Long-time readers know of my love for and commitment to the open web: sites with no intervening platform, no paywall, just sitting there on the World Wide Web in plain HTML which cats and dogs can read! (Allusion alert.) My buddy Austin Kleon — with his 300k Substack subscribers 😳 — teases me about this. This is me in blue:
He has a point, but here I am, still, out here on the range — and when I decided to start a big project about the films of Terrence Malick, as I just did, I put it on the open web too. Why?
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My economic model — post everything that I own on the open web and ask for donations at my Buy Me a Coffee page — suits my anarchist principles. Voluntary collaboration, give and give back, etc.
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As long as I still have a full-time professor’s salary — that is, for the next thirteen months — I can afford to have at least a few such principles.
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But when I lose that salary and have to downsize my life, I still plan to be here, because I don’t think I would gain much by moving to Substack, or anywhere else. I have a small audience and I am just not wired to do any of the things I would need to do to grow it — for instance, promote myself on Substack Notes, write clickbaity posts with clickbaity titles, etc. And that crap probably wouldn’t work anyway. Signing up to support me at BMAC may be slightly more difficult for most readers than signing up at Substack, but not much: I have no reason to think that if I went to Substack I would get an influx of new paid subscribers. I have my number, and though I’d love to get it to the Thousand True Fans stage, I’m not convinced Substack would help me do that. Besides:
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Substack is a platform and platforms enshittify, they just do. They’re designed to enshittify, and to be unresponsive to their users. Substack is already a worse environment for writing and publishing than it was three or four years ago — to me at least, its attempt to transform itself into a social network is nightmarish — and it will degrade further rather than improve. If I end up needing more money because an endless war in the Middle East has gas at eight bucks a gallon and my electric bill at a thousand bucks a month, I’d rather work as a greeter at Walmart than write for a platform. Over the long haul I really do believe that the open web is the safer and better option, at least for me.
So here I am, writing away, and hoping that in my declining years there will be at least a little spare change in my pockets. And that I won’t have to take the Walmart Option.
P.S. Austin’s new book is gonna be terrific.
