. Accurate open rates can be important to writers, as these figures allow them to discern which articles and/or strategies are helping them successfully reach their readership.

But while the faulty open rate figures lasted "for a month or more" (some say "multiple months", while some say "at least a year"), a more concerning situation is that of inflated subscriber numbers. According to a writer that goes by the name "Cow Girl" and whose publication Life at the Rodeo used to be on Substack but is now on Ghost, when they mentioned on Substack their plans to migrate one of their sites away from the platform "the subscribers started to pour in".

Considering my site was very niched it was painfully obvious those were no[t] real subscribers.

It's hard to prove that this occurrence was due to anything more than coincidence, but what can be more easily proven is the manner by which quite possibly all Substacks have highly inflated subscriber numbers. Because as many Substack writers have described it, their subscriber figures have become wildly inflated upon Substack having removed the option of requiring new signups to confirm their (free) subscription (also known as "double opt-in").

For those unaware of what that term means, double opt-in implies that in one way or another a user must confirm that they did in fact subscribe and/or sign up to whatever it is you're offering. Those confirmation emails asking you to "click here" to confirm your subscription or email address or what have you? That's double opt-in, and that's what Substack jettisoned sometime in late-2022. What that means is that by discarding double opt-in functionality bots are readily able to carry out fake signups, regardless of what the motivation of the creators of those bots may be. Moreover, it's not even too hard to prove.

Because while subscriber numbers is one metric, another metric, which makes the first metric arguably meaningless on its own, is open rates. Open rates, which is self-explanatory enough, is a measurement of the percentage of interactions, which in this case means how many emails were opened. And according to several accounts, those email open rates on Substack have been plummeting.

Although current Substack writers brought to my attention – that had cratering open rates and of which a vast majority of their subscribers driven by Substack were said to be "garbage" – were said to not want to speak publicly about it all (reasoning explained in a moment), one former – and prominent – Substack writer who also didn't want to be named stated that they were getting hundreds of fake signups, often in blocks of 50-100 at a time. Although they couldn't be sure, they estimated that a third of their signups were fake. Regardless, they certainly aren't the only one whose Substack has been receiving hundreds of fake signups.

In regards to why current Substack writers/publications wouldn't want to speak about their deteriorating open rates – and certainly not to cull their subscriber lists of fake accounts – is for the simple reason of optics. Yes, your open rate may be an abysmal 20%. But if you've got 10,000 subscribers (a metric which Substack prominently displays on the splash page one sees upon visiting a Substack for subscribing purposes) and a similarly-oriented publication also has 10,000 subscribers, even though your open rate of 20% may lead you to believe that you could quite safely cull 50% of your email list due to them being bot signups, doing so would drastically reduce your public-facing subscriber numbers to 5,000, half of what your competitor has (who also has 5,000 subscribers they could probably cull but similarly won't due to optics). As a result, everybody involved is incentivised to keep up the charade.

It's no surprise then that MacManus stated in a reply – upon bringing up the issue on Mastodon, Twitter and Substack's Subreddit – that "nobody seemed to know about or be interested in removal of double opt-in". The reasons for this, and for Substack's removal of said functionality, are quite possibly more than just keeping up the charade.

First off, there's no shortage of people, even rather smart people, who now and again uncritically fall for slickly-marketed campaigns that appeal to their egos. In this case that would entail a publishing platform that likes to tout itself with claims of how "a significant portion of new free and paid subscriptions are coming from readers who discovered your writing through the Substack ecosystem", the users of that platform – marvelling at all the attention (new subscribers) they're supposedly getting – then failing to question the authenticity of all those new subscribers and what kind of motivation the platform may have to see those subscriber numbers amazingly grow.

Because secondly, if a publishing platform is somewhat predicated on continuously raising round after round of investment in order to "accelerate and [be] in a position of strength", then it's got all the incentive it needs to do what it can to juice those subscriber numbers in order to bestow upon the platform wild growth figures of which it can draw attention to and use to proclaim to prospective investors how good of an investment opportunity it is.

Meanwhile, using the existence of the so-called "Substack ecosystem" to claim ownership over subscriber numbers that may have otherwise eventuated is another easy way of creating that facade. Uri Bram, publisher of The Browser (which doubled Substack's paid subscriber base overnight when it became one of Substack's first publications, which was at one time Substack's second-biggest customer before it moved to Ghost, and which then spent years trying to recoup improperly charged fees after Substack kept charging The Browser – and wouldn't pay it back – after it had left the platform), described one way in which this might work earlier this year.

So yes, go ahead and sign up to Substack where you can attain subscriber numbers beyond your wildest dreams and where Substack will tell you just how much your success is supposedly due to them, but don't pay any attention to the non-existence of that double opt-in, the possibility that your actual readership is nowhere near as large as you think it is, and that the genuine subscribers you do have aren't so much due to Substack itself as much as they're due to the efforts you've put in yourself.

Did Double Bounce double down on double opt-in?

Seeing how Patreon – minus a blogroll, and via what was a rather lacklustre interface – allowed "personal media empires" to charge readers for access to members-only material long before Substack came along, what can be said is that Substack appears to be the first platform that brought all the aforementioned functionalities together in one package. As Best put it himself on The JRE (6:52), "It sounded too simple to possibly work. We're like 'If this thing could work, somebody would have done this already, it seems stupid'".

Oh really?

Because it turns out that prior to Substack's launch there happened to exist a rather obscure newsletter platform by the name of Double Bounce, which did in fact already allow its users to charge its readers subscription fees. In fact Double Bounce, founded by product designer Alex Carusillo in 2017 (or was it 2016?), was a newsletter platform whose business model sounds a lot like Substack's. As Carusillo described how it worked to The Verge,

We take 5 percent and the payment processor takes 2 percent, so we just get a cut. It's a hilariously simple system.

So hilariously simple that it not only "seems stupid", but so hilariously simple that one could – ahem – "clone" it? Well, although the platform had no discovery feature or explore tab (actually it did, but they were removed) and so required a user to navigate directly to a Double Bounce newsletter, and paralleling TechCrunch's statement that "Substack didn't invent the paid newsletter", according to The Atlantic

[Double Bounce] was out of business within a year, and Substack, started by acquaintances of Alex Carusillo, arrived shortly after.

Kinda makes you wonder who exactly "cloned" who, huh?

The Substack files

To reiterate, Substack is the platform with tens of millions of dollars behind it of which has enabled it to quickly throw everything together in what can sometimes be interpreted as a rather haphazard manner, barely edging out the platform that had not tens of millions but rather hundreds of thousands of dollars to play with (more on that "edging out" in the next section).

In other words, with nothing overly unique about Substack besides being the new kid on the block with pockets overflowing with cash, why might so many ("ideologically aligned") individuals have such a fascination with it? Rogan explains it best.

ROGAN (1:00:47): You know, the problem is there's great consequences in those industries if you step outside the lines and you talk about things that are unpopular. And that's one of the real positive things about Substack, is you do give people – if they get cast out of these institutions – you give them a very viable, and often better alternative. And now, because of the popularity of Substack, there's a real good argument that they wouldn't just reach the same amount of people they reach more people.

That is, while Substack can be interpreted as an updated and advanced version of Double Bounce, or otherwise as a new coat of paint added on to Blogger/WordPress/Medium (with the paid subscriptions functionality of Patreon added on), what stands out so much for Rogan (and Best and Andreessen and Greenwald and all the rest of them) is that Substack is a platform that not only amplifies libertarians/grifters ("they [don't] just reach the same amount of people they reach more people"), but that Substack's sense of respectability – garnered not by actual success but rather by repeated infusions of tens of millions of dollars to hype the platform and give it the faux sheen of success – rubs off on its libertarian/grifting writers and thus validates their opinions in the eyes of a general public that otherwise wouldn't be so readily exposed to their ideologies. This is a process readily seen occurring on Twitter/X, as pointed out by investigative journalist Jason Wilson in The Guardian.

High-profile users of Twitter/X including rightwing personality [Tucker] Carlson and the platform's proprietor Musk, are helping to mainstream extremist narratives that are increasingly prevalent on the site, experts and advocates say.

Despite Musk's aggressive responses to organizations that criticize X for promoting extremism, white nationalists and other extremists last week took to the platform to celebrate the role of Musk, his platform and star attractions including Carlson for “shifting the Overton Window” on antisemitism.

Greenwald has stated himself that writing on Substack isn't so much about the money as much as it's about being associated with the Substack brand. When the Financial Times asked Greenwald in early-2021 "whether he would be willing to leave Substack and go to a different platform if they were charging less ... he said that Substack had already established itself as a kind of brand, and that was worth the extra money". As Greenwald put it,

I think what has happened is that . . . Substack in a lot of ways is becoming, or has become, a kind of a brand, so people do now feel like if you're at Substack, it's almost like being at a media outlet, even though it's not.

I feel like I would lose something if I just went to some totally unknown platform just because they would take 5 per cent instead of 10 per cent. I don't think the difference in the percentage commission would be worth what you lose.

In late-2022/early-2023 Greenwald did however decide that he wanted to focus on video content rather than written content and so moved to video platform Rumble, who contractually required him to also move his writing from Substack to Rumble's newsletter platform Locals. So while Greenwald is still fully in support of Substack ("We have had nothing but the best of experiences with Substack, and I continue to believe Substack is an excellent and important platform for empowering independent journalists and providing them a way to exercise full editorial freedom, free of external pressures to censor"), in his pre-migration comments to the Financial Times Greenwald effectively stated that his writing would "lose something" were it not associated with the Substack brand, that "something" arguably being the ideological rapport one gets when publishing on Substack.

Interestingly enough, Greenwald's reasoning for heaping the praise upon Substack is actually the antithesis of Ghost's approach. The name itself, Ghost, comes from the idea that the platform is cleanly designed and so gets out of the way in order to let writers do their thing – write. Simultaneously, while nobody has "a Ghost" the way one has "a Substack", there's effectively no draw for somebody to specifically want to read a publication running on Ghost. Ghost is therefore (mostly) invisible as it's not about the platform but rather is about the publications that use it – to the point that Ghost doesn't inadvertently garner the attention the way that Substack does (and so doesn't have the level of notoriety and the kind of household name it would have otherwise accrued) due to readers generally being unaware when they're visiting a Ghost-utilising publication. (Contrary to what Substack brass like to say, it might be more precise to say then that it's actually Ghost that is "for writers" while Substack is "for Substack writers".)

Substack, on the other hand, is very much about the brand itself and what it confers upon those that choose to use it. For as Rogan's latter-most quote continues (in which he was talking about Substack writers being able to reach more readers than they would have been able to otherwise), describing what is increasingly transforming into an echo chamber of libertarian grifters and anti-government/anti-establishment types,

ROGAN (1:01:12): And now, because of the popularity of Substack, there's a real good argument that they wouldn't just reach the same amount of people they reach more people. Particularly if it gets – if these things get promoted by other people like Bari [Weiss] or other journalists that are very popular on Substack.

(That is, promoted by the same Bari Weiss whose new Substack publication – the free code-utilising The Free Press – was the publication in which Substack made its first forays into lifting Ghost's open source code.)

And that, quite possibly, has been Substack's game plan all along.

You might recall McKenzie's aforementioned statement that for Substack's first two years "the most prominent writers on the platform were lefties" and that the platform "lacked ... voices from the right", to the point that Substack brass were "worried that Substack's left-wing lean would make the platform an unwelcoming place for people with different points of view". Because as McKenzie also put it, "We weren't for any one particular ideology; we were for writers".

Jonathan M. Katz, writer of the aforementioned "Substack Has a Nazi Problem" Atlantic article, concurred with this initial left-leaning position of Substack's.

I myself am a Substacker. I started my newsletter in 2019, at a time when the platform was known for hosting freelance journalists and bloggers, many on the left and center-left, attracted by the promise of a new way to scrape together a living amid the collapse of the journalism industry.

He goes on though to point out in his Atlantic piece that "In the past few years, Substack has sought to appeal to more contrarian and conservative authors ... and to readers disenchanted with mainstream publications", and that there exist "scores of white-supremacist, neo-Confederate, and explicitly Nazi newsletters on Substack – many of them apparently started in the past year."

It wasn't until his follup-up piece on his Substack-utilising publication The Racket that Katz elborated on what he saw as "the timing of [Substack's] turn". As he saw it, the "turn" coincided with the two investment rounds with Andreessen Horowitz, and that "the arrival of the new right-wing Substackers was accompanied by an influx of new staff from Andreessen Horowitz." Katz then highlighted the hiring of the aforementioned Lulu Cheng Merservey as Substack's first full-time spokeswoman, she not only being married to the former fellow of the Heritage Foundation but apparently "a noted fan of one of Substack's leading eugenics bloggers".

Katz makes it clear though that he doesn't believe Nazis were in any way recruited outright by any Substack or Andreessen Horowitz personnel.

I'm not alleging that Andreessen or his employees went out and recruited the Nazis who are proliferating around the platform. I am saying that Mersevey's conflation between free speech and far-right, exclusionary ideas is the exact sort of thing that leads to having a bunch of literal Nazis running around your platform in the name of protecting “free expression.”

Which makes perfect sense. As you may recall, it was relayed earlier via The Information that Substack partnered up with Andreessen Horowitz not only for economic reasons but due to "ideological alignment". As you may also recall, Andreessen proudly stated on The JRE that at Andreessen Horowitz "we only think long term – we only think in terms of 10 years, 15 years, longer". Put those two together, and seeing how the creation of a virtually-anything-goes free speech platform will inevitably attract grifters and extremists the way that flies naturally hone in on a freshly deposited load of dung (all the more so when your spokeswoman has placed a fan next to the droppings to spread the stench around), one could imagine that that 10-15 year plan would entail harnessing a platform that had started off by courting "lefties" (McKenzie travelled to Boston in the summer of 2018 to meet journalist Luke O'Neil and "convince him to start a newsletter", McKenzie and Best at one point even flying O'Neil into New York for a night of drinks), use those writers to claim a leftward slant, and then sit back and oh-so-surprisingly watch as over time – and with the expenditure of zero direct effort on the part of the co-founders and investors – the grifters and extremists voluntarily flock to your platform as they see the opening provided.

That's not to suggest though that Andreessen and Substack's co-founders have completely sat back and let the platform simply coalesce on its own. Because it turns out that while Weiss' Free Press – which has been described by The Information as being "libertarian-lite, pro-Israel, anti-woke" as well as "something like a libertarian Daily Beast" – had none other than Andreessen himself as an advisor on the building of the platform, and while Weiss is also said to have raised somewhere between $1m and $5m for the new publication (it has about a dozen staff, along with several writers), she's so far avoided disclosing whether or not Andreessen ponied up some cash to help another ideologically aligned colleague.

Moreover, and to slightly extend the ideological alignment, it also turns out that in late-2022 Weiss got a text from none other than Elon Musk, offering her and Taibbi, as well as fellow independent journalists Michael Shellenberger and Lee Fang, the opportunity to sift through select documents ("select" being a key word here) left by Twitter's previous authorities and to publish whatever they found most intriguing. So eager to play along was Substack-utilising Weiss that she even pushed up the launch of her new publication by four days in order to coincide with the release of her portion of the Twitter Files.

So while Substack's goal of being able to claim a "hands-off content moderation stance" appears to have entailed its co-founders starting off by going out of their way to procure leftward leaning writers prior to the free speech platform inherently attracting hordes of grifters and extremists (followed up with the feigning of surprise), that nonetheless wouldn't be enough on its own to mainstream the kind of ideological alignment that Andreessen and Substack's co-founders presumably had in mind to push.

For that to inconspicuously happen would require some grassroots promotion, two of what are likely numerous examples seen earlier via Andreessen granting interviews exclusively to Substack publications as well as his assistance given to Weiss for the launch of her Free Press publication (which coincided with her publication of the Twitter Files Part 2, of which for all we know was orchestrated by the venture capitalist with stakes in both Twitter/X and Substack). But that still wouldn't be enough. However, the first step for one methodology of tipping Substack's scales in favour of "helping to mainstream extremist narratives" (as Wilson put it) would be to grant interviews to those with an outsized audience. Otherwise put, the Joe Rogans.

For those unaware, while Rogan garnered a hefty paycheque when he signed his exclusive agreement with Spotify, he's since become not only the #1 podcast in places like the UK but also the #1 podcast on Spotify. Being able to harness a program as such can of course play much more than a small part when trying to subtlety and inconspicuously promote and mainstream extremist narratives. But while having Substack's largest investor on the show (who, as relayed earlier, sticks to giving interviews to programs along the lines of The JRE) doesn't necessarily accomplish the task (recall that Andreessen didn't mention Substack once on either of his two JRE appearances), it'd be a bit much to have the co-founder and CEO of the platform overtly push particular Substacks as that would betray the position of neutrality. Instead, while the co-founder and CEO feigns neutrality (when Rogan asked what particular Substacks he reads Best pointed to a sports-related Substack), the way to mainstream those extremist narratives is to have the host – who doesn't have to be neutral – recommend those ideologically aligned Substacks, Substacks which can kick off the promotion of mainstream extremist narratives. Because as luck would have it, Substack now has a recommendations feature.

As you might recall, while Rogan recommended some non-Substack figures, he also specifically went out of his way to recommend a specific coterie of Substack writers, namely Glenn Greenwald, Bari Weiss, and Matt Taibbi. Visit Taibbi's Substack and you'll not only find all his latest, but you'll also see a Recommendations section over on the side, consisting of a slew of publications whose writers have been known to push misinformation (Seymour Hersh), those with their own RT programs (Chris Hedges), and more. Click through to some of those recommended Substacks, and then through to some of the Substacks that those Substacks recommend, and before long there's a chance that – similar to the unhinged material that the YouTube algorithm can recommend if you watch the "wrong" video – one ends up going down a Substackian rabbit hole whereby one can get indoctrinated into any number of extremist narratives.

Substack does after all host Patrick Casey's publicaction, Casey being the leader of a now-defunct neo-Nazi group who, after getting himself banned from Twitter and TikTok, suspended from YouTube for having broken their terms of service, and then prohibited from using the payment processor Stripe, was then welcomed with open arms to Substack where he was able to establish a paid publication by setting up with a third-party payment processor. Via his recommendations feature Casey recommends seven other white-nationalist and extremist publications.

Which brings us to the Techdirt article by its editor Mike Masnick, entitled "Substack CEO Chris Best Doesn't Realize He's Just Become The Nazi Bar". The piece followed up Best's aforementioned second interview with The Verge in which he wouldn't commit to disallowing racist material on Substack Notes, Masnick starting off by referencing a tweet thread about becoming "a Nazi bar".

Masnick proceeds to berate Best, imploring that he "fucking own it", that he "not pretend [to] have some grand principled strategy", and that he "Say it. Say that you're the Nazi bar and you're proud of it."

Say “we believe that writers on our platform can publish anything they want, no matter how ridiculous, or hateful, or wrong.” Don't hide from the question. You claim you're enabling free speech, so own it. Don't hide behind some lofty goals about “freedom of the press” when you're really enabling “freedom of the grifters.”

You may recall that word "grifters" from an earlier section, when it was relayed that Best had effectively admitted to Rogan that Substack wouldn't be viable without profiting off of grifters. Best tried to joke that people as such are "the index fund of the internet", which may very well be true. In fact, Masnick himself effectively concurred with this observation, albeit with a few added words.

[I]t's the internet itself that is the grand enabler of free speech. When you're a private centralized company and you don’t deal with hateful content on your site, you're the Nazi bar.

That is, the very nature of the internet allows anybody to create a website of their own – be it by installing something like WordPress on their own server or even coding their very own website – whereby they're free to say whatever they please. Prior to migrating over to Ghost and operating my site on a Linode VPS (before migrating to Ghost(Pro)), for three years I actually used my own hand-coded "blogging platform" of which operated on a shared server (which like the former setup provided me with all the "free speech" I could want). However, when you take the platform you've built (whether it be a rinky-dinky one similar to what I built or a more full-fledged one like Substack) and then centralise it and allow other people to use it (which I never did, but which Substack has obviously done), the onus is then on you to decipher what content stipulations – if any at all – you're going to operate it with. And if you don't apply any stipulations?

Substack is a centralized system. And a centralized system that doesn't do trust & safety… is the Nazi bar.

Yes, I know, Best and Rogan insinuated on The JRE that Substack is decentralised (which will be clarified in the next section), but like much else Best and company like to pretend that things are other than what they actually are. Like Substack being the Nazi bar.

Chris Best wants to pretend that Substack isn't the Nazi bar, while he's eagerly making it clear that it is.

And if some – if not all – of the above wasn't enough to convince you of what kind of "bar" Substack brass is operating, you might recall that disastrous second interview Best did with The Verge. Because upon The Atlantic publishing Katz's "Substack Has a Nazi Problem" article, The Verge's editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, who interviewed Best (and rather excellently at that), added an intro to a clip he'd released earlier.

You might also recall that a week after Best's second interview with The Verge was published that McKenzie was forced to partake in damage control, damage control in which he didn't actually offer any suggestion as to how Substack would deal with overt racist material published to Substack Notes, instead offering more of the same. In retrospect, it turns out that perhaps that shouldn't come as much of a surprise. Because while Substack's recommendations system can facilitate a kind of "soft-hijacking" of the non-algorithmic system in order to popularise and mainstream a particular ideological slant – ultimately culminating in the inconspicuous pushing of the platform in the direction so desired – it turns out that Substack brass isn't anywhere near as neutral as they may try to portray themselves as being.

According to Katz's Atlantic article, Substack's co-founders have a "willingness not only to accommodate but to promote writers with a history of making inflammatory racist comments". The first instance mentioned refers to Substack's flagship podcast, The Active Voice, in which McKenzie platformed the Substack writer Richard Hanania (a political scientist with a law degree from the University of Chicago) back in June, just a month earlier Hanania having described Black people on Twitter as "animals" who ought to be subject to "more policing, incarceration and surveillance." That is, Substack didn't simply host writings of Hanania's in a "neutral" manner, but it went out of its way to give him a microphone and effectively promote what he had to say.

Hanania did subsequently disavow his previous views, although what would seem insincerely as he then went on to state that "left-wing journalists dislike anyone acknowledging statistical differences between races." Did Substack follow up with a condemnation of any of Hanania's remarks? Not quite. For as Katz then stated,

Nevertheless, Chris Best, who is also Substack's CEO, hailed Hanania's non-apology as “an honest post on a difficult subject.” Within weeks, Substack was promoting Hanania yet again, trumpeting in one of its newsletters that his new book, The Origins of Woke – in which he calls for gutting the Civil Rights Act – “is in hot demand from reviewers,” and providing a link to preorder it. (One of those reviewers, writing for The Atlantic, observed: “Put plainly, Richard Hanania remains a white supremacist. A real one.”)

In his follow-up piece Katz then pointed out that in a September On Substack post McKenzie then promoted the xenophone and anti-Semite Ann Coulter as well as the "Pizzagate" promoter Mike Cernovich (both of whom are described by McKenzie as writers whom "millions of readers trust"), and also namechecked an "up-and-comer" that has previously posted a paean to a foundational Nazi ideologue.

Katz's pieces unsurprisingly garnered their fair share of attention, freelance writer, reporter and MSNBC columnist Marisa Kabas – who writes the Substack The Handbasket – having followed them up by taking to Substack Notes as well as Bluesky proclaiming that she was organising a collective response to demand an answer from leadership.

Which is certainly noble and all, but with Substack's Nazification being just the tip of the iceberg (I mean, there's still another four sections left to this post), one can wish Kabas well while also deeming her attempt to be a lost cause. Because while Katz himself stated on Substack that "I, for the moment, am staying", and that "I was here before the Nazis, and I think they should leave, not me", who was there first ultimately matters less than what the platform's co-founders and investors (originally?) had in store for the platform.

Because yes, the notion of Substack's "hands-off ... moderation stance" ostensibly being part of a 10-15 year Andreessen-aligned covert plan can be a bit too conspiratorial to swallow, but it nonetheless turns out that there's nothing covert at all about Substack's extremist machinations, and it's getting harder and harder to not admit that Substack is increasingly turning into something rather similar to what Musk has transformed his Twitter/X platform into.

Centralised vs decentralised ecosystems

To make matters worse (what, did you think this was going to get better at some point?), of all the publishing platforms on the market it's actually Substack that is the epitome of exactly what Rogan and Best profess to dislike and be against: centralisation. Because although Medium only allows Medium writers to display other Medium writers in their Follows/recommendations section, Blogger and WordPress have long allowed users of their platforms to link to non-Blogger and non-WordPress websites from their respective blogrolls. On the other hand, and much like its incestuous compatriot Medium (believe it or not, Andreessen Horowitz actually led Medium's 2015 Series B funding round in which it raised $57m, and then less than a year later participated in its Series C funding round in which Ben Horowitz joined Medium's board of directors), Substack only allows Substack writers/publications to recommend other Substack writers/publications.

So although Best stated that "rather than say 'we're gonna figure out who you want to do' we let the writers pick" who get placed in their recommendation sections, those writers have no choice but to pick amongst nothing but other Substack writers, writers who exist amongst what is in actuality a centralised platform. (Even if a Substack isn't on a subdomain of substack.com by way of having chosen to pay $50 for usage of their own domain, it's nonetheless still on Substack's centralised servers.)

That all being so, it should come as little surprise that there's several key differences between Substack and Ghost besides publications being hosted through a centralised platform vs being hosted anywhere they desire. That is: proprietary vs open source; limited functionality vs highly extensible; branding under the Substack banner vs one's own brand; generic look(s) vs (highly) customizable themes; culminating in Ghost's implementation of themes supporting a wide array of features while simultaneously being simple enough to use directly out of the box for general, non-technical users. That all being so, what's perhaps the most relevant comparison is not what makes the two platforms different, but what makes them the same.

As mentioned earlier, Substack's co-founders often like to shower themselves with praise for having come up with what is purportedly a groundbreaking business structure. That is, and unlike Facebook and Twitter, Substack not only doesn't monetise via advertising but profits solely off of writer's earnings, a structure which purportedly allows it to avoid the pitfalls that come with a click-bait system. It just so happens though that Ghost doesn't monetise via advertising either, but unlike Substack it's been able to avoid becoming infamous for getting itself embroiled in culture wars brouhaha, and nor has it ever provided anybody with a reason to confuse it as a publisher surreptitiously masquerading as something different. Ghost's ability to avoid controversy as such isn't due to a level of media introspection that's been dwarfed by that of which Substack has received, but is however actually due to something unique to Ghost's architecture.

First off, as a non-profit Ghost hasn't prioritised rapid growth. What this implies is that not only has Ghost not been forced to look to VCs for investment (and so has avoided getting stuck on the treadmill of growing quicker in order to get more capital in order to grow quicker in order to get more capital ad infinitum), but as it hasn't had to kowtow to the whims of investors and their portfolio aspirations it hasn't had to desperately host virtually every publication it can get its hands on in order to meet growth expectations.

As a side-benefit, Ghost's non-profit status also means that it can't be purchased by a Google or an Elon Musk or an Andreessen Horowitz or what have you, suggesting that the platform will be around for the long haul. Or as put by Jason Shen, a former user of both Substack and WordPress and now user of Ghost, "A journalist friend of mine asked if I thought Ghost would 'overcome' Substack. I told her that overcome wasn't the right word. I think Ghost will outlast Substack." And while Ghost's unique business structure suggests that in all likelihood Ghost will in fact outlast Substack, Substack co-founder McKenzie strangely enough thinks that Substack's acquiescence to VCs was a good idea (let's ignore the contradiction between McKenzie claiming that Substack is no longer "an indie project" with Best's aforementioned claim to Rogan that Substack is "an independent company").

Substack could have remained an indie project. We could have avoided venture capital and aimed for profitability from the outset. If we did that, we could have built a nice business and some writers would make a great living. But any success would likely have made us a target. It would have been trivial for a competitor to come along, replicate our model, and then buy up all the writers, making us vulnerable to acquisition or obsolescence. We didn't want to risk losing Substack to Facebook or Amazon.

But while Ghost – unlike Substack – has in fact "remained an indie project" and not only aimed for but achieved "profitability from the outset" (it had little more than a $300,000 runway, fortunately becoming profitable in its eleventh month), it's been able to do so without having become "a target". Because while Ghost has a unique business structure negating the ability for it to be purchased by a Facebook or an Amazon and has a steady base of customers paying for Ghost(Pro) hosting which have bestowed upon the platform the ability to avoid turning to VCs for funding, it's also managed to build a top quality platform that very few users have any interest in leaving.

Secondly is the manner in which Substack and Ghost make themselves available for usage, which can be explained via a simplified analogy of paper. In this analogy Substack can be said to be akin to a private printer which provides customers with access to a pamphlet-making facility, the pamphlets coming in pre-designed layouts on which nearly anything can be written and which writers can charge any fee for as they see fit. As printer, assembler, and distributor of the pamphlets, Substack takes a 10% cut on all proceeds.

Ghost, on the other hand, can be said to be akin to a company that came up with a recipe for creating high quality paper. They freely give out instructions for constructing the paper, which allows anybody and everybody to not only construct the paper themselves but to write on it whatever they please, in whichever format they prefer (flyer, pamphlet, journal, newspaper, book, etc.), and then charge for the final product an amount they deem most appropriate. Alternatively, and knowing the ins and outs of how to construct the paper better than anybody else out there (as they came up with the recipe), they also construct the paper themselves of which they then sell to people to use in nearly any manner they please. That is, Ghost doesn't take a percentage of proceeds, but instead charges what is comparably a nominal price for each piece of paper sold. All proceeds from selling the paper then get funnelled into further improving the paper recipe.

Yes, to back up one sentence, and in case that wasn't made clear enough and/or you thought you must have read wrong, I'll say it again: Ghost takes a grand total of 0% payment fees from publishers using Ghost.

In other words, Ghost doesn't extract money out of writers' profits, instead making its money by hosting the software itself and charging based on the amount of subscribers/members a publication has. Yes, while this means that besides a two-week trial period one can't just sign up on Ghost's website to create an ongoing publication for free (as can be done with Substack), users are however able to sign up to a less-costly hosting service elsewhere or alternatively download the software for free and install it anywhere they please (and sign up for their own email setup).

That "limitation" being so, it's worth noting that since sending massive amounts of emails quickly becomes very costly for platforms there's a good chance that platforms dangling a free deal in front of users are burning through VC money and/or monetising user data/content in some other (possibly undisclosed) manner. As stated by Justin Cox, formerly on Substack (and Revue) and now utilising Ghost (emphasis his),

This weekend, I started looking at Substack alternatives and quickly realized why the company has a revenue problem. Sending emails to a mass audience is expensive. This Week In Writing sends to around 18,000 people. Here is a quick breakdown of major email platforms' monthly fees for a 20,000-person audience:

• Mailchimp: $220 – $535/month
• ConvertKit: $150 – $210/month
• Ghost(Pro): $149 – $269/month
• Buttondown: $139/month
• MailerLite: $105 – $125/month
• Mailgun (100,000 monthly emails): $75 – $90/month
• Flodesk: $35/month
• Substack: free

...

Again, sending emails is expensive. Substack is giving away a costly service in an attempt to attract users. It's worked for platforms like Facebook and Twitter, but will it continue to work in the future? I'm skeptical.

And there's good reason for being skeptical, and not just because of the various cost-cutting measures Substack has been undertaking (some might say underhandedly undertaking) over the past year or two. Because as one Substack writer put it,

[Substack has] continually tried to make me or encourage me to go to a subscription model. They want people starting as a free newsletter, but you've got to convert it.

And if not enough people convert, and/or Substack loses one too many of its 17,000 converted writers (as of March of this year) to other platforms? Because following the publication of Katz's "Substack Has a Nazi Problem" piece, more than one publication has decided to hightail it out of there.

Regardless of what happens to Substack down the road, what all the above means is that Ghost "empowers" writers in the monetary sense far more than Substack does, due to the fact that after passing a very low threshold it quickly becomes significantly more cost-effective to publish with Ghost than with Substack. As stated on Ghost's Substack vs Ghost comparison page,

Let's put this into perspective: You have 1,000 paying subscribers at $5/month, generating $60,000 in annual recurring revenue. With Ghost, you pay $348 per year for hosting. Using Substack, you lose $6,000 per year.

To be fair, since the percentage of paid members out of all of one's subscribers is said to generally be about 10%, having 1,000 paying subscribers may mean roughly 10,000 subscribers in total. That'd imply a cost of about $1,200 per year, but would nonetheless still be significantly cheaper than Substack. Either way, those significantly smaller $348 or $1,200 would go towards improving the Ghost platform itself (as well as running the servers for hosted publications), while the $6,000 would not only go towards running Substack's servers and improving the platform (when they're not improving it by using code from other platforms) but would also go towards increasing the portfolios and lining the pockets of Substack's multi-million dollar VC investors. One might almost say then that Substack doesn't just enable and amplify grifters via its platform, but it also grifts off of those naïve enough to earn money by writing on the vastly inferior product that Substack is.

What makes all the aforementioned – the non-profit structure and monetisation strategy, the aversion to prioritising rapid growth, the inability to be purchased – all the more interesting is that all of it was implemented by design. Which is all easier said than done, considering that following its relatively meagre $300,000 crowdfunding campaign Ghost has been bootstrapped via users choosing to host their publications with Ghost(Pro). What makes the non-profit structure and its genuine independence (from both VC investors and stockholders) all the more fascinating is that unlike platforms with tens of millions of dollars behind them and which have the ability to throw software together relatively lickety-split, Ghost not only had no choice but to be constructed at a slower pace (due to its much smaller team), but in order to launch various functionalities in a timely manner it had to think and plan way ahead of the curve.

As Ghost's co-founder John O'Nolan stated to Courtland Allen during an interview on Indie Hackers, "whereas funded startups move very quickly using capital, we can't do that". In other words, although Substack CEO Chris Best has correctly claimed that Substack created and launched a product that at the time didn't exist elsewhere (but which was invite only at launch in October 2017, was in beta between early-February 2018 and early-April 2019, and which then exited beta later that month), and then when forced to mention names (due to being directly asked "Who is your competition?" in a 2020 interview) reverted to his loose-with-the-truth approach by stating that "I think Ghost added subscriptions after they saw what Substack was doing", the fact remains that Ghost had been conceptualising and building its memberships and subscriptions functionality long before Substack had launched even its nascent invite-only platform.

As O'Nolan very interestingly elaborated on the above,

And so we started with Node in 2013. We started with a kind of brand new dynamic semi-block-based editor in 2014, 15? We started it on memberships and subscriptions in 2016. Each one of those things took maybe four or five years to play out. And by the time we had kind of just built each iteration of what that thing was, and launched it, was just when it was catching on and becoming mainstream. So we launched our editor around the same time as WordPress shifted its editor and Medium became wildly popular. We launched memberships and subscriptions, I think a month before or after Substack suddenly started taking off.

So placing those bets really early and not being able to see the future, but kind of guessing where you think it's going to go is how you compete with funded startups as an indie hacker. And I believe that really, really strongly is you don't have the advantage of being able to move fast. So you have to have the advantage of looking further ahead and trying to get there. Cause you're going to move slower, it's going to take more time. But if you place good bets you'll get there at the same time as the funded competitor who realizes the opportunity much later, but can move much more quickly.

Which of course doesn't guarantee that the end-product will actually be any good. But when it comes to Ghost, which upon much else launched its memberships and subscriptions functionality in October 2019 and its dashboard in May 2022, well...

So while Medium has raised $163m since 2014 (and may become profitable in 2024!), Patreon has raised $413m since 2013, and WordPress has raised $491m since 2000, Substack, with its more than $90m raised since 2017, is another funded platform that inherently "move[s] much more quickly" and which in its case apparently means continuously increasing its centralisation in order to please the bottom lines of investors and/or to disincentivize users from leaving the platform. Moreover, and seemingly unsatisfied with early centralising maneuvers such as disallowing Substack writers to recommend writers and/or publications beyond its confines, Substack's transition to ever-increasing insular conditions by way of moving away from newsletters to something more akin to a social media network (via its app) recently saw Substack's co-founders designate their next target for centralisation: the creation of the "Substack reader".

Announced via the Substack Reads Substack in August, Substack's co-founders stated that "It has been clear for a while now who a Substack writer is".

But until recently, few people would have described themselves as a Substack reader. Over time, we think this dynamic will change. Even while the writer-reader relationship will remain sacrosanct here, it will become ever clearer that there is such a thing as a Substack reader.

September thus saw Substack release an overhauled version of its app, one that unsurprisingly brought out another round of pronunciations by the tech press pointing out that "Substack is moving away from its newsletter roots into a place with more of a focus on its feed, its app, and encouraging people to read posts directly on its platform. You know... like a social network."

But what was most interesting in Substack's post announcing the newly-designed app was the description made regarding the platform's overall ambitions. As stated in the post's second paragraph (emphasis added),

The new Home ... is part of our ongoing effort to bring the world's most valuable readers into the Substack ecosystem and connect them with the world's best writers (you!).

And as then stated in the post's second-last paragraph (emphasis added),

We are excited to further unlock the power of the Substack ecosystem as we continue our effort to build a new economic engine for culture.

Putting aside the notion that this "culture" being spoken of appears to be a world of grifting, this idea of a "Substack ecosystem" is exactly the opposite of what Rogan and Best claimed to be so aghast with during their conversation on The JRE. Namely, the centralisation down to "one entity" (as Rogan put it). Substack, as stated in the two quotes above, is undertaking an "ongoing effort" to "build a new economic engine for culture", which implies centralising "the world's most valuable readers" and "the world's best writers" into the "Substack ecosystem", all on Substack's centralised servers.

Interestingly enough, not only is that exactly what Rogan and Best claimed to be against, but it's actually Ghost that is building the decentralised ecosystem that Rogan and Best claimed to be in favour of. As O'Nolan also stated during the Indie Hackers interview (emphasis added),

A lot of how I think about Ghost now is less about growing ... one centralized company [and] more about growing a large decentralized ecosystem. So whereas many/most companies will try to grow bigger and absorb smaller companies and kind of be this big blob consuming more and more of the market to become the holy grail of what everyone wants to become – which is a monopoly that dominates the market – I kind of think about the opposite. How can we make Ghost the product a really strong and stable core? And then spin off all the other things for which there is demand from the market but that we don't have a big enough team to build.

...

If we can have our smaller team make a tight core that enables lots of businesses to exist around Ghost and around that open source core, then an ecosystem will evolve around it of multiple economic dependence. And it will probably function similarly to a large company, except that I won't control all of it. And that's actually very appealing to me. I don't want to control all of it. I don't want to have the final say in how everything should evolve. So as we kind of get closer and closer to that size, I start thinking more and more about How can we decentralize features? How can we decentralize the architecture of products? And how can we decentralize the market to be able to create opportunities for other businesses to exist within Ghost?

This notion of decentralisation doesn't just apply to an ecosystem of companies though as it also translates over into distribution of content. First off, when writing on Substack one's publication is – at worst – associated with the substack.com domain (and so can easily be blocked by the likes of a Twitter/X), while at best paying the $50 to use a domain of one's own still means that the publication is associated with a Substack IP address (which could quite easily fall under a blanket block by the likes of a Twitter/X as well). No doubt this inherent shortcoming of Substack's architecture has played a part in the creation of its Twitter-like app, which in the process has established a bit of a Substack echo chamber (from which 25% of new subscriptions are said to currently originate from).

Secondly, and perhaps of more importance, Ghost's decentralised nature in which users of the platform need not be associated with Ghost itself via Ghost(Pro) hosting not only means that a publication utilising Ghost can't be indiscriminately blocked by the likes of a Twitter/X (unless a Ghost(Pro)-using publication chooses to freely publish as a subdomain on ghost.io, which I have no idea why one would actually want to do so), but it also means that Ghost ultimately can't be an arbiter of the material that can or can't be published with the software. Yes, Ghost does have a Terms of Service page, part of which outlines various kinds of content that are prohibited on Ghost(Pro). That, however, doesn't stop another hosting service from having terms of service that allow for material that Ghost(Pro) doesn't permit, nor does it stop somebody from spinning up their own instance of the platform on a server of their choosing and publishing whatever they choose to there.

What the above implies is that while Ghost doesn't go around extolling free speech as Substack does (Ghost instead points to all the functionality available on the platform itself and then explains how to use it all), it's actually much more aligned with free speech than Substack could ever be. For example, and just like Substack, the terms for hosting a publication with Ghost(Pro) restrict users from publishing material that contains pornography. However, and unlike Substack, people interested in publishing said material (and who for whatever reason didn't want to use a more appropriate platform like OnlyFans) can either sign up to another host that allows content as such or install the platform on a server of their choosing and publish it themselves. Substack, the platform that likes to go around thumping its chest as a great defender of free speech, doesn't allow for this in any shape or form. In other words, while Substack CEO Chris Best likes to go around promoting the idea of "Defund[ing] the thought police", in reality the centralised Substack platform that Best has created with his co-founders is more akin to the embodiment of the thought police than something like the decentralised Ghost platform could ever be.

In the process of being a platform whose primary draw and mode of gaining attention is what one can and can't publish on it (rather than being a platform whose primary draw is the capabilities and functionalities of the platform itself), Substack has become an overarching website that wittingly or not draws attention to the more seedy elements of humanity and which effectively works to legitimise those opinions as being just as valid and important as any other. While Best and his co-founders stated in their "Substack's view of content moderation" post that "We favor civil liberties, believe in democracy, and are against authoritarianism of all kinds", the fact remains that their platform is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, the Marc Andreessen portion of that duo being one of the "four men" who, as relayed earlier in the quote by Vanity Fair, "are actually part of a broader antidemocratic, authoritarian turn within the tech world", and who more specifically has laid out his techno-fascist beliefs for all the world to see (and who Substack brass are apparently in "ideological alignment" with).

In short, if a Marc Andreessen or another like-minded individual with stature wanted to push the normalisation and dissemination of material put forth by the likes of bigots in order to destabilise societies for a turn to an antidemocratic and authoritarian world, as a centralised-platform-with-stature Substack would be an ideal venue for doing so. Because while bigots and the like certainly can publish with Ghost's software, they're effectively as much of a "nobody" as anybody else amongst the millions of other websites across the internet and can quite easily be ignored (and so must build a reputation like anybody else, not ride the coattails of a brand). On the contrary, while (a) the championing of free speech is used to defend and legitimise the presence and the opinions of bigots, (b) publishing on Substack provides bigots and the like with a certain degree of stature they couldn't receive elsewhere, and (c) the controversy and noise whipped up by the very presence of bigots and the like on a popular platform like Substack engenders the attention desired, it's only a matter of time before (d) individuals as such find themselves on the recommendations tab of "respectable" writers with much larger followings (possibly the writers that Rogan has recommended, or at least those that they recommend) and Substack subsequently begins its transformation into Xstack or Supremastack or whatever it be.

When the earlier-quoted white supremacist Substack stated that "What we like most about Substack is that we can now communicate with you directly – no middle-man platform, no algorithm, no haters, no censorship", it wasn't quite correct with that assessment. Fact is, Substack is – by design – a "middle-man platform". Substack has constructed a centralised platform that can't be installed on one's computer or server, requiring users to go through its centralised servers in order to start up a publication. As the "middle-man platform" it operates the sign-up process, it hosts all publications on its centralised servers, it maintains installations and any updates, it sends out newsletter emails on behalf of writers (which itself utilises another middle-man, third-party service), push notifications for its apps are generated by its centralised servers, etc. The very fact that CEO Chris Best could be asked in an interview with The Verge whether or not Substack would allow certain content on its app belies the fact that Substack is a centralised system, because only in a centralised system is the ability to make that decision even possible.

The fact that there's no censorship (besides that of pornography and such) isn't because Substack can't censor, it's because it chooses not to censor. As the ultimate arbiter of what material can and cannot be published with Substack – thanks to Substack's creation as a centralised platform and thus its inherent role of having the final say on all matters – rather than say "no, we're not going to host, assist in the publication of, and profit off of reprehensible material", it's instead chosen to abrogate any kind of responsibility it inherently has and has instead chosen to promulgate – and happily profit off of – such material.

Money that Substack has received from VC investors (if not from the exorbitant 10% commission it siphons from subscription-using Substacks) is effectively used to provide free resources for unsavoury writers, writers that may very well be there in preparation for when publications as theirs get the amplification they're waiting for – and expecting – as the Overton window continues to shift. As recently seen via a study related to the Israel-Hamas war by NewsGuard (a for-profit organisation that rates the trustworthiness of news sites), "false or unsubstantiated narratives" go viral on Twitter/X before they spread to other platforms, while 74% of the most engaged-with content was spread by blue-tick verified accounts. With Twitter/X's new free speech-aligned "Freedom of Speech, not Freedom of Reach" approach being similar in spirit to Substack's free speech-aligned "Readers ... are in charge. Readers can opt in and out of media experiences as they wish, and they are in control of what they see" approach, it doesn't take too much of a stretch of the imagination to picture Substack devolving in a similar manner to how Twitter/X has, Substack arguably already being in the process of preemptively setting itself up to become the internet's most "respectable" newsletter/blogging platform for misinformation and other reprehensible material as societal conditions all but inevitably continue to deteriorate.

When free speech doesn't recommend freedom

It's true that Substack exists as more of a murky moat (or perhaps a permeable fence?) than a full-fledged walled garden, what with Substack writers able to export their data for usage on other platforms (which isn't necessarily as easy as it could be) while the general public isn't required to be signed into the platform in order to read material. However, the fact that Substack doesn't allow its writers to recommend writers/publications beyond its confines does attest to the notion that Substack may be veering towards what some have termed "enshittification".

If you haven't heard of the term before, "enshittification" was coined by tech journalist Cory Doctorow in early 2023 on his (WordPress-using) blog (and later republished by Wired) to describe the method by which platforms die. In (very) short: platforms are good, then they're abusive (for business reasons), then they die.

Examples abound, be it Facebook's process of going from a platform that showed you material from those you knew, to – when it had become effectively impossible to leave due to everyone you knew now being there – serving you material from accounts you didn't follow (such as online publications), to – once those publications had become dependent on Facebook for online traffic – charging those publications to "boost" their articles to users. Otherwise, Reddit's recent API fiasco as well as Twitter/X's daily antics are more recent examples, and once Meta's Threads starts including advertising in the platform (upon hitting one billion users, it's been said) will it all but surely similarly experience its own enshittification.

Drawing out the process a bit and drawing a parallel with Substack's path, the first stage for an online venture's enshittification is to ensnare as large of an amount of users as quickly as possible (by offering "free" services) in order to take advantage of the resultant network effects. Ideally this would be in a walled garden as that would allow for greater capture of users. But as the term has attained a poor reputation of late it's no surprise that Substack avoided erecting a wall around the platform from the get go, instead taking the more drawn out process of slowly, step by step, erecting a somewhat pervious wall (pervious for the time being?) that through various mechanisms (the establishment of a social media-like audience on an app that can't be exported) disincentivizes users to leave.

The second stage would be to take advantage of this captive market upon having all but locked it in, which would normally be achieved by serving up said captive market to advertisers and vendors. But Substack doesn't work this way (no advertising and no algorithms), what with it claiming to be "chang[ing] the underlying laws of physics that apply" to the business model for independent writing, while ostensibly being a "new economic engine for culture". But while that's all a great sales pitch, what Substack has been doing (as has been repeatedly alluded to) is creating a platform whose publications would over time inherently and oh-so-inconspicuously shift the Overton window to one side of the political spectrum thanks to its laissez-faire approach to content moderation, in the process ultimately attracting writers of one political persuasion to the platform whose reputation it had astroturfed, while increasingly repulsing the other. And much like Musk's approach with Twitter/X, Substack would obfuscate the true nature of the undertaking, claiming that no such process was underway and that it was adamantly "against censorship".

With stage two completed, the third stage is then a seller's market in which one can "print money", which in Substack's case will quite possibly entail a platform in which writers on the alt-right (hard-right, far-right, whatever) have proliferated and are thus given free reign to "print" (i.e. spread) their increasingly extremist ideologies (and their simple solutions to complex problems) to a public looking for answers in an increasingly fracturing world.

That all being so, one couldn't be blamed for thinking that Substack's achilles heel is its readers – and especially its writers – getting too much of a look beyond the safe-space of its permeable fence, lest they discover for themselves that the grass is indeed greener on the other side: far more functionalities to choose from, a vastly superior interface, zero culture war headaches, and – absurdly enough – 0% green fees.

Supposing one were to take a gander through the slats and onto the other side of that fence, one might notice another platform out there that emerged four years prior to Substack, that may have actually conceived its membership and subscriptions functionality before Substack did, that has a decentralised structure in which all publications using its platform aren't required to operate on the company's servers (and so isn't just non-centralised in fantasy land but in reality), that with no VCs or stockholders to please its genuine independence allows for it to take not 10% from writer's earnings but a whopping grand total of 0%, and that a few weeks ago even launched a brand new feature in which writers/publications are able to recommend other writers/publications using not just the same platform but any platform. Sounds kinda like... freedom.

Because yes, although you wouldn't know it thanks to them not polluting social media and what have you with it, Ghost's About page reveals that they are in fact quite fond of freedom themselves.

Behind the scenes, we're just a group of weird, fun-loving humans who enjoy experimenting with new technology. We believe in creating as much freedom in the world as we can, and everything we do is based on that core principle.

Interestingly enough, that belief in freedom doesn't just include creating a platform of which can be freely downloaded, freely installed on a server of one's choosing, and then used to freely publish any kind of material desired, but it also means enabling a network effect that encompasses, well, the entire internet.

As you might recall, Substack likes to heap the praise upon itself for its vaunted "network effects" (which, as you may also recall, might not actually be all they're cracked up to be), but it's a network that goes no further than its own moat as users can only recommend other Substacks. In parallel to this, if you've ever read a Substack before you're probably familiar with the little subscribe boxes that users are able to embed within their posts for the goal of gaining new subscribers.

Similar to this, Substack also provides "unique code" for signup forms that its users can embed into external websites for the purpose of gaining new subscribers via non-Substack sites. (For example, users can embed a Substack signup form into a Shopify-utilising WordPress site.)

Ghost is capable of this as well, via (very extensible) signup cards for utilisation on one's own publication:

Signup cards

For those using the new Ghost Editor (beta), we’ve just released a brand new editor card that gives you new ways to grow your audience across your publication. Following on from the release of embeddable signup forms that gives you the tools to embed signup forms anywhere on the web,

ChangelogTeam Ghost

As well as via embeddable signup forms that can be inserted into external, non Ghost-using publications (or even into Ghost-using publications belonging to others):

Embeddable signup forms

Start growing your audience from anywhere on the web, using the new embeddable signup forms. It’s now even easier attract new subscribers from any website, while keeping Ghost as the hub for your memberships. Branded Include your logo, publication name, and description in your signup form, and optionally select a

ChangelogTeam Ghost

Problem is, while Substack's embeddable signup forms can be inserted into Ghost publications, Ghost's embeddable signup forms can't be inserted into Substacks. That's not, however, due to any fault of Ghost's, but rather because Substack doesn't provide the ability for its users to insert HTML code within their Substacks (which Substack's embeddable form is dependent on other platforms having).

It's not exactly clear why Substack doesn't allow for HTML code to be inserted into Substacks (the way it inherently hopes every other platform allows for, without which Substack embeddable signup forms couldn't be embedded into them). Perhaps it's because Substack thinks rather poorly of its users and thinks they're too incompetent to be able to copy and paste a line or two of code into their Substacks without breaking their Substacks, the way that users on many other platforms have shown themselves readily capable of accomplishing. Or perhaps it's because Substack is too afraid of letting the competition through its moat and by extension fears losing its users to other platforms. Or perhaps it's because it first needs another few million dollars before it's able to integrate such menial functionality into its platform. Or perhaps it's because it hasn't quite figured out how to lift that aspect of Ghost's open source codebase and integrate it into its own platform.

Who knows?

Regardless of the exact reasoning, while Ghost readily allows for Substack embeddable signup forms to be inserted into Ghost publications via HTML cards, one of the most recent functionalities it's added to the platform goes much, much further. That is, Ghost has not only created a system by which Ghost-using publications can also enjoy the benefits of "network effects" by recommending other Ghost-using publications to their readers, but it's created a recommendations feature that works across any publication on any platform.

Recommendations (beta)

Introducing simple cross-promotion for every publisher, on any platform.

ChangelogTeam Ghost

That is, having built the feature on the Webmention open standard, Ghost has created a "Recommendations feature that's compatible with the entire open web" of which "escapes walled gardens and vendor lock-in, operating, instead, across the entirety of the internet". In Ghost's own words,

The dirty secret about Recommendations, though, is that most platforms have designed them primarily to boost their own growth. You can't recommend anything you like, you can only recommend other people who use their product.

We wanted to give publishers the ability to benefit from cross promotion without limits or hidden incentives, so we decided to do things differently. We built a full Recommendations system for Ghost that's compatible with any platform, website, or publisher out there – so you can recommend whoever you like.

This isn't however a mere replica of what WordPress and Blogger have allowed for for years now, because implied by the cross-platform design is that the Recommendations system can be integrated into any other platform (similar to how Substack integrated Ghost's Sodo Search functionality into its system). Were the system integrated into another platform, publications from that platform (say, WordPress) that were recommended by a publication utilising another platform (say, Ghost) could be subscribed to with a single click. Ghost is currently the only platform using the system as the feature was only just launched on November 1^st, meaning that for the time being users signed into a Ghost publication are only able to sign up with a single click to recommended sites that are also utilising Ghost.

So as Ghost does indeed allow Ghost-using publications to recommend publications (and any other kind of website) operated with other platforms that haven't integrated the Recommendations system into their platform, the only limitation is that the 1-click subscribe button can't appear without adoption of the system.

While the system only just launched a few weeks ago, Ghost did however indicate that "we are eager to help other platforms in implementing this 1-click functionality. Contact us if you're interested in building 1-click subscriptions for the open web!" That being so, the million dollar question (or is it the 90 million dollar question?) is whether or not Substack – which is already quite proficient in integrating Ghost's code into its platform – would actually integrate this new Recommendations system into its platform.

As you may recall, Substack CEO Chris Best wrote a tweet thread of his own in response to the tweet thread by Ghost's CEO John O'Nolan about Substack utilising Ghost's open source code, the final tweet in the former thread being the following:

An internet in which publications from any platform can recommend and cross-promote publications from other platforms most certainly sounds like "a better internet" than one in which each platform is segregated into its own silo and can't interact with each other in any manner. Some have already expressed doubts that such a system will actually emerge, although there apparently have already been some bites.

The question on everybody's mind, of course, is which are the two platforms that have already reached out? A safe guess would be that one of them is WordPress, what with it not only being the other open source platform but one that has also created and established a standard that is used across the internet (Gravatar, which Ghost and many other platforms use for applying avatar images to user profiles). Might Substack actually be the second? One might think so, considering something that Best stated via a tweet thread in response to Twitter's first foray into throttling Substack links.

Or as more specifically stated by Best, McKenzie and Sethi in a piece published later that day (emphasis added), "Writers deserve the freedom to share links to Substack or anywhere else".

Question is, do these two statements suggest that Substack writers ought to have the freedom to recommend links to Blogger-utilising publications (what with Blogger allowing for recommendation links to Substacks), WordPress-utilising publications (what with WordPress allowing for recommendation links to Substacks), Ghost-utilising publications (what with Ghost allowing for recommendation links to Substacks), etc.? Might this qualify as something that's not only "bigger than Twitter", but also bigger than Substack?

Once again, who knows?

Well, we do in fact know something, that being that Substack has undoubtedly found itself in an awkward position. Because with Best and company having repeatedly stated how staunchly in support of "freedom of speech" and "freedom of the press" they are, and – to reiterate yet again – with Best even blatantly stating in the latter tweet that "writers deserve the freedom to share whatever links they want", it could be interpreted as utterly hypocritical if Substack didn't allow its writers to share recommendations to publications utilising other platforms.

But why wouldn't Substack integrate Ghost's Recommendations system into its platform? Surely it's got a good enough platform that virtually nobody would want to leave Substack for another platform, right? Because as you may recall Best stating to Rogan, the platform itself is premised upon writers owning all their content and their mailing lists, resulting in: "we're like 'well you can leave, therefore we have to actually do the work to keep you', and that means that in order to succeed we have to do the right thing." Or as McKenzie similarly put it,

You can take your content, mailing list, and payments relationships off the platform with a few clicks. That puts pressure on us to keep proving that the value we deliver justifies the fee you pay us.

And they have in fact proven that the value they deliver justifies the fee they charge, right? That is, rather than blowing millions of dollars (if not tens of millions of dollars) effectively bribing writers to join up so they could be used to hype what was essentially a vacuous platform with very little functionality, they instead spent it on actually building an utterly fantastic product with all sorts of fantastic and extensible functionality, right? All without grifting code from any other platform, right?

Right?

Well, no doubt you can come to your own conclusion regarding all that. That being said, well, were Substack co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi to actually give the okay to integrate into Substack the Recommendations system that Ghost built (supposing their techno-fascist VC overlord even let them) it could very well portend the death knell for the platform. Because were Substack to allow other platforms to pierce its moat, not only would readers be made aware of publications on other platforms, but Substack writers would slowly become increasingly aware of not just other publishing options, but vastly superior publishing options. If so, in more ways than one Substack could lose out on a significant amount of cash flow were enough of its (converted) writers to migrate elsewhere.

Based on other actions that Substack has undertaken – or rather, not undertaken – the safe guess would be that Substack won't integrate the Recommendations system that Ghost built, the hint we have regarding this coming from the second interview with The Verge that Substack CEO Chris Best gave, an interview in which he was asked "Is Notes going to be compatible with ActivityPub or Bluesky? Have you considered that stuff?". As Best replied,

That stuff is really interesting. I sort of mentioned before that we want stuff that gets published on Substack to go everywhere. So we have RSS feeds for existing content. And we're really interested in, are there ways that we could help this stuff spread? I don’t think we have a specific plan with any of these protocols, but we're really interested, in general, in how we can help people on Substack have their work travel everywhere in the world as frictionlessly as possible.

Which is in all likelihood a very long-winded and indirect way of saying "no". Because while RSS feeds (and Substack's once-vaunted newsletter emails) are a risk-free way in which Substack material can be shared across the internet without springing a leak in the moat that Substack has constructed for itself, hooking up Substack Notes with Activity Pub-using Mastodon or AT Protocol-using Bluesky could not only effectively cut into usage of Substack Notes, but it could also nullify the disincentivizing setup in which Substack writers are softly locked in via being unable to export their Notes followers (were said Substack writers to export their content and subscribers data). But if Substack Notes was hooked up into Mastodon and/or Bluesky, there could theoretically be zero friction for Substack writers to export all their content and subscriber data and then simply meet all their Notes/Mastodon/Bluesky social media followers on the other side of the moat.

In summation, while a Tutorials newsletter published by Ghost a week or so after it released its Recommendations system revealed that the two platforms expressing early interest in the system were Micro.blog and Steady, if Substack ends up refraining from integrating the cross-platform Recommendations system then it'll in turn be making the clear case that it's not actually in support of freedom of speech and/or freedom of the press, and that its CEO only believes that "writers deserve the freedom to share whatever links they want" when it comes to sharing Substack links. That is, Substack's limited and conditional implementation of freedom of speech and freedom of the press will be indistinguishable from, as The Verge described Twitter/X's restriction on the promotion of links to Substack newsletters, "a move that seems to fly in the face of owner Elon Musk’s vocal support of free speech on the platform". In other words, Substack's application of freedom of speech will be revealed to be just as vacuous as Elon Musk's.

On the other hand, if Substack surprises us and against all expectations does actually integrate into Substack the cross-platform Recommendations system that Ghost built, well, let's just say that we may all be about to witness what it looks like for a platform to swallow a poison pill.

Whichever way it turns out, it's important to remember something else that Substack's three co-founders stated in that piece they published the day Twitter/X started blocking interactions with tweets containing Substack links.

This writer- and reader-first model represents the future of the internet. Any platform that benefits from writers' and creators' work but that doesn't give them control over their relationships will inevitably wonder how to respond to the platforms that do.

That being so, will Substack follow its own words and give its writers "control over their relationships" by bestowing upon them the freedom to cross-promote publications on other platforms, or will it ineffectually sputter around and find itself confused with "how to respond to the platforms that do"?

A ghost train that's more than an apparition

Interestingly enough, while Ghost also doesn't mind freedom – and if you haven't noticed, bestows much more freedom upon its users than Substack ever could – a steadily increasing stream of writers and publications have in fact been taking the plunge and migrating their publications from Substack on over to Ghost (and not just because of Ghost's superior SEO). But be warned if you're having thoughts about migrating. Because like Best stated to Rogan, Substack's head-honchos "hate it" when people leave Substack, and in a worst-case scenario they may very well retaliate against you for doing so.

The most infamous case in which a writer's departure from Substack earned themselves the ire of the platform's top brass was that of writer Spencer Ackerman and his publication Forever Wars. In mid-2021 Ackerman signed up to a one-year Substack Pro contract, secure in the knowledge that after the first year he'd be free to continue on with Substack or depart for new environs. The latter he did, a new incarnation of Forever Wars appearing as a publication utilising Ghost the day after his contract with Substack expired. That's when the trouble started.

Ackerman's introductory post was entitled "The Ghost Era of FOREVER WARS Begins", the post edited by his colleague Sam Thielman whose services Ackerman had been utilising throughout his time at Substack, paid for via the lump sum received via the Substack Pro contract. Following commencement of his editing of Ackerman's material at Substack, Thielman proceeded to expand his freelance work with the platform by editing the work of other Substack writers.

So with editing work undertaken by Thielman, the July 21^st 2022 post that Ackerman wrote utilising the Ghost platform stated, in part, the following:

Obviously I went in with the full knowledge of the reputation Substack had cultivated as a pandemic-disinformation vector and preferred platform of hot-take artists who wage culture wars and reify everything already wrong with the mainstream journalism and society they think they're challenging.

Which didn't go over very well. Because even though Ackerman was well within his rights to do whatever he pleased come the expiry of his contract, from all appearances Ackerman's departure from the platform was taken as a sign of personal betrayal by Substack's brass, a seemingly strange occurrence that rendered Substack's claims of being a staunch supporter of free speech rather hollow. Moreover, not only was Substack brass evidently unhappy, but it intended to retaliate. Problem was, with Ackerman gone Substack had no way to do so. Directly, that is. Because two days later, on July 23^rd, Thielman, who was still freelancing as an editor for various other Substack writers, woke up to find out that he was locked out of the company's shared accounts, and with zero explanation. Another couple of days later, on July 25^th, Thielman received a termination notice stating the following:

Considering your and Spencer's post about the move off the platform, we are glad to release you from future commitments to work with Substack. I'm sure you'll agree it makes sense for both sides. As such, we'll be winding down your other Substack-funded editing relationships.

Thielman disagreed with being "released" for simply editing somebody's else's post of which Substack – bastions of free speech – didn't like, but nonetheless agreed to part ways within the stipulated 30 days.

To make the situation all the more dubious, it should be noted that Best explicitly stated on The JRE (39:42) that

Editors can be good though, there's people on Substack that have editors, the difference is the writer hires the editor. It's a collaborative venture, and ultimately the person that you're subscribing to, the person you're choosing to trust, is the person that you're hearing from.

But does Substack actually provide the opportunity for its readers to "trust" that the person they're subscribing to has been allowed to choose their own editor?

Because following Thielman's termination notice, Substack then unilaterally went around to the remaining Substack writers that Thielman still did editing work for (that, according to Best, they themselves hired) and informed them that Substack was ending its relationship with Thielman and that his services would no longer be available (which effectively also rendered Thielman out of work immediately rather than the agreed upon 30 days). Which, once again, is a rather dubious situation for Substack to be in, seeing how it claims it's not a publisher and that it doesn't interfere editorially-wise with its writers.

That all being the case, on August 15^th Thielman penned a guest post on Forever Wars, stating the following:

[S]ince Substack had no means to retaliate against [Ackerman] financially, I suppose they felt that they could hurt me and hurt him by proxy, since he had said publicly that paying me fairly was important to him.

Which was then followed up by his sharing of the post – with a few added words – on Twitter/X.

That tweet thread unsurprisingly garnered a strong reaction on Twitter/X, including many promises to unsubscribe from various Substacks. Moreover, the commotion that occurred nearly a month after Thielman was let go was not only enough to get the attention of Substack, but even inspired them to "reflect" a little bit.

But while there shouldn't have been any stepping at all – never mind overstepping – since Substack supposedly isn't a publisher and makes no editorial decisions, it's hard not to get the impression that Substack wasn't so much sorry for what it had done to Thielman as much as it was sorry for getting caught. Because as Ackerman stated in a few words added to Thielman's guest post on Forever Wars,

Remember, our true values are not what they say they are. They are reflected in what we do. Substack chose to retaliate against Sam because of decisions I made and words I wrote. And so those are their true values.

And those values aren't simply unique to this situation, but are apparently evident across Substack's relations with various other publications that choose to not toe the Substack line. One of these cases was with the aforementioned Browser, publisher Uri Bram providing a few extra words of his own that somewhat paralleled what Ackerman and Thielman went through.

It's not surprising then that – taking into account the myriad of reasons listed throughout this post – an ever-increasing number of publications are choosing to leave Substack for other platforms, perhaps the most commonly-chosen of those alternative options being Ghost. Some of the more notable publications to have migrated from Substack to Ghost include:

• The Browser
• Forever Wars (one-paragraph Substack sign-off post here, elaborated post about leaving Substack – on new Ghost site – here)
• Welcome to Hell World (Substack sign-off post here, or here on Ghost if you prefer)
• Notes on the Crises (Substack sign-off post here)
• The Content Technologist (Substack sign-off post here)
• Tangle (which pulls in more than half a million dollars per year, and whose "Why I'm *not* leaving Substack" post can amusingly be read on Tangle's new Ghost-using site here)
• Galaxy Brain (under the Atlantic banner, but which is actually run on Ghost; Substack sign-off post here)
• The Daily Poster-cum-The Lever

And many more. (Which can be added to with publications that generally didn't originate on Substack, such as various creator-oriented publications, publishing-oriented publications, and business-oriented publications, to go along with a directory in which one can peruse through Ghost publications that have chosen to list themselves on Ghost's Explore page.)

In fact, many writers who found themselves uncomfortable with Substack – due to its acquiescence to those that paint themselves as "victims" of the supposed tyranny of "woke culture" and "cancel culture", etc. – have found themselves gravitating towards Ghost, even though those prone to discriminating against others could very well be operating websites with Ghost as we speak. (I don't know either way, although I do at least know of one publication using Ghost that I'm not too fond of, but whose name I won't mention – not so much because I don't want to bring attention to them, but because with Ghost being a decentralised platform it's a complete non-issue. UPDATE 10/12/2023: If the statement is to be believed, Ghost apparently has no interest in getting involved with hosting on Ghost(Pro) some of the types of publications that Substack gainfully hosts, one individual stating on Ghost's forum that "Ghost Pro has said we do not want to go there thanks".)

One notable writer that migrated from Substack to Ghost was Nathan Tankus, a "lapsed student" who writes about economics and finance through his newsletter Notes on the Crises. In his final post on Substack before migrating to Ghost, Tankus decried the "targeted harassment of individual marginalised people" that Substack was happy to see published on its site, which he says "indicated the complete failure of the moderation policy they've put to paper, but never into practice". (As stated in Katz's "Substack Has a Nazi Problem" Atlantic article , "If something that bills itself as 'a National Socialist website' doesn't violate Substack's own policy against 'hate,' what does?")

But even more interesting was Welcome to Hell World's Luke O'Neil, who generally wrote for mainstream outlets until he was recruited by McKenzie to join Substack in 2018 (where he made as much as $120,000 a year). But by early-2022 O'Neil had had enough of things and decided to leave Substack for Ghost (where he seems to be making roughly the same amount as he did on Substack, albeit with 0% payment fees instead of 10%, potentially saving him $12,000 per year). As he stated in his Substack sign-off post, and which was quoted in Vanity Fair, "I cannot emphasise strongly enough how little I want to take part in never mind be the subject of one single more conversation about 'free speech' on platforms and cancel culture or whatever."

It might be said then that while Substack is the place for people who want to staunchly support and/or endlessly – and vacuously – clamour on about free speech, Ghost is the place for the "I don't want to get involved with and/or be associated with all this contrived outrage, I just want to write" people.

In fact, and in an amusing turn of events, while the name "Ghost" came about via the idea that like a ghost the platform would get out of the way and just let writers write, that's now true in two ways: the platform not only has a very clean and unobtrusive interface, but its architecture also negates writers having to deal with – and thus being able to sidestep – the "for or against free speech" nonsense.

Otherwise, while Wired published an article in mid-2021 entitled "Why Are Writers Fleeing Substack for Ghost?", it more recently published another piece in late-2022 about "The Best Substack Alternatives". While Ghost made the top of that list, the last two paragraphs are key:

Substack has raised over $82 million in venture capital, which is a way of saying that some very rich people expect to see a massive amount of growth from this newsletter company. If you work in media, or have paid attention to the past 20 years of online publishing history, you might be skeptical that such a situation will benefit you financially in the long term.

To Substack's credit, right now it's relatively easy to migrate your newsletter off their platform and onto other ones. Hopefully it stays that way, but if you're at all skeptical that might change, I recommend migrating sooner rather than later.

For example, and putting aside notions of Substack having to merge with – or get bought out by – the likes of a Twitter/X, the fact that Substack was unable to raise its $75m to $100m last year (and so had to resort to raising $8m or so from retail investors) suggests that it no longer has the kind of money it previously had to subsidise new writers, implying that it'll be unable to generate the kind of buzz it benefited from in the past. Be it an outcrop of that or not, there's also the possibility that the time may come when Substack's profits are nowhere near to adequate and so in order to please its VC investors it's forced to make a pivot (as Medium has done over and over and over again).

What might such a pivot look like? Well, if Substack ends up pivoting to a system of bundled subscriptions – which not only tech journalists envision but which even Best has all but confirmed with the comment that "I think it's very likely that we do bundles" – that could very well end up severing the connection between individual publications and their subscribers. If that were to happen, well, Substack could pull up the gates even further on the decreasingly pervious wall it's built around what was once a very open platform, writers conceivably losing the ability to export their subscribers.

Alternatively, there's also the possibility that Twitter/X launches a Substack competitor, and if Substack does, for whatever reason, one day find itself on the ropes, there may be little other recourse than for all Substacks to be rolled into the fellow Andreessen Horowitz-funded platform X, with all links theoretically easily redirected from substack.com to x.com.

And for the doubters out there, not only does it appear that article writing functionality is in fact coming to Twitter/X (with "a much more capable text editor ... for serious writing"), but as it'll presumably be available to Premium subscribers for US$8/month / US$84/year it'll be priced with a similar structure to Ghost and thus be significantly cheaper than Substack for those earning money off their writing.

Supposing one doesn't want to find their Substack possibly appearing on X or what have you (supposing X's runway doesn't run out before Substack's hand is forced, or that it hasn't already signed its death warrant), and as was stated in that Wired article, it might be a good idea then to migrate away from Substack sooner rather than later.

Otherwise, and with all the above in mind, here's a couple of embeds for two aforementioned interviews. The first is Substack CEO Chris Best's August 2022 JRE interview in which for more than two and a half hours he and Rogan rehash and try to oh-so-delicately ram down the audience's throat the tired old free speech, Silicon Valley, tech-bro, libertarian clap trap that many of us have become exasperatingly tired of, having heard enough of it the over the past few months if not years from Twitter/X's new insufferable edgelord. The second is Ghost CEO John O'Nolan's September 2021 Indie Hackers interview in which he conveyed some rather fascinating thoughts about publishing, publishing ecosystems, the business structures of these platforms, and more, for under an hour. Should you have the time to listen to just one of them, the freedom is yours to choose which one that'll be.

And for anybody wondering whether or not Substack ever took up Ghost's offer of collaborating on open source projects (be it Recommendations or otherwise) after lifting some of Ghost's code, well...

Chickens of a feather grift together

Returning to what this post was initially supposed to be about, it turns out that there's another similarity that Substack and Doomberg share, to go along with their propensity to lift the work of others without giving proper accreditation, i.e. Substack's lifting of Ghost's open source code, Doomberg's ██████ ██ ████ ███████ ███ ██████ █████ ████████ █████ ██ █████████ ██ █ ██████ █████████ ███. (NOTE: Due to splitting this exposé on Doomberg into two parts the explanatory section which the redacted text references has been moved from the beginning of what was originally one whole post to the beginning of what is now part 2, the redaction made so as to not give it all away just yet. Stay tuned for the unveiling.)

Because while Substack is head-over-heels on the VC gravy train as it takes in tens of millions of VC dollars in order to, at best, rake in tens of millions of more VC dollars, Doomberg's motives don't seem to be all that different. Let's look at some figures.

In 2020 Substack's top ten publications brought in $7m collectively for the year, that haul of Substack's top ten publications having increased to an annual total of $20m by 2021 and then $25m by 2022. One would assume that were Doomberg publishing under something like a Substack Cooking category that it wouldn't be cracking the overall top ten publications listing. But seeing how Doomberg falls under the Finance category it'd be hard to imagine it not doing so.

Look around though for listings of Substack's top earning publications and one never sees Doomberg as making the list of top earners.

However, if one visits Substack's Leaderboard for its Top Finance publications one gets a different picture.

As there are publications in other categories whose write-ups describe them as having tens of thousands of paid subscribers, Doomberg's description of having thousands of paying subscribers suggests that it has somewhere between 2,000 and 19,999 paying subscribers. Low-balling that figure to its lowest possible of 2,000 (which has been the case since no later than January 20^th of this year, nearly a month before the Press Gazette article appeared), at $30/month one reaches a figure of $60,000/month, or $720,000/year. Low-ball that even further by supposing that all of Doomberg's subscribers are paying the discounted rate of $300/year and that annual figure is $600,000 (which would place it in a tie for tenth spot in the Press Gazette listing above). Which, again, supposes Doomberg has the bare minimum of 2,000 subscribers, all its paying subscribers are forking over the discounted rate of $300 per year, and that none of them are signed up to the $1,200/year Doomberg Pro plan. Realistically, Doomberg is more than likely raking it in hand over fist, pulling in at least $1m/year, possibly millions/year. (If Doomberg is converting 10% of what at publication is 199,000+ subscribers, then at $300 a pop it's pulling in just under $6m/year before fees. Its figures likely aren't that high, but even a 5% conversion rate means just under $3m/year.)

While there's of course nothing inherently wrong with Doomberg making the kind of money it does, it does however cement Doomberg in as a perfect fit for Substack. Just like publishing is – at best – merely Substack's means to the end of raking in tens of millions of dollars while the raking is good, the purpose of Doomberg is similarly little more than to fill its coffers while the coffer-filling is similarly good (which won't be elaborated on and explained until part 2).

It would however be incorrect to suggest that Substack is the place to make money while Ghost is the place for quality writing, as there is in fact at least one Ghost-using publication earning more than a million dollars per year (there's possibly more, supposing others have decided to refrain from listing themselves on Ghost's Explore page).

Nonetheless, I see little reason to suggest that, like others, Doomberg should start thinking about jumping ship. Not just because Doomberg apparently likes and suits the Substack scene so much, but because of that whole "chickens of a feather grift together" thing whereby Doomberg is probably best served by operating its grift via what is – at best – another get-rich-quick scheme, and so might as well place all their (green) eggs in one (ham-fisted) basket.

That being said, while on the topic of "doom"-related Substack publications there is actually another such publication that I would recommend move to Ghost, and which in fact recently did. If you do a search on Substack for "doom" the first result is of course Doomberg, while, until recently, the second was a publication entitled OK Doomer.

As it turns out, OK Doomer's writer, Jessica Wildfire, tweeted a question a few months ago about publishing, which I responded with the suggestion of using Ghost. Within the day OK Doomer was up and running on Ghost, of which as a "Ghost Expert" I take zero credit for (besides suggesting a tiny fix or two). That all being so, it just so happens that I'd told myself some time ago that I'd refrain from monetarily supporting any Substack publications but – and supposing I liked their writing enough – would do so if they moved to Ghost. When OK Doomer moved (Substack sign-off post here), well, I ate my words and signed up to a yearly subscription (and then a couple of months in, when tier options were increased from the initial one to four, I upgraded from Little Doomer to Super Doomer). (I didn't, however, sign up to a paid subscription for Umair Haque's new – and rather bland-looking – publication The Issue when he switched from Medium to Ghost a couple of months ago. For now?) Although I'm not too familiar with OK Doomer, a few standouts can be found below.

You’re Not a Fearmonger. You Have Sentinel Intelligence.

Some of us can hear the future.

The Sentinel-IntelligenceJessica Wildfire

The Collapse Will Not Be Televised

Like hunger, social collapse takes a long time.

The Sentinel-IntelligenceJessica Wildfire

There’s No Lesser Evil, or Even a Slower Collapse

There’s an ulterior motive in Gaza, and it’s disturbing.

The Sentinel-IntelligenceJessica Wildfire

If you look around OK Doomer you'll see that the publication is oriented around health, as, you might say, Doomberg is as well. But whereas OK Doomer is concerned with climate health, mental health, social health, and public health, it's fair enough to say that Doomberg is concerned with little else that the health of their and their audience's wallets. As Doomberg stated on its "Notes on X" post,

We humbly request that if you have benefited from our work thus far, please consider rewarding us in any of the following ways:

• If you are a free subscriber and have been pondering whether to join us behind the paywall, you can help us by upgrading to paid today. We are 100% subscriber supported, and your patronage would be much appreciated. (Upgrade here.)
• If you have a friend or family member that you feel would benefit from reading Doomberg, you can help us by gifting them a paid subscription. (Send a gift here.)
• If you feel uncomfortable purchasing a subscription for others but still want to share our work, you can use Substack's new referral program to help us grow our audience. It is free, and we have created a series of rewards for those who actively take advantage of it. (Get credit for referring by using the “Share” link in the header of this, or any, article.)
• If you enjoy our articles, please remember to hit the “Like” and “Restack” buttons. Such actions are free for you but mean the world to us.

Or to rephrase it all in a much less convoluted manner:

• If you've not been paying us, please give us money
• If you have so much money that you could give us money in somebody else's name, please give us even more money
• If you don't know anybody who wouldn't think that a subscription to Doomberg is a waste of time and money, here's some crumbs if you'd like to passively work at getting us more money
• If you're a complete sod that can't do any of the above, smash those buttons and give us hope that in one way or another you can get us some money

If that translation sounds a bit harsh and simplistic to you then Nate Hagens (who inadvertently set me off on all this) might be in agreement. As he stated in a Frankly episode two weeks after his interview with Doomberg,

It was on the heels of what I'd been noticing from recent Frankly and podcast episodes. The vitriol and tribalism and different sort of tenor in the comments on YouTube and in my emails. Someone said “I subscribed to your podcast because of XYZ guests and now I'm unsubscribing because of this clown”. I got massive positive feedback from a recent guest episode at the same time I got massive negative feedback.

So I think what I'm attempting here is really difficult and today I'm going to describe what it looks like – of course I'm making this up but it's tethered to reality and also tethered to science – to run the gauntlet of discourse about the future.

But on the contrary, what Hagens is attempting might not actually be as hard as he thinks, the key being to avoid interviewing grifters. Because yes, the "clown" Hagens was referring to was in all likelihood the individual who, for reasons that shall be revealed in part 2, conceals their identity behind the image of a green chicken and who, for a reason that shall soon be revealed, modifies their voice with a voice distorter. Otherwise, yes, I too was one of those people that chimed in with some feedback (prior to having learned all that I did about Doomberg), albeit on Twitter.

Shortly after sending that tweet I realised that what I meant to say was "A village yes, but not with the village idiot in charge", but it was too late so I just left it. That being said, even that would have been incorrect, as Doomberg is by no means an idiot, but is in fact an extremely sharp individual. Or rather, and as I mentioned above, an extremely sharp grifter.

But regardless of how sharp Doomberg is or isn't, and to tie it all together, the following tweet about Doomberg's presence on Substack may turn out to be the most prescient tweet of 2022.

With all that said and done, now would be a good time to close this post off so I can get back to completing part 2 and describing all that I've been insinuating about Doomberg. Because in case you didn't notice, I think I just heard somebody whistling "In the Hall of the Mountain King".