The machine in the garden.
Substack is encroaching on what was a once a respectably literate walled garden.
This letter is about Substack, and why “writer” has become such an easy job title to give oneself. I made it free because I think it’s important. If you enjoyed it, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to Feed Me.
I haven’t thought about my therapist or New York restaurant openings or shopping while on vacation. I have thought too much about the stock market and all the wasteful brand events on my Instagram feed happening back in New York. These parties look bad and make me seriously question marketing spend at consumer brands.
I’ve barely listened to music on this trip, besides a lot of Nitefreak and Peggy Gou in the Greek nightclubs filled with bubblegum vape smoke, teenagers, and Italian men hitting on said teenagers. Now I’m in my room on top of a hill in Folegandros listening to my favorite playlist. It’s good for writing, dinner parties, scoring your future film, and sex — few playlists can check all four boxes. I didn’t make it. Here you go:
I opened my Substack app the other day on the beach (my friends and I are clearly the Americans based on our pacing work calls and swims interjected by iPhone emails under umbrellas) and I actually had time to read some newsletters from the people I subscribe to. And then I read some newsletters from the people that they subscribe to. I realized that if you blacked out the names of many of the writers I come across on Substack today, I wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. So then this essay began.
In a 2020 interview, Chris Best (co-founder and CEO of Substack), told The Verge, “We want to help massively grow the size of the market for great writing, so much more of it can be created.”
In a 2021 interview, Hamish McKenzie (co-founder and Chief Writing Officer of Substack), told The Bit, “What we’re setting out to do is restore the value of online writing and to trigger a renaissance with lots more writing than any time in history.”
And man, it sure feels like there is “lots more writing than any time in history.” I’m noticing this platform has become a really good way for women to monetize their diary entries — lists, random thoughts, and (easy to write) roundups of “what I’ve been doing” do really well on this site. Substack is making everyone into writers the same way Instagram made everyone into photographers, but there’s one big difference: the entrepreneur thing wasn’t built into Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger’s original vision.*
Meanwhile, Substack’s mission statement is “Building a new economic engine for culture”? Which means the point of Substack — unlike Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and TikTok — is to get you to monetize your content, and/or get you to spend money on other people’s content. Creating content with the goal of making money off of it is different than creating content with the goal of getting likes, is different than creating content with the goal of being creative and connecting with other people. Seems to me, the obvious attraction of being able to monetize your taste—over putting out a probably-more-interesting letter about your actual life—is leading to a lot of very, very similar Substacks.
I texted a few friends whose ideas about writing on the internet I care about. One said:
“I think this this is an issue of content creation that we’re seeing on all these platforms — people see others making so much money off of their “unedited” selves and everyone is like “omg this is me too which means that I can do this too and I can show my ‘real, authentic life’ too” leaving the audiences inundated with unoriginal and unnecessary content carbon copies that are exceedingly shallow and elementary and the result is.. you either eat this shit up (which clearly so many people do) or you’re exhausted from seeing the sheer lack of quality and skill becoming the norm…it’s harsh but sometimes I truly think not everyone can do everything and everyone shouldn’t try… Or, more positively, everyone can do anything but should strive to do so at a quality that is additive.”
Another one in the same group chat said:
“Everyone falls to a mean so quickly. Every influencer starts with a niche and then suddenly everyone’s a travel, food and skincare influencer. People are just seeking wholesale lifestyle inspiration. I don’t know what it is about writing… it’s held on such a pedestal, when it’s just another medium for “expression” and monetizing your identity.”
With regard to putting “writing” on a pedestal, it is very real that former influencers are now adding “Writer” to their Instagram bios, now that they have a Substack. I guess they are? I remember in my job interview for New York Magazine in 2016, one of the men who interviewed me asked, “Do you think Kendall Jenner is really a model?” and I said, “Well, she models, right?” Social media is encroaching on what was a once a respectably literate walled garden — the machine is now in the garden**.
Back in December, my friend Louis Cheslaw wrote a story for Air Mail about young authors getting six-figure literary deals that are dead on arrival. “I’ve seen an increase in completely illegible submissions this fall,” one editor told Louis. “Agents are coming with what seem to me half-cooked projects just because the writer wrote for [shuttered downtown newspaper] The Drunken Canal one time.... Those books come out, and they flop.” I think this phenomenon is part of this idea that something can do really well in The Drunken Canal (and how are we measuring that… in Twitter virality?), or on Substack, but high performance in these niche online circles doesn’t translate to actual quality — internet writing doesn’t always match the demands of a novel or long form nonfiction. Social media followers and claustrophobic downtown readings with open bars don’t translate into book sales. Per one of my group chats:
Even skillful and “serious” essayists can’t resist the seduction of popular Substack tropes (list of content I’m consuming, list of things that make me happy, list of my favorite restaurants) — it’s easy and performs well. And even more often, an up-and-coming writer, who might have started their Substack with more serious ambitions, follows the path of least resistance and writes traffic-bait. In part because it’s what the readers ask for! Revealed preferences!
Some of the top posts on Substack right now (according to their explore page) are lists:
I emailed
a sleepy pitch on this essay the other morning morning. His response was unsurprisingly apt:“Monetized diary entries is totally right. I cringe when I hit a paywall on some random weekend update newsletter of a writer who I subscribed to because their work was interesting. Like you want me to pay for 5 links you read this week or your fav new novel?
established a real template for personal writing on Substack but Haley has always been very careful and intentional with her writing. A lot of paywalled newsletters seem like afterthoughts or not very intentionally structured. Maybe I'm biased as an Aging Millennial but I think editorial products require commitment and should be well-designed.I think Substack changed the culture on readers paying for writing, which is generally a very good thing. But that also leads to this urge of trying to monetize everything, even very casual stuff. What it reminds me of is trying to establish my career by tweeting a lot circa 2013-2018, when it seemed to matter. Imagine if that structure pushed everyone toward charging for their tweets. At some point I would have thought my tweets were worth paying for, even though they absolutely were not***. Substack just makes it really easy to start asking people for money.”
A few weeks ago I was doing some research on a project of mine that involves learning about people who post about themselves online a lot. I listened to a few episodes of
’s old podcast, Monocycle. Her unabashed sense of humor and normal language was refreshing, it sounded like a time machine took me back to Soho in 2017. You could’ve shown me a transcript with no name and I would’ve told you, Of course that’s Leandra Medine.Today, I can barely tell anyone apart. Many of the Substacks I follow use these big, figurative words that don’t really make sense in an attempt to go viral, which on this platform means getting subscribers and notes and comments. It’s like there’s this internet language that “works” for engagement (literal language, but also sense of style, and a range of trending topics to touch upon) but it all coagulates together and creates a whitewashed, boring internet. A friend pointed out that even these peoples’ bad days look the same — it’s never “I thought about killing my boss,” or “My group dinner the other night made me super anxious but I posted it on Instagram anyway,” it's always like, “wallowing, languishing, reading by the lake, journaling, feeling blue by the window.”
There are a lot of people trying to monetize noise. I know this because if you really saw my screen time, most of it would be spent on this platform — I publish 5x a week, I have a solid grasp of what’s going on.
A few hours after I started writing this letter, someone on my Substack newsfeed reposted an essay from
called Look At Me! No, Don't comparing contestants from the reality show Love Island to writing vulnerably on the internet — everyone wants their 15 minutes. Huizinga goes on to get curious about what happens when people publish diary-like entries on Substack:“I often feel the call to write about heavy life experiences for a number of reasons, ranging from seeking solidarity with others to wanting to work through my own feelings. Across my blog and my personal diary, I write to connect, to illuminate, and, selfishly, to salve personal wounds. Predictably, these reasons often blend and overlap. However, I have an ongoing fear of crossing a line. Of offering excessive personal access for the sake of it, conflating it with “good writing” when it’s really just a cumbersome confessional - a self-gratifying expulsion.”
Here’s something interesting. Look at how many times the subjects interviewed for
’s Embedded mention Tumblr:Sydney Gore: “I miss Tumblr all the time, everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. Fun fact: I wrote my college admissions essay about how blogging on Tumblr changed my life and it was so ~captivating~ that a dean from one of the universities that accepted me wrote back a letter of praise. (I didn’t end up going there, but appreciated the validation.)”
: “Obviously I got really popular on Tumblr in that wave. Those people that I quoted, a lot of those people are people that I knew… I had dozens of them because you could spin them up about anything, and almost all my blogs were submission-based. So I had one where it was, like, bagels, and another was sunsets. And then I had a bunch of blogs where I would reblog things that looked like things, like things that looked like sprinkles or things that looked like bricks.”
: “As a former avid Tumblr girl in my college days (2007-2011), my opinion about Tumblr is they really should allow you to reset your password if the email associated with your account ceased to exist because Comcast stopped hosting email. That wasn’t my fault!”
And yours, truly: “I think I was really skinny in high school because I just laid in bed all day and spent time on Tumblr.”
I think a certain set of millennial women think they miss Tumblr, but they really miss a specific moment of anonymity and creation on the internet.
The musician Halsey gave an interview a few days ago where they said they miss Tumblr because on Tumblr you could be, “Absolutely ridiculous. You could post memes, and then get really serious and post about Kafka… if you switch vibes too fast on another platform everyone is like Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Sounds like Halsey would really like my Substack Explore feed right now, where people are getting money for posting like they once did on Tumblr.
The ghost of Tumblr was wandering the internet for the past ten years, and has made itself at home on Substack.
During the mega-post-COVID venture deals, it was very popular to identify as a “brand consultant” or a Swiss Army Knife or a freelance creative director. Businesses had a ton of cash and were willing to spend it on part-time talent who charged for a variety of talents (creative direction, social media, production). It was common to see this job title in Instagram bios of people who you were always left wondering, “How do they make their money?”
Since the 2021 investment boom, many former “brand consultants” have found a more fruitful income (without the mental fatigue of crazy founders and disorganized marketing teams) through rebranding as writers on Substack. This happens through paid subscriptions, affiliate links, ads, or in most cases, a combination of all three.
This was the case with Feed Me. I started the newsletter while working at Meta, grew it while consulting on a few different tech and consumer brands, and it only began to take off when I decided to write it full-time. Back to my earlier point, if you write a newsletter (even if it is mostly affiliate links, or lists that could’ve been Tweets) you are a writer, if not to anyone else, at least to Substack.
Feed Me is a newsletter that is partially made up of rounding up news links from elsewhere on the internet. I know it’s a service that many of you appreciate paying for because you tell me — I conduct research internally and externally regularly. Since taking time off of my daily routine of writing Feed Me, I have thought differently about Substack. Taking a step out of the eye of the storm has been really, really good for preventing disaster.
I don’t want to send boring content, I don’t want any type of dropoff of subscribers, and I definitely don’t want to become trapped on a platform I don’t understand.
* In a 2019 interview with Stella Bugbee for New York Magazine, Kevin Systrom (co-founder of Instagram) said “At the beginning, when we were small, there were no influencers. I think once we crossed say, I don’t know, 100 million people, it became clear that you could maybe start to have an interesting business if you were just on Instagram.”
** “The machine is in the garden” is a reference to Leo Marx, a literary theorist who a friend introduced to me while I was writing this. It comes from a wonderfully developed thesis about the encroachment of tech into pastoral life in American literature. When I learned about this I thought about the Orcs in Lord of the Rings, but the example Marx uses is the steamboat that destroys the raft in Huckleberry Finn.
*** Yesterday, Substack announced that users can now write and publish via the Substack app. In ’s announcement post, he wrote, “That means everyone in the Substack ecosystem is now just a couple of clicks away from sharing a piece of their writing… it will be easy to start and run a media business from your phone. If you come up with an idea for an article in the shower, you can be making money from it by breakfast.” This will only exacerbate the trend of monetizing what otherwise could’ve been Tweets or… thoughts.
honestly, this essay really just feels like punching down to me. it's easy to critique writing as not up to your standards when you run a popular blog and are apart of the group that sets those standards. substack is a wide ranging platform with intentionally made space for a variety of pieces (articles, essays, poetry, blog entries, etc), and part of having such an open platform is that you are going to have to sift through a lot of content you don't enjoy to get to what resonates with you.
i also firmly believe it's far better for someone to write poorly instead of not writing at all. in this piece, you talked about thinking that not everyone needs to share their opinion and i agree to an extent, but posting on substack is not forcing people to read it. it gives: if you can't express your thoughts in a way that i like, you shouldn't express it at all.
i do understand some of the concerns you've raised and also think it's important to keep literary standards up to date and valued, but that argument should be aimed at the publishing industry that chooses what narratives and styles to churn out and fund as the writing "norm." substack is a free, public platform with space for everyone and there is more than enough room for different types of writing with a variety of styles, perspectives, motivations, and standard.
it's as easy as choosing to not read pieces you don't view as "good writing," but the choice to write this instead feels a bit icky. if i was on the fence about starting a substack and read this, i think it would probably discourage me from doing so. we are always better off with one more writer in the world and inviting more people to dip their toes into the pool will always breed more innovation, attention, and support of the writing industry
EDIT: i expanded on my thoughts about all of this in a new post if you're interested! maybe i'm "triggered," but i think healthy and civil discourse about tthe culture we're curating on substack is important. https://open.substack.com/pub/shrewdiaries/p/whos-even-a-writer-anyway?r=2ppzzg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Hi Emily. I want to start by telling you that I am generally a huge fan of all you do. Feed Me is the only Substack I open up every day, without fail. I've linked to you before and regularly share your content -- you somehow manage to curate exactly what I want to read each week. I am probably not your target audience (A soon to be 43 year old aging fashion blogger living in the south after 15 years in NY) and not someone looking for an argument but felt compelled to leave a comment as I wanted to tell you how this made me feel.
As someone who has run a fashion blog + instagram for 15 years, I couldn't help but feel a little bit irritated (and frankly hurt) reading this. Some of your comments, definitely Kyle's (whose book I adored). Maybe I'm just a little bit triggered and/or taking this all too personally but I've always been of the "there's room for everyone" sort of mindset. This takes me back to the days when journalists and traditional media would shit all over influencers: being at fashion week, taking brand deals, etc. (It is a bit funny though, as you flash forward 5-10 years later where we now have many journalists starting their own accounts, running sponsored content, doing the same thing. But you never saw influencers bemoan the journalists who turned their social media accounts into a business. We welcomed them. Again, there is room for everyone).
Substack for me, (an influencer or blogger or creator or whatever cringey term we want to call it), has been such a reprieve from the constant chaos of Instagram. It is a place where I can write, be more open and honest, not worry about constantly feeding the content beast etc. It reminds me a lot of the early days of blogging. And with Substack I don't worry about the algorithm showing our content. I know an email will be sent to my audience and they can decide whether or not they want to read it. I don't refer to myself a writer (really for the very fear of pieces like this, the way that journalists can be so condescending to those of us who don't come from a traditional media background) but I write. A lot. And I'd love to write a book someday. But really, what even makes a writer? You touched on that.
My audience pays for my silly little "lists" and "diary entries" lol because I've spent 15 years building a community -- hard work! They care about my life and my writing and they appreciate my POV. They want to know what book I'm reading, what films I love, what new brands I've discovered. And they keep coming back because I'm honest and forthright.
I think it's a little bit short-sighted to dismiss the influencers on here who are trying to build a platform and grow their community. Many influencers got where they are today because of their writing. And also: building a community, curation (curation is work!), responding to every.single.DM (this can take hours). I get the frustration seeing an influencer paywall their outfits (I personally would never do this) but does it really matter? The influencers who are joining Substack are bringing their followers with them. When I joined Substack last year, I moved my existing newsletter and brought with me 40,000 subscribers. I'm now up to 47,000 with 1,500 paid subs. Those followers are likely paying for other Substacks, maybe even yours and/or the other "serious, skillfull essayists" referenced.
Thank you for reading. Just wanted to offer up another perspective. Ironically, my post today was about wanting to be a better writer.