#185 - This Is Not A Newsletter
or: calling things what they are
Imprecise language is one of those things I don't really uh, care for.
The flattening of communication feels like the biggest reddest arrow pointing towards totalitarianism and I'm not just saying that because I can't stop reading/thinking about/connecting everything to Orwell.
The erosion of meaning, of specificity, of accurate description creates chaos.
(It happens most-often for the sake of jokes and I feel like the biggest Comedy Cop in the world when I point it out because while yes, acab, we also must resist turning everything into a joke to sap meaning out of the moment every single time we approach a Big Emotion or experience Life Changing Events. And since the latter is happening at a higher frequency, that informs the escalation in recurrences of the former.)
This is not a newsletter. This is a blog that I send out via email!
I may have referred to it as a newsletter in the past, but that was me not being specific/figuring out the form this thing would take. Going forward, not calling it a newsletter.
Newsletters contain news.
This blog is a collection thoughts I had about random topics that vary in cultural and historic significance. Often oscillating wildly between either end of the "i think this is the most important thing happening in the world right now" and "btw I got a new couch" spectrum. I have never bothered to define it because I'm not trying to elevator pitch it and parlay it into a Brand Identity I'm just like, writing my thoughts down in public.
I moved off of Substack last year. (Most tech companies are run by bad people but I prefer when they have the decency to at least attempt to hide their depravity.)
Substack is a business model that skims off the top of the creators it "platforms". It's free because it's subsidized by << PBS voice >> Readers Like You.
I now pay to host this blog on a platform that would also like me to attempt to monetize but since they're getting my money already they're wayyyy less pushy about it and show me far fewer metrics which is great for my number-obsessed brain.
Substack exclusively refers to what it hosts as Newsletters.
Newsletters feel important. They sound important. And they really can be important!
Sarah Kendzior
But by lumping everything on a platform into 'newsletter', it degrades the meaning.
Because a lotta these indie self-branded emails simply aren't news. But the naming convention stuck and now there's a lot of people paying $5 a month for life advice from 23 year olds.
Blanket terms are bad! Calling all media "content" is reductive! To both the media itself and the people who made it!
(They get the fun blanket term "creators" which is equally vague while also feeling kinda godlike.)
The reason the subscription model for artists exists is because tech companies can skim off the top of it. And spending money online in a passive way doesn't feel real, so if they can get you to sign up it's unlikely you'll ever leave.
(Though that may be far more likely to change soon! Shout out to the FTCs Click-To-Cancel law, everyone say thank you Lina Khan!!)
Bureau of Competition
Patreon came about after the booming success of Kickstarter because artists realized there was crowd-funding available but were then stuck in promoting projects on an individual basis and that's not how most art has ever been made throughout history.
That's been due to patrons!
And so, a monthly "I like you here's $3 to keep doing what you're doing cuz I dig it and you" subscription service was born.
People can spend their money however they want and I think it's genuinely great that we have carved tiny ways to subvert capitalism by venmoing the same $20 around the working class but I also think it's right to investigate the people who are running the platforms and take chunks of the money in order to "fund the venture" and anytime there's a raise in the fee they should have to publish the CEO's salary/bonuses from the past 24 months.
Substack is happy to let anyone publish on their site, because they're happy to take 10% commission+stripe fee+subscriber fee from anyone.
The more money you make, the more money they make, business logic ipso facto there's no such thing as content moderation in a maximum profit model.
Sam Biddle
(I wish tech had developed with any sense of morality or stuck to a single ethical standard but hey what would humanities majors add to the company amiright?) (Ethical technology feels somewhat oxymoronic.)
Ken Klippenstein
They push the phrase Newsletters because it hits the Urgent and Important quadrant of the lexicon matrix. And some of them are written by really smart reporters who were censored out of the traditional industry and really do matter in terms of independent journalism!
That's not true for most, but because it exists, so does the reputation for others to glom onto.
It's illogical to scoff at the idea of monetization in a capitalistic society. It's not irrational, but it is illogical. So when you tell people you're writing something, a lot of people's first question is how you plan to make money from it. As if that's the only outcome anyone would be planning around.
News used to have meaning.
Now I get push notifications about what vegetables Alec Baldwin's wife pretended to mispronounce this week.
Not news!
Journalism used to have standards. Actual rules that separated it as a genre. Schools dedicated to beating the prose out of people in order to effectively capture why a story was newsworthy. Setting with limited description, objective lenses in an attempt to circumvent bias, accurate fact checked articles that were read by someone who understood syntax above all else.
Paying to read unedited work by amateurs is not a historical habit. But I think it's become what a lot of people read the most.
(Certainly in terms of volume.)
(To the people who that joke was for: I'm so sorry about all the comma splices.)
The precision isn't inherent. Editors are such an important part of the process. Few newsletters employ them.
Unedited writing leads to less vigilant readers. Floating past the fluff becomes habitual.
I read 1984 out loud to a friend last year and it made me a more honest reader. I had gotten in the habit of skimming. Which is so embarrassing to realize because it had become subconscious.
(What do you mean I'm not awake and aware inside my own head all the time???)
My attention span is shot unless I continue to actively try and reverse it and I've been aware that I should be developing different habits since I was like 16. Time kept going, the boxes on the screen got more distracting, and now sometimes I go to movies just to make sure I won't look at my phone for two hours because I am a Rule Follower above all else!!
(The movie thing is working though. As is spending more time in silence. Also like trying just a little bit and caring about how I spend my days because that will cumulatively amount to how I spend my life and it's all a distraction and I'm not above being sucked into the discourse just because I say that I'm there in order to develop my own opinions on how it's happening. Like okay, maybe let's qualify that research or get outta there, me! Not helpful to my life in anyway just puts a bunch of weird stories in my brain that I then have to spend energy "getting over" and "moving on from" because despite how little they matter I still have to sort through the motivations in my brain and nothing could be more of a waste of time.)
New York City does not have a newspaper that's dedicated to local news anymore. The Post is becoming the voice of the city because they're good at writing inflammatory front pages (a skill they've been honing since Murdoch purchased them) which means I'm now considering a daily subscription to the New York Daily News which is technically a tabloid but counts a local paper that's not owned by one of the worst men in the world!!! But in that vacuum of local news because the New York Times is useless, there is no replacement that satiates wholly so the solution is to collect single-issue journalists one by one in a chronological twitter feed except oh no now THAT platform is owned by one of the worst men in the world and he's making it an actively hostile place to use!!! UH OH UH OH there's sand and shards of hourglass everywhere ahhhh I'm bleeding!
Cindy Adams is an evil presence in the world but that does actually make her incredibly captivating on screen
Mediums allow for all different levels of expression to exist, so it's not that all newsletters are bad it's that the model they operate within is inherently predatory to both user and consumer.
In losing analyses skills we are losing specific tastes. When all criticism is silenced by stans who repeat the same banalities until everyone loses interest in engaging thoughtfully with art being produced on massive influential scales, well. Here we are.
It's amateur hour and I'm over it.
This isn't a newsletter. Most people aren't writing newsletters they're just calling them that because it feels better to monetize things that feel necessary because everyone is apologizing for making art without intention beyond monetization because art can't exist in a world with no right to life guarantees and we're all being squeezed for every penny from all sides and some people morph under that pressure in ways that emphasize individualistic survival over communal progress even though without community we cease to exist because one person cannot sustain life by themselves humans need each other but capitalism makes us pretend we just need money from each other but we literally cannot do it alone and now a bunch of people think trying isn't even worth it because monetizing the worst thoughts anyone has ever had is profitable because it's bait because we're all desperate to say how we feel about things all the time!
Invest attention where it matters. Create criticism before imbibing it.
Support local journalism – especially newsrooms that aren't owned by Gannet or Sinclair!
Specificity is key.
Paying attention is important.
Writing down your personal thoughts and reactions can be the difference between falling for future propaganda and having an accurate depiction of what happened and the progression of fascism. I hope nothing I'm saying dissuades anyone from writing I just hope it makes us more discerning about what we're reading and the sources of it and why news is being framed that way by the journalists and–more importantly–publishers!
Last year was my "please read the communist manifesto" year (still short! still rips!!) and this year is for "please record your personal thoughts and feelings somewhere for future reference because keeping track of reality is bound to get harder to do even in private" because, well, I mentioned I read 1984 last year right?
I read Animal Farm on the first day of the year this year and uhhhh it's also short and it also rips!!!! Orwell rules and while he hates all women (doesn't seem to care much for men either tbh, Winston is the definition of Some Guy) he is very funny and I just want to make sure everyone knows that he's all about the spoonfuls of sugar it's just that his medicine is sooooo bitter the sugar kind of acts more as a tissue for the tears that come instead of masking the taste.
Read! Write! Be specific!
Okay that's it g'byeee thanks for reading my blog that I send to your inbox!