My Substack Year-in-Review (plus some thoughts on Substack's Nazi moderation problem)

This is not how I wanted to spend my end-of-year post, Hamish and Chris!

Well, this is a bummer of a way to end the year.

After a couple weeks of stalling, Substack’s leadership team has made their intentions clear regarding Substack’s Nazi Problem. As Ken White put it (in a post that you absolutely must read), they’ve decided to treat it less as a Nazi problem than a Nazi opportunity.

I’m disappointed but unsurprised. Moderation costs money and isn’t any fun. Substack wants to be a revolutionary platform for the creator economy, without spending money on the not-fun stuff.

My hunch, fwiw, is that they are going to find this to be an unstable equilibrium in 2024. It calls to mind Cloudflare’s situation in 2017. Cloudflare then, like Substack now, took the laissez-faire stance that they were just a neutral tool, and shouldn’t be in the business of denying service to anybody. (Cloudflare was more consistent about it, though.) Then Charlottesville happened, and the white nationalist perpetrators started bragging that Cloudflare was secretly on their side. And then the CEO realized that you don’t get to be an important platform and also ignore how your tools are being used.

Sometime in the next year, white nationalists are going to start some serious shit. There’s going to be a body count. It’s going to be awful. And it’s going to turn out that they used their Substack to organize it. And that’s when Hamish and Chris will write a heartfelt post apologizing that they haven’t emphasized enforcement of the existing Terms of Service nearly enough, and declaring that they platform is going to ramp up their Trust and Safety team.

As for what this all means for my blog-with-an-email-distribution-list… Yeah, I dunno. Here’s where my head currently is:

-I have long assumed that, eventually, I would move off of Substack. Substack is currently the beneficiary of the big pile of VC cash that periodically gets thrown at future-of-media operations. I figured eventually the VC cash would run out, the platform would enshittify, and I would flee. Dan Hon wrote about this in his (non-Substack) newsletter a couple of months ago.

-The argument for not fleeing earlier is, thanks to the big pile of VC cash, Substack has built a perfectly nice product and allows me to free-ride for $0. This is currently a free Substack, and I wasn’t planning to consider adding a paid tier for at least the next six months anyway (more on that in a later section).

-There are several quality competitors out there — I’ve heard great things about both Buttondown and Ghost. Apparently I could move this entire operation over to one of them in less than an hour, archives and all. That’s tempting. But, according to this (genuinely nifty) calculator Buttondown published, it would cost me $79/month to run this through Buttondown. Ghost would cost $82/month. Those are very reasonable options for Substack authors with a paid readership (cheaper than Substack once your subscriber base hits the mid-triple digits, in fact). But it’s a lot more than zero.

-I don’t blame Buttondown, Ghost, etc for charging for their products. “The Future, Now and Then” doesn’t generate any revenue for Substack. It costs Substack more than $0 to host and support it. Competing platforms who aren’t blessed with piles of VC cash need to actually generate income.

-But… yeah. It’s a lot more than zero. It reminds me of a dustup on Bluesky that happened a few months ago. Spencer Ackerman (who is great!) vented that there are many authors on Substack who think they don’t need editors, and they are absolutely wrong. And my reaction was “I love editors. My writing is so so so much better with an editor. And, also, editors cost money. I’m doing this for free. <shrug emoji>.”

-Editors improve your writing. But so does practice. And that, in a sense, is what I've been doing here for the past year: practicing. There's something a tiny bit unfair about that approach (why should your inbox be cluttered with my practice sessions?) But it's only a tiny bit unfair, since you signed up for the experience, and it is little trouble to delete the boring ones or unsubscribe.

What that all adds up to is that this free Substack is structurally indistinguishable from a hobby. And I don’t want it to become an expensive hobby. I can justify spending a lot of time on this writing practice. But I want to resist spending much money on it.

(And/but I would also really rather my hobby not lump me in with a bunch of actual Nazis. Is that so much to ask?)

…So, I dunno. I definitely won’t be turning on subscriptions here anytime soon. I won’t be contributing to the company’s bottom line. And I’ve put it on my to-do list to look at other newsletter/blog hosting options. But I’m not prepared to announce an immediate change.

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That all being said, I also want to share some year-in-review reflections.

My plan for 2023 was to write at a cadence of about one post per week. I still had a backlog of essay drafts that I wanted to work through. I also wanted to work out a bunch of ideas for the book project, and do some public thinking about timely stuff like Elon’s Twitter meltdowns and generative AI.

This is my 53rd post of the year.

“The Future, Now and Then’s” readership has grown at a pretty steady pace of about 1,000 per quarter, and is now just 6,200.

Here are my five most-read essays from the past year:

(5) Pamela Paul, Cancel Culture Grifters, and the Republic of Letters (May)

Back when Twitter was still Twitter, I once wrote a pretty-viral thread about how Op-Ed columnists tend to act in defense of the “Republic of Letters,” actively working to defend the status hierarchy that they sit atop. Pamela Paul wrote an obnoxious column in May 2023 that gave me excuse to dust this argument off and develop it a bit further.

(4) On Generative AI and Satisficing (May)

I wrote a series of essays between December and May, all working through ideas about how we should make sense of Generative AI. This was the one that resonated the most.

(3) Why Can’t Our Tech Billionaires Learn Anything New? (October)

My response to Marc Andreessen’s “techno-optimist manifesto.” This essay feels like a preamble to the book project.

(2) Elon Musk and the Infinite Rebuy. (September)

I read Walter Isaacson’s Elon Musk biography. I was, uhhhh, not a fan. And it turns out there’s a big audience for secondhand hate-reading.

(1) How long does Twitter have left? (March)

This was the one where I predicted Twitter would declare bankruptcy after the big FTC and EU fines were announced, supplying Elon with a face-saving scapegoat. I figured it would take about six months. Both are still in process, so we’ll have to wait until 2024 to find out if the mechanics of the prediction were correct.

I also wrote essays this year reflecting on my time with the Sierra Student Coalition (“a eulogy for the SSC”), developing a minimalist theory of democracy (“Huxley’s electorate”), and sharing thoughts about how political communication professors ought to orient our research in times of democratic crisis (“On Political Communication as a Mission Science”).

And I wrote fourteen pieces that do indeed feel like pre-writes for the book: (1) That old WIRED ideology, (2) What I’m looking for in the WIRED back catalog, (3) The Reverse Scooby Doo theory of tech innovation, (4) on technological optimism and technological pragmatism, (5) Two failure modes of emerging technologies, (6) Web3’s fake version of web history, (7) On Jackpot technologies, or, What Apple’s Vision Pro is actually *for*, (8) The Curse of the Long Boom, (9) The Two Bets, (10) 90’s tech culture was a jumbled mess, (11) How 9/11 affected the digital future, (12) On WIRED magazine’s startup phase, (13) From the WIRED archives: the trajectory of any emerging technology bends toward money, and (14) Silicon Valley is the Church of Moore’s Law.

Looking at that list of fourteen pieces is an interesting reflective exercise for me. It is a lot of public writing. And it’s also only ~1/4 of my writing this year — meaning I spent around 75% of my writing time in 2023 not-working-on-the-book.

I did manage to clear through my backlog of draft essays in 2023. But I’ve added outlines for fifteen new pieces that I want to write. (Come on, Dave…)

For the past five years, I have been telling myself (and everyone else!) that I am working on a book manuscript — a booklength treatment of Why the Digital Future Never Arrives. There have been plenty of actually-quite-good excuses why I haven’t made a lot of headway on the project. I’ll be on sabbatical from GWU next semester — no teaching or service responsibilities, just writing. Between January and August, I am writing a draft of this book.

So that means two things for this blog-with-an-email-list:

(1) I’m either going to be posting a lot more or a lot less. Either way, expect it to be more book project-focused. I’ll still write about breaking tech news, and I imagine it’ll hard to resist the occasional politics post during an election year. But I need to put 75%+ of my writing energy into the book project. I might still use this space to try out ideas or share updates. But it’s time to focus.

(2) I won’t consider adding a paid tier until after the book is finished. A few of you have pledged support. That is fantastically cool of you and I deeply appreciate the support. After the book is drafted, I’m going to take some time to think about my writing goals. If this newsletter/blog, either hosted on Substack or elsewhere, figures heavily into that plan, then I might add a subscriber tier. But first I’ve got this proverbial mountain to climb…

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To all my readers, and particularly to the folks who have shared my work through their own newsletters, have contributed to the comments section, and have shared on social media: thank you.

I started writing this Substack to work out some ideas, and to rebuild my confidence as a writer. I didn’t have a lot of audience expectations. It has been a privilege and a pleasure. I’m frustrated by Substack's management team right now — potentially enough to switch hosting platforms. But I also deeply appreciate the fact that several thousand people have decided that “Dave yells about tech, politics, and the futures that never came to pass” is an email they have opted in to receiving.

2024 is going to be an eventful year. Here’s hoping we can all make it part of a future we deserve.