If it’s happening to Lorenz, it will be happening to everyone downhill from her, too. Certainly, there are plenty of people who will attest to that. Most of them have noticed an obvious problem with the business model: there are only so many paid subscriptions a reader will spring for. Eventually, Substack was going to hit a demand ceiling.

Back in 2017, Substack solved a particular problem for a particular type of journalist at a particular time. We were a few years into Black Lives Matter, and, of course, the first year of Trump’s first term. The Great Awokening was well underway, and over the next few years, culminating in the summer of 2020, the media industry would come to resemble a grumpy religious sect, with its theological dogma and mechanisms for punishing dissent. It became a suffocating place for anyone who wanted to think the least bit freely.

In Substack, journalists who refused to bend to the new rules had a refuge to escape to. That is the story of how Bari Weiss founded the biggest media outlet on the platform, The Free Press. Substack served that early generation of writers well: they became its poster children and its evangelists.

But while it solved a problem for journalists, it did not solve the problem of journalism: which is that its business model was shattered two decades ago and is yet to be fixed. In the 20th century, journalism was propped up by mass advertising, which, as Andrey Miroshnichenko has pointed out, was effectively a tax on corporations to sustain the jobs of journalists. Companies couldn’t find their customers without getting their brand names in front of them, and the only way to do that was by running advertisements in the newspapers that showed up on everyone’s doorstep each morning and on the TV shows that were piped daily and nightly into their living rooms.

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This was the marketing equivalent of trawling: it caught a lot of fish by casting a net wide enough to scoop up everything in its path. It was inefficient and expensive, and it produced enough revenue to sustain an entire profession of reporters, editors, producers, and news anchors. The peak of profitability for The New York Times was at the cusp of the emergence of the internet — 1999, when it reported net income of $447 million. Last year, conversely, that figure was $334 million.

But along came Facebook, and suddenly, instead of trawling, advertisers could fly fish, but on an industrial scale. Targeted advertising allowed them to individually pick their customers from the teeming mass of humanity on the internet, and for a sliver of what it cost to run a TV commercial or run a newspaper ad. Today, digital advertising costs from $3 to $10 for every 1,000 customer “impressions”, versus $22 to $1,300 per person reached via traditional media. Moreover, it’s far harder to find your most receptive consumers with a billboard or TV commercial than a social-media ad, and far, far harder to measure its impact in real time.

Mass advertising quickly became a relic of the 20th century, and the economic floor it was holding up for the journalism industry collapsed. By 2017, The New York Times‘s net income was just $4 million, and that wasn’t even its worst year (in 2011, it actually lost money). In the 12 years following 2008, newsroom employment dropped by more than a quarter. Laid-off reporters were as mundane a part of this new landscape as the 20-something software engineers making doctors’ salaries.

Substack created an alternative to this business model by shifting the journalism tax from advertisers directly onto consumers. Now, instead of indirectly subsidizing reporters’ careers by buying products from the companies that market them through print ads and TV spots, readers could pay them directly via the online marketplace of journalism that is Substack.

The problem with this model is obvious: it will never come close to producing revenue on the scale that mass advertising generated for media corporations. From the perspective of advertisers, of course, that’s a good thing: their profits aren’t being siphoned off by an industry they have nothing to do with. From the perspective of news consumers, though, it sucks. It means less journalism, and journalism of a much lower quality.

The upside, some might argue, is that journalists are now truly independent. When you’re not controlled by editors and producers who answer to corporate bosses who answer to shareholders, you can report candidly without fear of professional repercussions. There isn’t an upper floor of suits to stop you from running a story on the corruption of defense contractors because the toothpaste company that’s the network’s biggest primetime advertiser owns an overseas subsidiary that manufactures land mines. Or, to take a real example, a parent company that censors your reporting on the tobacco industry out of fear of a potential lawsuit that could disrupt a pending corporate merger.

Your only bosses are your readers, and what they expect of you is honesty and integrity. The incentive to do good journalism aligns with the incentive of making money. That’s the theory, at least.

But that theory both overstates the level of corporate control over the old model and understates the malign influences insinuated into the new one. Noam Chomsky might have you believe that New York Times editors and NBC News producers once quaked in fear of the punishment they would face from their industrially polluting advertisers if they reported too honestly about industrial pollution. As Chomsky wrote in his 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: “Television networks learn over time that such programs will not sell and would have to be carried at a financial sacrifice, and that, in addition, they may offend powerful advertisers”.

But the nice thing about mass advertising was that there was so much of it that individual advertisers rarely had that kind of clout.

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There may have been some vague sensibility among media professionals about not wanting to fall too far afield of the establishment, but that wasn’t rooted in anxiety over advertiser boycotts; it was rooted in publishers sharing the same alma maters as Congressmen and corporate executives and their kids going to the same private schools. In an exception that proves the rule, the 2017 Steven Spielberg movie The Post portrayed former Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham as a national hero for putting the public interest ahead of her personal relationship with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara when she approved publication of the Pentagon Papers.

If anything, the pressures that the new model exerts on journalists are more direct and specific. Journalists who work for major media outlets are salaried employees; journalists who sell Substack subscriptions are small-time entrepreneurs. At least in establishment media outlets, there are institutional divisions between the editorial side and the business side. When you’re selling your reporting directly to readers, by contrast, there is no firewall in your brain that separates the part that’s thinking about what you’re reporting and how you’re reporting it from the part that is thinking about how this story will affect your subscriber base and thus your bank account.

Altogether, this makes Substack ripe for audience capture. You have very good reasons not to report on stories that might upset your readers or to arrive at conclusions that might anger them. You have equally good reasons to serve them slop that confirms their priors. After years of watching your subscriber graph go up and down, and the Stripe payments to your bank account get bigger and smaller, eventually you shape your newsletter into a product. And since your newsletter is, effectively, you, you have made yourself into that product. You might not have to worry about some corporate suit telling you what you can or can’t say, but that’s only because you are that suit and you’re telling it to yourself. The call is coming from inside the house.

If Taylor Lorenz’s experience is indicative of a larger pattern, these perverse incentives are only going to get worse as people’s paid subscriber bases dry up. Substack’s executives would have you believe that the consumer market for email newsletters is only getting bigger. But it’s easy to imagine another possibility. As Scott Carney has written, Substack is growing its user base principally by attracting more people to Notes, its Twitter knock-off. The theory appears to be that people will come for the social media and stay for the paid newsletters.

But that doesn’t seem to be working out, particularly for Substacks that aren’t already on the leaderboards (why do they even have leaderboards?). People who like to scroll aren’t necessarily people who pay to read long-form essays. My own paid subscriber count has proceeded along the same downward path that both Lorenz’s and Carney’s have, even as my tallies of free subscriber and “followers” (whatever that is) have stacked up. If that’s happening for many others, we can expect that as paid subscribers become scarcer, the incentives to gain and retain them will become harder to resist. More and more Substack writers will conform to the demands of the market by flattering their readers, avoiding risky topics, arriving at prefabricated conclusions, and repeating formulas that have worked in the past. I’ve seen it happen over and over again.

In other words, Substack hasn’t fixed the broken media model: it hasn’t even attempted to. All it has done is giggify it. That has given some established reporters the freedom to do their own thing and made a handful of already famous and wealthy journalists even more famous and wealthy — good things, I guess. But it has also likely further degraded the already broken-down institutional structure of the journalism profession. That might bring joy to a few nihilists who simply despise the establishment media, but that doesn’t make it progress. It just makes it another step towards the death of the craft.

***

This essay was adapted from Leighton Woodhouse’s Social Studies Substack.

The only memorable line is a catchphrase: “a Britain truly built for all.” It stands out not just for being repeated, but also for begging two crucial questions. Obviously, it seems to say, we all agree on the answer to the question: what is “Britain”? And clearly we all agree who’s included in “all”, as in “a Britain truly built for all”? Except we don’t. Especially since Brexit, how we define Britain, and who should be included in it, is so intractable a dispute that it appears to have swallowed our entire ability to do politics. Nothing could be less settled than what Britain is, or who is included in “all”.

And the irony is that the digital platforms Starmer (or KeithGPT, or whatever) is embracing (he’s also recently joined TikTok) are a key reason we’re having these arguments. TikTok is Chinese; Substack is based in San Francisco; both are used all over the globe. And this de-materialized, post-geographic quality maps strangely onto our struggles over what a nation is, and who’s included.

The explanation Starmer gives for embracing Substack is as bland as the rest of his writing: “People have a right to know how decisions that affect them are taken and why. And I believe all politicians should explore innovative new ways to do that.” But at least in relatively recent history, a “nation” has implied both a defined geography and its occupation by a defined group. And the paradox of a national leader leaning so heavily into the internet is that this medium is so post-geographic in its effect as to make nation-states as such appear increasingly quaint: an impression the most radical tech elites are now embracing as the future of politics.

In the interminable online culture wars over how we define nations, what often gets overlooked is their historical, technological catalyst: the invention and spread of printing. European nation-states, as the historian Carlton Hayes showed, were never tight-knit tribes but instead “agglomerations of peoples with diverse languages and dialects”. These emerged out of a medieval plurality of sometimes tiny polities, across which an elite of scholars, merchants, and politicians communicated using the lingua franca inherited from ancient Rome: Latin.

Wherever printing centers took root, from 1450 onward, the dialect in that particular area would become gradually more widespread, fixed and culturally dominant. These print-powered dialects morphed over time into the “official” languages of much larger polities, while other dialects lost status or disappeared. The circulation of printed books and newspapers in these newly standardized vernacular languages in turn forged “nations” into self-conscious political units: the print historian Elizabeth Eisenstein shows how the idea of a “public” as such derives from “publishing”, offering a new, printed mirror within which these publics saw themselves reflected, for the first time, as “imagined communities”.

It wasn’t just print, of course. But print helped to fuse geography, language and power into modern nation-states, in which, as Hayes puts it, “a particular nationality […] constituted the core and furnished the governing class and the official language” along with other minority peoples, in a form “more akin to small empires than large tribes”. In time, many of these “small empires” became large ones — such as, perhaps most notably of all, Britain. Over the same period, too, Latin began to wither as a living lingua franca, replaced by now-competing “national” vernaculars.

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What does any of this have to do with Britain now? And what does it have to do with Substack? Well, it’s not a coincidence that elites around the world began dreaming bigger than nations or even empires, just as new broadcast media emerged to challenge print for the public’s attention. You don’t have to be Marshall McLuhan to wonder whether being able to beam TV images around the world might, in time, affect who we imagine our “communities” to be, and how widely we cast that net. Nor is it a coincidence that the TV era also saw Britain dislodged as “Top Nation” by our own imperial progeny, the USA.

Of course, as critics have noted, American hegemony came cloaked in the neutral utopianism of “rules-based international order”. This bait-and-switch was perhaps less obvious to the English than some other cultures, because the “official” language of this order was a variant of our own: the modern-day equivalent of medieval Latin, American English, or latterly “International Business English”.

This is the flat register in which the Starmerstack is written: “But, as I argued above, it’s also impossible to look at poverty and not see the visible impact of the cost-of-living crisis.” It’s hard even to choose an illustrative quote: it all feels equally lump-free, like the verbal equivalent of mechanically recovered meat. But the fact that he’s felt obliged to start a Starmerstack, instead of just going on TV, points to the still more disruptive recent triumph of the internet over broadcast: a shift that’s now shoving even Starmer out of the internationalist 20th-century dream, into a far more fractious and fragmented world.

Why? Well, print created the idea of a “public”, and forged language-communities into geographic and political ones. In other words: it massively affected political form. Broadcast allowed us to dream of uniting the world as one giant community. Another massive effect. It stands to reason the internet might change things again; but how? Perhaps the most optimistic exposition to date of how this might look comes from US tech investor Balaji Srinivasan, in his 2022 ebook The Network State. Here, Srinivasan set out a vision for a new kind of digital-age political entity, not defined by geography but shared vision and values, and beginning as internet-only entities. Once cohesive and well-established, he suggests, such entities could then realize themselves in the material world by crowdfunding real-world holdings, gaining political clout, and ultimately pursuing diplomatic recognition as a “network state”.

Examples of real-world projects with a “network state” flavor include Peter Thiel’s (as yet fruitless) “seasteading” vision, and also the Praxis group, which occasionally makes headlines by attempting to buy Greenland and such audacious stunts. Other proposals to create assorted forms of either pop-up or permanent startup city-state exist, in various states, such as the Próspera “startup zone” in Honduras.

What these have in common is that they recognize the radical new potential afforded by digital for transforming politics, and want to experiment — for example by forming polities that dispense with geography, or central banking, or (often) democracy. They share public ideas on platforms such as Substack, and hatch private plans in closed spaces such as Urbit. They tend to be, like the tech scene itself, both Anglophone and international (Substack’s founders are an American, an Indian-American, and a New Zealander) but, unlike the 20th-century globalist dream, highly exclusive. Like the 20th-century globalists, Srinivasan envisions opt-in, ethnically pluralist, secular polities. But while pluralist and secular, there’s nothing inclusive about “network states”. If you don’t like it, you can leave; by extension if the founders don’t like you, you can be expelled.

Srinivasan’s vision was first ignored by the mainstream. But more recently, especially since the Trump victory brought wealthy figures such as Srinivasan and Thiel closer to the White House, network states have inspired a slew of increasingly unnerved mainstream coverage. Such articles tend to fret about the openly anti-democratic worldview expressed by advocates such as Patri Friedman, who invests in “startup cities” and is frank about his firm funding companies “starting non-democratic cities”.

What if these post-democratic elite innovators really do end up setting the tone for the polities of the future? It doesn’t bode well for the little guy. To this we might reply that the dubiously democratic nature of even self-identified democracies, especially since Covid, somewhat blunts the moral force of this critique. A more substantive challenge is perhaps that in being digital-first, such polities are parasitic on goods provided by traditional nation-states. It’s all very well having Bitcoin, but as long as you’re dependent on an old-world nation-state for reliable roads, telecoms, waste management, power, sewerage, public order, and enforceable property laws backed by a (nation) state monopoly on violence, your claims to statehood are still acutely vulnerable. You’re also radically dependent on the viability of the system you claim to be trying to replace.

Against this, we might argue that these are transitional issues that can be resolved either (for tech-optimists) by more automation, or through gaining physical capabilities as network-states become more established. But to my eye, the hardest challenge to the tech-bro model for new countries is the oldest: where does your cohesion come from? Srinivasan grasps this in theory, emphasizing the need for unity in cultural, moral, and identity issues. But as expected from a tech-libertarian, The Network State stops short of advocating religious or ethnic homogeneity as a basis for such states.

This does not bode well. Anyone who has spent time in online communities knows how fissiparous they are. Meanwhile the 20th century is littered with attempts at secular utopias that turned into sex cults, or suicide cults, or just had huge rows and fell apart. But what if Srinivasan is just not seeing the wood for the trees? If we borrow the broad “network state” formula, but discard the “grey tribe” distaste for racial and religious identitarianism, we only need to glance about to see that germinal “network states” already exist — it’s just that the groups driving them aren’t Silicon Valley elites.

Americans, for example, were recently shocked by the revelation that organized Somali-heritage communities in Minnesota have been methodically defrauding the state government, funneling vast sums of money out of America toward co-ethnic communities overseas. And though their relation to state funding doubtless varies a great deal, I suspect comparable low-tech networked “nations” are now increasingly common across the West, as a byproduct of 20th-century utopianism.

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Could this represent at least one possible future template for post-national political solidarity? Seen dispassionately, a resource-extraction network of the kind documented in Minnesota appears highly cohesive and internally solidaristic. It leverages existing infrastructure. It’s spread over a distributed geographic area, and using digital tools to network. It’s focused on increasing real-world holdings. What actually distinguishes this from a “network state”, apart from the lack of interest in blockchain?

Those still attached to nation-states may well harrumph about deportations, or even (like Trump) actually do some. But none of that changes the internet’s power to convene post-geographic networked polities. Like other digital platforms, Substack’s popular readership communities are post-national; as long as such digital platforms exist, whether on Substack or elsewhere people will go on forging post-national, geographically distributed communities. In light of this, nation-state nostalgists may need to accept that the globalists are right to view such entities as obsolete.

But the internationalists may also need to accept that their “one world” model is obsolete as well. The decentralized, de-materialized, many-to-many environment enabled by the internet doesn’t deliver a united planet of peace and harmony. Rather, it delivers McLuhan’s real “global village”: a chaotic place of competing digital tribes, each hoarding their store of resources and competing to extract whatever they can for their own, from what’s left of the commons.

Whether wealthy, secular and high-tech, or tribal, religious and low-tech, these are the real “post-liberal” successor entities to nation-states. In their world Starmer’s “all” doesn’t exist; there is only the in-group. And whatever (or even whether) KeithGPT himself thinks, to the extent that network nations on this model become a template here, the nation-state “Britain” of his catchphrase will be nothing more than a carcass for them to loot.

Rather than resist the pressure toward full-spectrum progressivism over the past decade, mainstream imprints gave in. The gender gap favoring women widened to comical degrees, and sensitivity readers became the norm. Editor-author relationships are conducted over email, rather than through letters and lunches. Overpriced Master of Fine Arts programs gave birth to a veritable genre, the MFA novel, each offering distinguished mainly by sameness. Novels are detached from history and philosophy, stuck, like an algorithm scroll, in the meaningless present; and even then, even after sacrificing all kinds of complexity — syntactic, structural, moral, and emotional — only romance novels have consistent readerships; pandering to the present has not saved the literary novel.

There are no silver-bullet fixes to this literary polycrisis. Pessimism is justified until proved otherwise, until a side-effect-free antidote to phone addiction — or better yet, general stupidity — is widely available in drugstores. But short of a miracle, entrepreneurial and courageous authors may still write new books that break out of this literary wasteland, and discerning readers may still buy, read, and talk about those books.

To be sure, writing and reading novels outside of the corporate vetting machine, without pre-approval and packaging, does not guarantee quality; “wild” self-published or independent novels are not good by dint of being different. But difference is at least a precondition of a renaissance. If talented writers can’t get into the system, then they should stop performing tricks for it.

Ross Barkan’s new and much discussed novel, Glass Century, signals a shift. The author — a contributor to these pages and a New York magazine columnist — offers a moving, multigenerational social novel set primarily in the less glamorous parts of the five Boroughs. Glass Century, in terms of form and content, is a novel of the midcentury: it slowly builds a picture of life. Like many older novels, but few new ones, it remains open to digressions and to detail — and is less fundamentally concerned with pace and voice: more substance, less flash.

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It’s significant that Barkan has published Glass Century through a small imprint (Tough Poets) and has seemingly done much of the publicity for the book himself; rather than write a novel that momentarily fits a hot category or responds to a strain of contemporary discourse, Barkan wrote an ambitious novel first, and has used his own platform (primarily Substack) to attract and naturalize readers to the style; make readers come to the book, not the other way around. This is the way.

The author depicts a functional, lived-in New York City, where working people fall in love, raise families, struggle, and figure shit out. For Barkan — a Bay Ridge kid, immersed in city politics — Gotham is an organism. The organism, in turn, gives its citizens purpose, verve, and resilience.

The novel’s titular hero, Mona Glass, when we first meet her at age 24, is charmingly flawed; horny and tomboyish, unwilling to settle down; her youth is New York City’s chic senescence: the Seventies. Mona’s older lover, Saul Plotz, is already married and a father of two. To please her old-fashioned parents, they stage a legally meaningless marriage ceremony. Mona is passionate, independent, competitive. She came to like Saul because he “let her curse, never questioned it, even tossed in his own.” Mona finds “private liberation in curse words — fucking, shit, damn, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker.”

Mona, through the cocaine Eighties, is always in motion, playing tennis, running, biking, having sex, photographing (she becomes a successful photojournalist after she snaps a photo of a mysterious vigilante). The Daily News pays her a higher rate than the New York Post; her tennis game grows stronger with age; “winning” is part of the “small, beautiful glory” of Mona’s life. Mona Glass is vital and vitally rendered.

At age 40, and at the end of the Eighties, Mona, who has been sleeping with the incorrigible Saul the whole time, finds herself pregnant; and she decides to keep the baby. Barkan includes no discourse about motherhood or family; Mona’s career and choices aren’t pathologized or editorialized. They just are. Life is just what happens; she isn’t the paralyzed subject of contemporary fiction who agonizes over childrearing.

She commits to motherhood for the same reason she stages a marriage to Saul or takes photos or plays tennis: she’s good at reinventing herself; at tackling what is in front of her. The long, compromised, fitful, essentially lifelong relationship between Mona and Saul. and their flawed relationships with their children, are merely representative of people getting by, year after year, decade after decade, era after era.

Barkan has a gift for naive (as in, pre-internet) speech patterns and descriptions of behavior; he sympathetically reconstructs a part of the American past, and the reader follows. Glass Century is a new book that feels old; and this is healthy. Glass Century is a corrective lens for the eye that can only see the present. Barkan’s America is a place where men like Saul “[slurp].. black coffee and [puff] from a pack of Marlboros,” watching the Twin Towers burn and thinking that America is “an ineffable and mystical life force” — a humane, unpretentious America with a touch of sentimentality.

That willingness to allow for some sentimental humanism leak into the text is what sets Glass Century apart from so many New York novels written by authors under 35 — books (think Honor Levy’s My First Book; Peter Vack’s Silly Boy) that too often take a meta-modern stance with flat, self-absorbed protagonists desperate for erotic attention or furious they can’t get it. Many of these books feel like they were written by people who were quite literally born after 2020 — after the fall. There’s no outside, no historical ground to stand on. Just the internet, just memes. No future either — just a flat, stale now.

So called alt-lit novels — which now means something like: select former indie authors repacked by a Big Five imprint — too often deploy the same basic trope: a solipsistic protagonist who narrates her own phantasmagoric breakdown. Dissociation and internet addiction, in the 2020s, have become axiomatically literary. Take this representative passage from Tao Lin’s Leave Society: “After three days of consciously attributing hazy despair, static negativity, and loss of mind control to modern urban society instead of other people, personal failings, or existence itself, he felt stably in a good mood again.”

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And while maybe, the present does have a demoralizing, flattened texture, novels need something more. If novelists stop imagining, stop demonstrating curiosity about both the past and future, stop engaging in the deep, imaginative synthesis that takes us out and away from the pathologies of the present… then what are they up to? What’s the point? Book-ified memes or X posts aren’t good enough, aesthetically.

Novels need a metaphysical horizon. A Catholic novelist might gesture toward salvation. An existentialist urges us to live authentically. A Russian Orthodox writer like Dostoevsky wanted us to see the devil in modern ideas. Henry James showed us the formal qualities of life. Joyce gave us epiphanies. David Foster Wallace believed that Americans in the Eighties and Nineties might have turned off the TV, read, thought, and woken up.

Novels also need a past; they need genealogies, textures, roots — even if they’re set, roughly, now. This is why I suspect that, assuming the novel form will survive this decade, novels will not be written, largely, as they have been since at least the Nineties, by MFAs and publishing insiders, but by radical traditionalists and outsiders who can use tools like Substack (and whatever platforms on or offline emerge in the future) to assert counter-aesthetics.

John Pistelli’s Major Arcana, self-published and serialized on Substack before getting picked up by Belt Publishing is another salient example. Successful, lasting novels in the latter half of this decade will resemble, I suspect, Glass Century if not in literal form and content, then in the path they take to market: composed outside of institutions, presentist trends, fads — written for sheer pleasure, rather than Big Five exposure.

The larger point is that breaking from the tone and stylistics of the contemporary novel is to break from the metaphysics of contemporary life; to read and write differently is to summon and apply the mind’s resources in new ways. This is what is needed: to bundle the data of reality in ways that are different than the internet does, than social media does; the most exciting thing about novels conceived of, or promoted on Substack, for instance, is that they induce us to close the app.

The cream of American journalism was not much interested in slathering itself over the Maxwell story last summer. They were more invested in tone-policing each other’s language, or playing the game of labelling their colleagues racist following the murder of George Floyd.

Star byline American hacks are so much grander than their British cousins. They are celebrated, and become celebrities. In Britain the successful journalist is the one who has enough money to (finally) fix their boiler next month. Maybe, after nearly losing their mind several times, and surrendering all their hair to a stress-related-disorder, they scratch together the words for a political thriller that nobody reads. If they’re really, truly successful they move to America. In the land of the bald eagle, the British accent — even if it’s a Welsh one — makes them sound attractive, funny and clever.

American journalists want to be liked. They think of themselves, in the good guys busting the corrupt guys Watergate tradition, as ethical. British journalists would certainly like to be more ethical, but deep down I suspect that many of them would still hack a grieving mother’s phone if you gave them a promise from an editor and the assurances of a lawyer.

Anyway, all those battles over racism in the US press in 2020 did have one major consequence: a flock of big American journalists fled their perches at the biggest papers and magazines. Famous old classical liberal journalists like Andrew Sullivan exchanged berths in the mainstream media for new homes at the subscription newsletter service Substack. And the consequence of that move is to make US journalism resemble British journalism — albeit the British journalism of the 18^th century.

Substack was founded in 2017 by Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi, and Hamish McKenzie. Each is a parody of the Silicon Valley tech bro, a type that in my imagination eats cicada tacos for lunch and speculates on the impact of Bitcoin on developing economies after dinner. Ultramodern then. But Substack, an online platform that provides writers with the infrastructure to send newsletters to paying subscribers, isn’t modern at all. It’s a throwback. Best, Sethi and McKenzie’s use of new-ish technology is retrieving and reviving an old form of publishing: the 18^th century literary periodical.

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In the 18^th century there were no hard borders between philosophy, journalism, memoirs, confessions, sermons, travelogues, ephemera, satires, screeds, and squibs. London publishing was like one of those pictures of a murky pre-Cambrian swamp, swarming with colourful oddities and crudely formed clusters of life. There was little distinction between fiction and non-fiction; personal prejudice was indistinguishable from social critique. There was, thank God, not a data journalist in sight. Objectivity was less important than fantasy.

The most popular form of all in this period was the periodical literary essay, which survived well into the 19^th century. These short essays were driven by personalities. Like Substack’s top newsletters today, they were sold to the public on the reputational strength of superstar writers who were not above satirising each other.

There was Richard Steele’s Tatler (1709-11), a breezy gossip rag, and Joseph Addison’s Spectator (1711-12), which spied on politicians in coffee houses. Dr Johnson published The Rambler (1750-2) and The Idler (1758-60) as homes for his most meandering, self-conscious essays. The periodicals were about taste, war, history, manners, and fashion — the news in other words — but through a lens that was semi-fictional. The writers usually performed a character. So, Dr Johnson was not Dr Johnson, but “The Rambler” — a man with his own peculiar notions, his own unique, desultory angle on the world. The most successful periodicals, and this is the case with Substacks too, were defined by the character of the writer and the strength of their voice.

Whether any of it was true or not was beside the point. The 18^th century politician, diarist and letter writer Horace Walpole can be found moaning somewhere that journalism was full of “nothing but lies, every one of which fifty persons could contradict and disprove”.

As James Boswell, Johnson’s biographer and a periodical essayist himself with The Hypochondriak (1777-83) announced: “We may be in some degree whatever character we choose.” The periodical writers were offering more than information to their readers. They offered their public a fantasy persona to read about. If the Mail Online sidebar has taught us anything about human nature at all, it is that people enjoy feasting on the lives of others. The ups, the downs, the pratfalls, the implosions, the HR-bothering opinions. Objective news cannot compete with fleshy human drama, or splenetic POVs — the key insight shared by Substack, which is full of writers feuding with other writers, and the literary periodicals.

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Oxbridge is killing journalism

By Justin Webb

One critic of Substack has described America’s digital media ecosystem as a “feudal structure”. Here “highly charismatic knights” — like say, Matt Taibbi, who has an enormous Substack following — are the winners who take it all. An interesting idea, but it would be difficult to find a time when this wasn’t;’t true. Public taste in the 21^st century is as unpredictable as it was in the 18^th century. Then, as now, those who invested in writing and publishing looked for safe returns and backed pedigreed racers. At the top of the industry, whichever century you choose to look at, you will always find a blessed, golden circle of proven champs.

For every Dr Johnson selling out his Rambler and Matthew Yglesias with his tens of thousands of Substack subscribers, there will always be a dozen writers sinking into penury, disgrace and madness. The age of the literary periodical was the age of Grub Street too. This semi-mythical area of London was immiserated and impoverished, garrisoned by a cast of indigent poets, semi-literate dead beats, half-professional plagiarists, their tarts and the bailiffs who were out to hunt them down. William Hogarth could have spent his entire career drawing endless versions of his The Distressed Poet (1737).

Ambition was the evil star that burned over Grub Street. The vast surplus pool of writerly labour drove wages down (a painful phenomenon that anyone who makes a living by their words will recognise immediately). One writer summed it up with true journalistic melodrama in 1758: “there is no Difference between the Writer in his Garret, and the Slave in the Mines;… Both have their Tasks assigned to them alike: Both must drudge and starve; and neither can hope for Deliverance.”

Only the names have changed since then. Today’s starving journalists live in overpriced flats in London’s Hackney or Brooklyn’s Williamsburg. They dream of topping the Substack leaderboard; they’ll be lucky to crank out five listicles a day for Buzzfeed. Even at The New Yorker — the journalistic equivalent of Mount Olympus — just the other day the junior staff were threatening to go on strike. Outside Anna Wintour’s house they chanted, “Bosses wear Prada, workers get nada!” Wintour could sack them all right now and replace each and every one of them before breakfast tomorrow.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that the mental agony of journalism has always been something that journalism refers back to. (Here’s a Substack about that by Freddie de Boer, who is very much in the winner’s enclosure of the platform.) “We should not find it astonishing,” wrote Max Weber years ago, “that so many journalists have gone off the rails or have otherwise lost their value as human beings.”

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Given my time again, I wouldn't choose journalism

By Sarah Ditum

Journalists today — largely due to recency bias — imagine that they have it harder, and that their careers are that much tougher, due to the ruthless competition fostered by Substack, or other platforms like Twitter. They might feel like they need to talk about their mental health (fair enough), but they — I hope — have never been paid for their articles with loaves of bread, like their ancestors in Grub Street often were.

Johnson’s Rambler, just like the discussion around Substack across the American press, served as a meta-commentary on the struggles of journalism itself. The world is endlessly competitive writes Johnson, who rose from the depths of Grub Street to the top of his profession: “Every one wishes for the distinctions for which thousands are wishing at the same time.” There is only ever a scarce supply of fame, so success necessarily entails victory over others. Otherwise, all that remained for the failed writer was, as Johnson put it in a poem: “Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.”

Substack is taking American journalists — and inevitably, British ones — back to Johnson’s world. It is not very hard to imagine a scurrilous Rod Liddle newsletter, once he has finally nuked himself in the pages of The Sunday Times. Perhaps the most promising development for Substack on this side of the Atlantic is Joshi Herrmann’s Manchester Mill. Hermann is using Substack to create a thoughtful, ultra-local, story-driven paper that serves Manchester alone. Barely a year old, it’s already better than any local newspaper in Britain.

Still, if there’s any lesson in the similarities between Substack and the literary periodicals, it’s that trends run in cycles, not straight lines. Substack won’t last forever, even if it is generating a flurry of attacks on it from envious, non-Substack writers now. It will be lame eventually. That’s what happened to the periodicals.

In Barchester Towers (1857) Anthony Trollope pokes fun at a moth-eaten country squire who possesses a complete set of Dr Johnson’s periodicals. He yacks on about how The Idler is superior to anything produced before or since. In forty years there’ll be a hack talking about Substack like that, and another hack taking the piss out of them for it.