Your writing -- from Formula 1 reportage to McMansion Hell to Baffler articles about the old internet to Siegfried chapters on your neocities -- have delighted, inspired, encouraged, and provoked me for years. I think I speak for many people when I say: I feel better living in a world that has people who think and write like you do, despite all the shit. I know sympathy as a reaction to an essay like this can seem trite or completely in step with the enshittified social media cycle, but my life has been enriched by your writing. Thank you.
Thank you AC -- this means the world to me, really. (Especially because some of my more obscure projects are mentioned!) I think that the way things are makes it really difficult to remember that people *do* read and enjoy what I (and other writers) write, especially as we become more and more separated from our audiences at the same time as we become more and more intimate with them. It's another paradox! Anyway, all this to say, you're the best,
You're very welcome! It's a stupid and hellish state of affairs that writers get so much more exposure to readers' anger and critiques, rather than their appreciation. Wishing you endless good luck! (And also wishing that a well-funded and well-resourced media organisation with an adventurous yet rigorous editorial team and unwavering ethics offer you a stable union contract!)
I’m going to be earnest for a second because you were too in this piece:
Your writing has made my life, frankly, better. The way you write about cycling is the thing that made me love the sport, and I am truly grateful. Your writing has made me realise that sports, and the way we think and talk about them, can be so much deeper, more political, and more beautiful than I had thought.
You probably don’t give yourself enough credit when you say that writing is the only thing you can do but I will say that you are, as you hopefully have internalised, a hell of a writer and thinker. And while I completely agree with your overall diagnosis of the particular dead-end we’re in culturally and socially, I will say (perhaps with some biased hope as an academic) that people who take the time to think and read and write deeply are important to anything we can build in the aftermath of all of this burning down.
I don’t know how to end this and it does feel a tiny bit overfamiliar but I guess one of the things that’s wrong with our current discourse is the lack of earnestness, lack of vulnerability and lack of real human connection — even if those things are there it sure is gauche to acknowledge them, a very 2010s way of talking online if you will. I guess what I’m trying to say is: solidarity, and also, thank you.
You really articulated something I've felt in my chest for a long time but could never find the words for. That this is crazy, that fear is the rational response to our industrial conditions. I'm a young writer, and looking at the industry the last year or two it seems not even like there's no future, but like there's not even really a present. There's no coherent fabric, just the acid taste of slop.
I appreciate your insanity, Kate. I feel perpetually late to every “new, “revolutionary,” or “autonomous” writing or creative platform. There’s such immediate saturation, testing the waters and figuring out the best use of the platform automatically delays traction — and then two more bright, shiny options arise and mass migration and dilution begin again.
Admittedly, Substack’s publishing and monetization model was attractive to me for my personal writing — I was working on my second book of poetry and a novella. I didn’t equate it with my freelance journalist and advertising communications work. That said, I agree unequivocally with your position on journalism and legacy media and the digital implosion of the entire system.
However, your insight also echoes how I’ve felt about Substack in recent months from a literary perspective (and I know this is more anecdotal and not a thorough analysis).
Substack is so wide open content-wise as to be paralyzing. Choir meet choir meet choir meet choir…
I’ll give you $7 a month, hoping I’ll get $7 a month so I can break even. And I’ll give my talent away in hopes of that one moment when I’m somehow elevated enough to be noticed and come out ahead. It’s like a million individual MFA programs banging into each other at the AWP conference.
But this isn’t why I write poetry and prose. Well, at least it’s not my primary motivation — we all want our writing to be read and contribute to difference-making in the world.
I’ve come to believe that letters — the purposeful craft and importance of writing — will outlive social media. When the platforms of false hope, self-service, and divisiveness die (which they will), humanity will be left searching for meaning and understanding. They won’t be found in viral videos and micro-poetry. They’ll be found in stories, essays, poetry — books by writers brave and committed enough to put timeless, thoughtful, well-crafted work into the world despite gatekeeping and the shackles of algorithms.
That writing has to be there — be it journalism or literature. It has to exist. It existed long before publishers and “revolutionary” modes of disseminating accessible (and curated) information to the larger public. The writing we craft today needs to be the soil that survives. The soil humanity plants seeds in when we all return to tending to life with our bare hands.
It’s a long end-game. But good writing - meaningful writing - is forever.
I have first discovered your work through your contributions to cycling, and more specifically your forays on the cycling podcast. Since then, you have unlocked a number of different worlds for me, and your writings have been at the forefront of any attempt to avoid the brain rot and the flattening of thought that my daily work and a lot of social media try to impose on me. I am immensely grateful for your work, and have found this essay a beautiful - as always - encapsulation of feelings that I often struggle to give words to. Thank you so much for all you do
I was reading this while listening to my crank wave playlist and that definitely gave the whole experience a certain essence of dark maw-staring. You're always good at giving voice to what is beyond words for most people so thank you for that.
To the extent that we're peers -and I wouldn't give myself that honorific- I have to say it is near-impossible to write anything these days. I've barely strung together 1000 words since my book came out. Even writing this is comment is fueled by procrastination toward finishing my syllabus. I start putting ideas to the page and I immediately start to self-censor. I either start worrying about my health insurance or -somehow this is worse- feel as though I've argued the opposite of whatever I'm writing somewhere else at some other time. I also start to feel hopeless as I think about my other writing and realizing the publication it appeared in is either long-gone or has put up an impenetrable paywall that even I, THE AUTHOR, cannot get around. It really feels like the death of culture around here.
David your work is great and I loved your book so much. We are absolutely peers. I wish the better for both of us. If I find a way to destroy the cop in my head (and I think because we travel in similar lefty urbanist circles our bullies have the same faces) I’ll pass the information along to everyone. Keep doing what you do.
Your piece is very insightful, especially your observations on the Substack algorithm; so why did you choose such an off-putting title for it?
There seems to be a perceived positive correlation between Substack success and the degree to which one has a “spicy” (a.k.a. profane/gratuitous/sophmoric/juvenile) writing style; yeah, I remember being a high-schooler and feeling a bit of a fizz blurting out profanities … but I grew up.
"Perhaps the only precept taught me by Grandfather Wills that I have honoured all my adult life is that profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their eyes and ears to you.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
Understood. We all get frustrated from time to time.
But as Warren Buffett once said, "it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that you'll do things differently."
One of the biggest disadvantages to the old world of writing and publishing were *editors* to keep this from happening.
Kate, many of us are still reading, and, though that has no bearing on your sense of career choice gone wrong, many of us love your Patreon and your writing. You are a supremely skilled writer and, by dint, thinker. You are one of my favorite writers I've encountered online. I'm right there with you. I hope you can feel less discouraged in the future, because your talent is really uncommon.
Dang this is good! I have never read anything from you before but this ended up on my feed and I devoured it greedily. I’m in the TV biz, and make (or made) videos for social media and there’s a lot of analogs.
Thank you. Funny to phrase it this way, but this is a beautiful, resonant, important, and wrenching piece. It can't have been, or be, easy, to understate things a bit. Though, in a strange way, it sounds like you're very much on the right track and have found a really good and healthy relationship to "it all."
This is also the first of yours I've read (knowingly, at least) and quite easily the best I've read in a long while. I subscribed and paid, even as you have shown how clear it is (or can be) that it's pretty much impossible to act within and through any of these platforms' choice architectures and not share a meager but profound complicity in reinforcing the paradigm, as it were. Onward?
Your writing -- from Formula 1 reportage to McMansion Hell to Baffler articles about the old internet to Siegfried chapters on your neocities -- have delighted, inspired, encouraged, and provoked me for years. I think I speak for many people when I say: I feel better living in a world that has people who think and write like you do, despite all the shit. I know sympathy as a reaction to an essay like this can seem trite or completely in step with the enshittified social media cycle, but my life has been enriched by your writing. Thank you.
Thank you AC -- this means the world to me, really. (Especially because some of my more obscure projects are mentioned!) I think that the way things are makes it really difficult to remember that people *do* read and enjoy what I (and other writers) write, especially as we become more and more separated from our audiences at the same time as we become more and more intimate with them. It's another paradox! Anyway, all this to say, you're the best,
Kate
You're very welcome! It's a stupid and hellish state of affairs that writers get so much more exposure to readers' anger and critiques, rather than their appreciation. Wishing you endless good luck! (And also wishing that a well-funded and well-resourced media organisation with an adventurous yet rigorous editorial team and unwavering ethics offer you a stable union contract!)
I’m going to be earnest for a second because you were too in this piece:
Your writing has made my life, frankly, better. The way you write about cycling is the thing that made me love the sport, and I am truly grateful. Your writing has made me realise that sports, and the way we think and talk about them, can be so much deeper, more political, and more beautiful than I had thought.
You probably don’t give yourself enough credit when you say that writing is the only thing you can do but I will say that you are, as you hopefully have internalised, a hell of a writer and thinker. And while I completely agree with your overall diagnosis of the particular dead-end we’re in culturally and socially, I will say (perhaps with some biased hope as an academic) that people who take the time to think and read and write deeply are important to anything we can build in the aftermath of all of this burning down.
I don’t know how to end this and it does feel a tiny bit overfamiliar but I guess one of the things that’s wrong with our current discourse is the lack of earnestness, lack of vulnerability and lack of real human connection — even if those things are there it sure is gauche to acknowledge them, a very 2010s way of talking online if you will. I guess what I’m trying to say is: solidarity, and also, thank you.
You really articulated something I've felt in my chest for a long time but could never find the words for. That this is crazy, that fear is the rational response to our industrial conditions. I'm a young writer, and looking at the industry the last year or two it seems not even like there's no future, but like there's not even really a present. There's no coherent fabric, just the acid taste of slop.
Thank you so much for writing this.
glad to know that im not the only one gripped by The Fear
I appreciate your insanity, Kate. I feel perpetually late to every “new, “revolutionary,” or “autonomous” writing or creative platform. There’s such immediate saturation, testing the waters and figuring out the best use of the platform automatically delays traction — and then two more bright, shiny options arise and mass migration and dilution begin again.
Admittedly, Substack’s publishing and monetization model was attractive to me for my personal writing — I was working on my second book of poetry and a novella. I didn’t equate it with my freelance journalist and advertising communications work. That said, I agree unequivocally with your position on journalism and legacy media and the digital implosion of the entire system.
However, your insight also echoes how I’ve felt about Substack in recent months from a literary perspective (and I know this is more anecdotal and not a thorough analysis).
Substack is so wide open content-wise as to be paralyzing. Choir meet choir meet choir meet choir…
I’ll give you $7 a month, hoping I’ll get $7 a month so I can break even. And I’ll give my talent away in hopes of that one moment when I’m somehow elevated enough to be noticed and come out ahead. It’s like a million individual MFA programs banging into each other at the AWP conference.
But this isn’t why I write poetry and prose. Well, at least it’s not my primary motivation — we all want our writing to be read and contribute to difference-making in the world.
I’ve come to believe that letters — the purposeful craft and importance of writing — will outlive social media. When the platforms of false hope, self-service, and divisiveness die (which they will), humanity will be left searching for meaning and understanding. They won’t be found in viral videos and micro-poetry. They’ll be found in stories, essays, poetry — books by writers brave and committed enough to put timeless, thoughtful, well-crafted work into the world despite gatekeeping and the shackles of algorithms.
That writing has to be there — be it journalism or literature. It has to exist. It existed long before publishers and “revolutionary” modes of disseminating accessible (and curated) information to the larger public. The writing we craft today needs to be the soil that survives. The soil humanity plants seeds in when we all return to tending to life with our bare hands.
It’s a long end-game. But good writing - meaningful writing - is forever.
I have first discovered your work through your contributions to cycling, and more specifically your forays on the cycling podcast. Since then, you have unlocked a number of different worlds for me, and your writings have been at the forefront of any attempt to avoid the brain rot and the flattening of thought that my daily work and a lot of social media try to impose on me. I am immensely grateful for your work, and have found this essay a beautiful - as always - encapsulation of feelings that I often struggle to give words to. Thank you so much for all you do
well said
Thank you for your raw honesty.
I was reading this while listening to my crank wave playlist and that definitely gave the whole experience a certain essence of dark maw-staring. You're always good at giving voice to what is beyond words for most people so thank you for that.
To the extent that we're peers -and I wouldn't give myself that honorific- I have to say it is near-impossible to write anything these days. I've barely strung together 1000 words since my book came out. Even writing this is comment is fueled by procrastination toward finishing my syllabus. I start putting ideas to the page and I immediately start to self-censor. I either start worrying about my health insurance or -somehow this is worse- feel as though I've argued the opposite of whatever I'm writing somewhere else at some other time. I also start to feel hopeless as I think about my other writing and realizing the publication it appeared in is either long-gone or has put up an impenetrable paywall that even I, THE AUTHOR, cannot get around. It really feels like the death of culture around here.
David your work is great and I loved your book so much. We are absolutely peers. I wish the better for both of us. If I find a way to destroy the cop in my head (and I think because we travel in similar lefty urbanist circles our bullies have the same faces) I’ll pass the information along to everyone. Keep doing what you do.
The cop in my head looks like Zoomer Le Corbusier :(
For real tho that means a lot! And you keep doing you for as long as you can! You're one of the best voices of our generation!
Will do my best! Also zoomer le corbusier is such a powerful image
Your piece is very insightful, especially your observations on the Substack algorithm; so why did you choose such an off-putting title for it?
There seems to be a perceived positive correlation between Substack success and the degree to which one has a “spicy” (a.k.a. profane/gratuitous/sophmoric/juvenile) writing style; yeah, I remember being a high-schooler and feeling a bit of a fizz blurting out profanities … but I grew up.
"Perhaps the only precept taught me by Grandfather Wills that I have honoured all my adult life is that profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their eyes and ears to you.” ― Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus
the simple answer is I was very angry and wrote this in two hours
Understood. We all get frustrated from time to time.
But as Warren Buffett once said, "it takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that you'll do things differently."
One of the biggest disadvantages to the old world of writing and publishing were *editors* to keep this from happening.
Kate, many of us are still reading, and, though that has no bearing on your sense of career choice gone wrong, many of us love your Patreon and your writing. You are a supremely skilled writer and, by dint, thinker. You are one of my favorite writers I've encountered online. I'm right there with you. I hope you can feel less discouraged in the future, because your talent is really uncommon.
Thank you Steven, that means a lot truly. I’ll keep writing for sure, I just wish the vibes were better!
Dang this is good! I have never read anything from you before but this ended up on my feed and I devoured it greedily. I’m in the TV biz, and make (or made) videos for social media and there’s a lot of analogs.
We are in a race to the bottom and the floor is mostly lava. But I hope you keep writing these words down for as long as you can.
Thank you. Funny to phrase it this way, but this is a beautiful, resonant, important, and wrenching piece. It can't have been, or be, easy, to understate things a bit. Though, in a strange way, it sounds like you're very much on the right track and have found a really good and healthy relationship to "it all."
This is also the first of yours I've read (knowingly, at least) and quite easily the best I've read in a long while. I subscribed and paid, even as you have shown how clear it is (or can be) that it's pretty much impossible to act within and through any of these platforms' choice architectures and not share a meager but profound complicity in reinforcing the paradigm, as it were. Onward?
onward indeed (in spite of and in service to ourselves!) Thanks for the sub and for the kind words!
If you want real hopelessness try being a Canadian writer.
I quit writing years ago because I already couldn't take it and this is exactly why it often feels hopeless to try. Not much more to say!