When I tell people that I'm a writer online, often they assume I'm on Substack. The platform has successfully branded itself as "a new economic engine for culture." And I did originally have plans to migrate and start a newsletter, but there was a rather large, existential problem with the platform.

A nazi problem.

In late 2023, journalist Jonathan Katz documented that over a dozen newsletters on Substack featured "overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad," in their branding. This sparked the "Substackers Against Nazis" protest letter, signed by nearly 250 writers demanding action. Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie's response was telling, while claiming they "don't like Nazis either," he argued that "censorship (including through demonetizing publications) makes the problem go away—in fact, it makes it worse."

McKenzie's claim is not supported by research. Research from Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, and Facebook has consistently shown that removing users posting hate speech does in fact reduce hate speech use When deplatformed, users do migrate to fringe platforms, but their broader audience is lost. Sunlight is not the best disinfectant.

The platform eventually caved and removed a handful of accounts in January 2024, but only after immense pressure, and notably, when prominent publications like Newton's Platformer left the platform entirely. What's particularly galling is Substack's selective moderation shows they ban sex worker newsletters while platforming actual Nazis. What exactly is this commitment to "free speech"?

Substack's subculture is fascinating and contradictory. Cultural newsletters on the platform "serve not only as tools for distribution but also as affective infrastructures, fostering trust, intimacy, and community between authors and readers." The platform has become what some describe as "the new, more connected era of blogging" combining newsletter delivery with a Twitter-like social layer through Substack Notes.

And yet, the same infrastructure enabling genuine creative community also allows extremist content to flourish, with white supremacists using Substack's recommendation system to promote other extremist newsletters. The platform's hands-off approach to moderation creates what they frame as "community-led standards," but what is simply passing the buck on content moderation while taking 10% of subscription revenue from everyone, including extremists.

And so I ask myself, how does this contradiction hold? How can a platform that prides itself on being the scholastic alternative to brainrotting shortform content also be, at best, wishy-washy on hate speech? The place where people claim they find and cultivate intellectual nourishment is plagued with neo-nazis?

The answer is obvious and simple, because Substack makes 10% off of everyone's success. The supposed art of longform essays and thinkpieces is commodified. This inherently compromises any ideal values or integrity.

I've already discussed Lewis Hyde's dichotomy of art-as-gift vs. art-as-commodity in a previous essay, "How a Taylor Swift Lyric Gave Me an Existential Crisis", but I'm circling back to the topic because I recently watched an excellent video on the topic by Camille E. Hill titled Substack and the performance of intelligence. This essay started out as a simple response to the video, but I realized there is a lot to say on the matter. Let's go over why this dichotomy is relevant to Substack, specifically.

Only the Gift is Sacred

To begin, I think one of the most clear examples of art-as-gift is in Indigenous cultures. You cannot perform a smudging ceremony with the four sacred medicines—tobacco, sage, cedar, and sweetgrass—that has been bought. It must be foraged or gifted, else it has no sacred properties. Indigenous smudging traditions, carry specific protocols around gathering and use of medicine. For instance, traditional teachings emphasize that when gathering these medicines, you should leave tobacco in the ground as an offering, "returning energy and prayer to our Mother, the Earth, and thanks to the Creator."

Elder Lynn Lush shared that "[i]f it is impossible for whatever reason to gather or be gifted medicine, one may ask to exchange gifts with someone who has a supply." The ideal, as described by Bear Heart at Kripalu, is to pick your own, "always making an offering of tobacco. Never pick all the sage in one area; leave some so it looks as though you were never there. And never pull it out by the roots."

In the tradish way, Indigenous youth were "taken down to the sage fields and introduced to the sage plants ceremonially, asking permission of the spirits of the plants to be able to pick it."

The medicine comes through relationship and reciprocity, not transaction. The commercialization of smudging is antithetical to this. Companies like Anthropologie, Sephora, and various crystal shops sell "smudging kits" despite traditional prohibitions. Native Ceremonial People have reported visiting harvesting sites only to find them bare, "their personal supply of sage taken from the tribe forever by new age, hippie, and other commercial poachers who have destroyed the sites by ripping the plants up by their roots."

I bring this up because I firmly believe writing, too, is medicine. There is healing power within our ability to storytell. In the medical arts, this is known as narrative medicine. To treat our writing as sacred art, to understand the inherent transcendent nature, is the antidote.

The Mystic

When we peer into the sacred properties of writing and art, there arises the mystic-gnostic idea of the artist being a vessel, I've been chewing on that for awhile as well. But can this be elitist gatekeeping? Surely only a "select few" would have this capacity of being a vessel, and thus anyone else who is not as skilled or talented or has the privilege of time to work on their craft looks novice, or commodity when they are from that same sincere intention.

Kyle Fite writes that "[t]he Gnostic artist is also a magician for he materializes thought forms in all that he does. These materializations are not always conscious, hence he is also a type of medium." The artist is a conduit for forces beyond themselves, but there is risk suggesting only certain people can access these "higher mind fields."

Jean Erdman Campbell, married to Joseph Campbell, offered a crucial distinction.

"The way of the mystic and the way of the artist are very much alike, except that the mystic doesn't have a craft."

Both journey between the known and unknown, but the artist must also master the transmutation of these experiences into material form. Sculptor Sybil Archibald describes creating "without expectation of the outcome, to surrender product for process. I entered into the Void and mingled with the Divine creative energies there... As a vessel, I felt the creative energies within me merge into matter."

The mystical framework valorizes those with the resources of time, training, institutional access. In early 20th century art movements, artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint explicitly incorporated mystical and spiritual practices into their work, but they also had the privilege to do so. The vessel metaphor becomes problematic when it's used to separate "true art" from everything else, for the separation tracks along lines of class, education, and access to cultural capital.

Reification: Verb to Noun

Similar to Hyde's idea of art becoming commodity, there's also the concept of reification. My watered-down definition is that reification describes the process where the act/verb becomes an object/noun. For example, punk used to be the act of being anti-establishment, DIY ethics, and aggressive rejection of the mainstream. It used to be something you do. Nowadays, punk is something you can buy at Hot Topic and wear, it is an aesthetic and signals you are "in" a group. This process of grassroot action being commodified is inescapable in capitalism. Just look at Hunger Games or Squid Game, both were explicit rejections of commodity and both have become commodity themselves.

Reification is a concept first developed by Karl Marx and later expanded by György Lukács. The term comes from the Latin reificare, meaning "to make into a thing." Marxist theorist Gajo Petrović much better defined it as "the act (or result of the act) of transforming human properties, relations and actions into properties, relations and actions of man-produced things which have become independent (and which are imagined as originally independent) of man and govern his life."

In Marx's analysis of commodity fetishism, he describes how "the social character of men's labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour." Lukács extended this, arguing that under capitalism, "the structure of reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of man." What was once dynamic human activity—punk as doing, gift as giving—becomes a static noun, a thing you can purchase and possess.

This transformation is what Marx called "the personification of things and the reification of people"—things take on social power while people become thing-like. Hunger Games critiques the spectacle of commodified violence, then becomes itself a spectacle, a franchise, a theme park. The act of critique is reified into the object of merchandise. The ouroboros of late capitalism.

Commodities are far easier to make than art. Art is anti-convenience and anti-expediency, where most find themselves aligned. People don't realize that by always doing the easiest, less-exhausting action they are actually causing so much more work for themselves in the long run. Algorithms, too, favour the easy and shallow (rage is the emotion with the highest retention rate).

What is the Solution?

Perhaps I write about nothing more than trying to find a solution to the above existential problems. I wrestle and reckon with the insurmountable obstacles we face trying to cultivate a world where people chase knowledge and ideals over currency and clout. In a world where our liberty and democracy are becoming increasingly unstable, in a world where nobody has the time nor energy to do much else than to survive. We must protect and nourish our creativity, to maintain an imagination capable of seeing a better world forward and then acting to make it a reality.

We must take ourselves seriously and treat our writing as ceremony, despite everything. I believe we can use the Internet for good. I have become active in the IndieWeb.org movement exactly because of this. Substack has these problems because all of Big Internet has these problems.

When people have their own sites and use non-algorithmic ways to connect (blogrolls, webrings, human-made directories, etc.) then there is much more opportunity for art-as-gift. I've written a starter guide for non-technical people wanting to dip their toes into this brave new world. My little website brennan.day is one of many examples of this. The age of independent blogs is far from over. There's so much left to write.