I’m fighting myself over yet another social media platform. I tried Substack for a short time a couple years ago as a newsletter provider but quit soon after noticing how many celebrities and creeps they were paying to write for them. But now there’s a lot of writing on there via their Notes feature—like Twitter but with no word limit—that has sucked me in. I’ve posted and deleted several messages. I don’t think this will replace my newsletter. I don’t write it as a way to interact on a daily basis with others. Sometimes people write responses, but they are not posted publicly, whereas this new Substack thing is all about in-the-moment reaction, about community and cross-pollination.
I don’t know if I want to be part of that. I also worry that to truly engage with this new virtual scene would end up as a hollow time-suck, as so much online activity is. A distraction bloated with empty calories. I have a few things I need to get done and the feeling the time to do them is far from infinite. Do I really need to be reading/thinking about/responding to thousands of words on subjects I’m only marginally interested in, from points of view I mostly don’t agree with?
The thing about making art the way I do it, no matter the medium, is that it’s a solitary thing. I don’t need anyone’s approval or input by now. I just do it. Publish, print, hang on a wall, upload to some cloud, move on to the next one.
What goes on on Substack—as it once did on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest—is like-minded aspiring people crossing paths to push their work forward under the guise of casual public friendship. I’ve never been comfortable—even when I was knee-deep in it on Twitter—with this blurred line between commerce and community. As these networks gain traction money and power always win. Then there are a million nostalgic epitaphs written about how great it was when it was beginning.
It’s the honeymoon period for this new thing. I don’t know whether to bum a ride on the car with the cans tied to the back sending sparks or just wait on the side of the road and watch it run off into the ditch.
Had a long talk with Ben Tanzer.
Reviewed Trap Door’s amazing production of Brecht’s “Galileo”.
