Really great. I try to keep my head on straight about Substack--they talk a lot about helping writers, but at the end of the day, it's like you say, incentives work too well. Substack's main incentive lies in attracting new people to the platform, getting more paid subscriptions. Does Notes really help writers? Eh, I don't know. Maybe. But it is certainly a way to get new people on the platform. Making the app more *fun*, that gets more people on the platform. It doesn't really do anything for writers. Getting big names on Substack, that gets more readers on the platform, but it doesn't help most writers, it doesn't do anything for the dream of "salons." I love the insight about the elk and I am always bummed when I get an update from Substack that makes it seem like it's participating in the arms race. I don't interact with Notes very much because 1) I'm not subscribed to very many publications (because I'm on board about the salon idea--I'm only subscribed to pubs I'm genuinely interested in), so it's pretty boring, but also because 2) I don't like it. I didn't like twitter either. I hated it actually. It sucks that it kind of feels like I'm "losing out" by not participating in this "arms race", or the direction that Substack is going?
This has quickly become one of my favorite pubs, I just added it to my recs :) Really looking forward to reading your novel, too-- I am going to start it soon.
well said; i like notes significantly more than i ever liked twitter, but worry it’s a gateway drug. thanks for reading & recommending! & hope you love portrait
Brilliant...Lot’s to think about...the update feels different. I hope it still encourages longer posts and creative writing, rather than the gamified Twitter version that requires pithy viral moments to be seen, but that doesn’t actually grow our “salons” with a meaningful audience
Thanks for honest post. I think we all want to run optimization algorithms that help us ascend whichever hierarchy we've set our sights on. The complexity here is which one we're invested in. I think the benefit of the complexity of our societies is that they afford many different status opportunities that wouldn't be available to our evolved social niche of small group (~150) hunter-gatherer.
Many would argue (Substack's Freddie deBoer) that our politics are deranged (in part) by the fact material hierarchies are no longer a pre-eminent concern. But maybe it is because for a time our media environment shrunk status opportunities (not sure if this is actually true...). Regardless, the disinterest in material outcomes among many elites definitely has a Nietzscheanly Last Man flavor, which Fukuyama predicted in his EoH book.
Relative social comparison is an embedded adaptive mechanism for navigating social hierarchies - the arms race that scaled human brain size and may have birth language. I think our triumphs and tragedies are of the same origin.
On Oppenheimer, it's funny that his peer Von Neumann very much thought his deescalation position was a pose to increase the status of his Manhattan project work. The Von Neumann quote: “sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it.”
Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of me saying that I don't think arms races are necessarily wasteful. The context and outcomes of the arms race matters.
thanks for the thoughtful response—i particularly like the oppie anecdote, which i don’t doubt—though personally benefitting from admitting his sin doesn’t mean he was wrong about it either.
material hierarchies are in competition with digital ones now resulting in “egoic bifurcation,” but i’d argue they’re directly intwined (digital success brings material rewards & the opposite).
frank’s point is the outcomes (specifically relative status re: material consumption) would be the same without the arms races.
I guess I'm quite a bit more skeptical of the link between material consumption/wealth and various forms of social prestige.
I think we have many people of PMC stripes burdened with debt (or degrees that outrun their earnings) envying the material ease of small time millionaires. And in contrast, those same small time millionaires (or even masters of the universe billionaires) are rubes and boors who can never access the approbation of the anointed in the PMC/successor class. Aren't such dynamics the reason Musk squandered billions on Twitter?
There's of course a relationship between prestige/attention and wealth but it appears more uncoupled to me (hence things like the recent data that the college wealth premium is not what it used to be). And this uncoupling partially describes (and maybe explains) some of our political polarization.
(I'm still to read couple of links there, so not quite done.)
I'll say it now, -you're one of the reasons I'm here, being and feeling "quite useless", -and I'm haunted by freaking usefulness concept, so.
You're somebody who's keeping the worlds and words unraveling in my brain, caleidoscopes shaken and laid out in new patterns-sometimes I vehemently agree, sometimes I don't-and then it's a discussion that I love to have, even if in my head only, sometimes I don't know what you're talking about, frankly, because I'm either dumb, or old, and a bit out of the discourse, for many reasons-so I go and try to find out.
I'm yet to read your novel too.
Sometimes I'm thinking something-and then there's your post, like some telepathy.
This one was a sort of telepathy, by the way, but that doesn't matter. No, it was not about Twitter and Instagram, which I never had by the way(had but wasn't participating, so forgot passwords).
That was a long-winded way to say-thank you, again.
"Scaling back the mansions, coming-of-age parties, cosmetic procedures etc. would inevitably mean scaling back their almost infinitely reproducible simulacra online that have so vexingly expanded the boundaries of internal mediation"
You can't escape the dynamics of the era', milieu etc one finds oneself in. Individual is one unit, compared to the hoi polloi, you either inside or outside; the exterior or the interior. The weight of numbers always prevails. Don't even consider to fight or effect change. You need huge costs of energy which is likely to be wasteful. I have attended business meetings and have rarely seen new ideas emerge, it is the same old rehash put forth - usually averaged down ideas to satisfy stock holders of what they perceive is an adequate return on antler investment.
There is a solution.
Time is the great leveler, fads, technologies come and go
and hopefully, you may be in the right one at right moment for an easier existence and growth.
After reading your article, I will not quit writing due to some theoretical economic framework. I like writing, not necessarily seeking to publish everything.
Perhaps what we are seeing is rebellion by writers who only get paltry 10% royalty, always seeking greener pasture to another platform better compensation as no one likes the idea of being ripped off..
Platforms everywhere, and you only have so much time apart from writing to explore them all.
Really great. I try to keep my head on straight about Substack--they talk a lot about helping writers, but at the end of the day, it's like you say, incentives work too well. Substack's main incentive lies in attracting new people to the platform, getting more paid subscriptions. Does Notes really help writers? Eh, I don't know. Maybe. But it is certainly a way to get new people on the platform. Making the app more *fun*, that gets more people on the platform. It doesn't really do anything for writers. Getting big names on Substack, that gets more readers on the platform, but it doesn't help most writers, it doesn't do anything for the dream of "salons." I love the insight about the elk and I am always bummed when I get an update from Substack that makes it seem like it's participating in the arms race. I don't interact with Notes very much because 1) I'm not subscribed to very many publications (because I'm on board about the salon idea--I'm only subscribed to pubs I'm genuinely interested in), so it's pretty boring, but also because 2) I don't like it. I didn't like twitter either. I hated it actually. It sucks that it kind of feels like I'm "losing out" by not participating in this "arms race", or the direction that Substack is going?
This has quickly become one of my favorite pubs, I just added it to my recs :) Really looking forward to reading your novel, too-- I am going to start it soon.
well said; i like notes significantly more than i ever liked twitter, but worry it’s a gateway drug. thanks for reading & recommending! & hope you love portrait
Brilliant...Lot’s to think about...the update feels different. I hope it still encourages longer posts and creative writing, rather than the gamified Twitter version that requires pithy viral moments to be seen, but that doesn’t actually grow our “salons” with a meaningful audience
me too
Thanks for honest post. I think we all want to run optimization algorithms that help us ascend whichever hierarchy we've set our sights on. The complexity here is which one we're invested in. I think the benefit of the complexity of our societies is that they afford many different status opportunities that wouldn't be available to our evolved social niche of small group (~150) hunter-gatherer.
Many would argue (Substack's Freddie deBoer) that our politics are deranged (in part) by the fact material hierarchies are no longer a pre-eminent concern. But maybe it is because for a time our media environment shrunk status opportunities (not sure if this is actually true...). Regardless, the disinterest in material outcomes among many elites definitely has a Nietzscheanly Last Man flavor, which Fukuyama predicted in his EoH book.
Relative social comparison is an embedded adaptive mechanism for navigating social hierarchies - the arms race that scaled human brain size and may have birth language. I think our triumphs and tragedies are of the same origin.
On Oppenheimer, it's funny that his peer Von Neumann very much thought his deescalation position was a pose to increase the status of his Manhattan project work. The Von Neumann quote: “sometimes someone confesses a sin in order to take credit for it.”
Anyway, this is all a long-winded way of me saying that I don't think arms races are necessarily wasteful. The context and outcomes of the arms race matters.
thanks for the thoughtful response—i particularly like the oppie anecdote, which i don’t doubt—though personally benefitting from admitting his sin doesn’t mean he was wrong about it either.
material hierarchies are in competition with digital ones now resulting in “egoic bifurcation,” but i’d argue they’re directly intwined (digital success brings material rewards & the opposite).
frank’s point is the outcomes (specifically relative status re: material consumption) would be the same without the arms races.
I guess I'm quite a bit more skeptical of the link between material consumption/wealth and various forms of social prestige.
I think we have many people of PMC stripes burdened with debt (or degrees that outrun their earnings) envying the material ease of small time millionaires. And in contrast, those same small time millionaires (or even masters of the universe billionaires) are rubes and boors who can never access the approbation of the anointed in the PMC/successor class. Aren't such dynamics the reason Musk squandered billions on Twitter?
There's of course a relationship between prestige/attention and wealth but it appears more uncoupled to me (hence things like the recent data that the college wealth premium is not what it used to be). And this uncoupling partially describes (and maybe explains) some of our political polarization.
i don’t disagree with any of this; big racks are contextual—and my new novel actually probes this phenomenon directly!
I'd be happy to read and review your upcoming novel.
What an incredible post.
Thank you! Unless of course you mean “too improbable to be believed.”
ha! but of course I'm using the informal definition; "Extremely good".
It was interesting to read this right after read Erik Hoel’s (qualified) optimistic take on why Substack, Reddit, et al might be structurally more resilient than the more mimetically-insane platforms implicitly centered in this post. https://open.substack.com/pub/erikhoel/p/walled-gardens-mean-online-writing?r=qowxp&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
indeed! really enjoyed Erik’s piece myself
Thought provoking and insightful - lots to chew on here...thanks for this one 😤
thanks for reading!
This was great.
thanks for reading!
so kind thank you!
Oh my.
(I'm still to read couple of links there, so not quite done.)
I'll say it now, -you're one of the reasons I'm here, being and feeling "quite useless", -and I'm haunted by freaking usefulness concept, so.
You're somebody who's keeping the worlds and words unraveling in my brain, caleidoscopes shaken and laid out in new patterns-sometimes I vehemently agree, sometimes I don't-and then it's a discussion that I love to have, even if in my head only, sometimes I don't know what you're talking about, frankly, because I'm either dumb, or old, and a bit out of the discourse, for many reasons-so I go and try to find out.
I'm yet to read your novel too.
Sometimes I'm thinking something-and then there's your post, like some telepathy.
This one was a sort of telepathy, by the way, but that doesn't matter. No, it was not about Twitter and Instagram, which I never had by the way(had but wasn't participating, so forgot passwords).
That was a long-winded way to say-thank you, again.
So, sharing, and pleasure's all mine.
Natasha, this was so thoughtful and well written, I devoured it! Thank you!
oh thank you! devouring is good...i aim to serve metaphysical caviar
"Scaling back the mansions, coming-of-age parties, cosmetic procedures etc. would inevitably mean scaling back their almost infinitely reproducible simulacra online that have so vexingly expanded the boundaries of internal mediation"
Seems like a <i>non sequitur</i> to me.
Like most things in life, we all earn to wait.
Thanks for posting, this a welcomed difference.
You can't escape the dynamics of the era', milieu etc one finds oneself in. Individual is one unit, compared to the hoi polloi, you either inside or outside; the exterior or the interior. The weight of numbers always prevails. Don't even consider to fight or effect change. You need huge costs of energy which is likely to be wasteful. I have attended business meetings and have rarely seen new ideas emerge, it is the same old rehash put forth - usually averaged down ideas to satisfy stock holders of what they perceive is an adequate return on antler investment.
There is a solution.
Time is the great leveler, fads, technologies come and go
and hopefully, you may be in the right one at right moment for an easier existence and growth.
After reading your article, I will not quit writing due to some theoretical economic framework. I like writing, not necessarily seeking to publish everything.
Perhaps what we are seeing is rebellion by writers who only get paltry 10% royalty, always seeking greener pasture to another platform better compensation as no one likes the idea of being ripped off..
Platforms everywhere, and you only have so much time apart from writing to explore them all.
Encore !
time is the great leveler—we all die eventually—but i am certainly in no hurry to get there!
lol thank you?
hahaha gonna put that on my résumé
i have never seen bob’s burgers but always appreciate an irreverent connection