Three Years on Substack, or the Fall from Eden
Freedom of reach - hanging garden - sunk cost
Freedom of reach
I started Subtle Sparks (previously Thinking Ahead) on March 14th, 2022.
The why is a paradox, an overthought whim, a quixotic quest. With the collapse of Medium into an increasingly clickbait-driven content mill, I wanted a place to write without constraints. Substack seemed to fit the bill.
Like the serpent in the garden’s tree, the devil hides in the ‘seemed’.
A while ago, there was a kerfuffle about Substack’s Nazi problem. Ooh, controversy. Hence, engagement. Everybody had a take on it and Substack got plenty of mentions in the same traditional media it wants to challenge. Social media engines spun up, vitriol flew around, and… our twenty-second attention spans leaped to the next topic.
Earlier this year, a member of Substack’s leadership triumvirate lauded Elon Musk as a champion of free speech. Huh? As far as I can tell, Musk took a social media platform and turned it into his personal polemical playground where anything that doesn’t stroke his solar system-sized ego is suppressed. But he’s a self-proclaimed genius, so I’m probably missing the master plan.
My point: Substack prefers to position itself as a platform that champions free speech. To get there, they are lenient in terms of content moderation. Fair. I like free speech. But freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach — a distinction I owe to Renée DiResta and her (highly recommended) book Invisible Rulers.
You can write what you want, but no platform has to promote, recommend, or let you monetize it under the guise of free speech. Free speech is not free reach. Hate speech, disinformation, rage-bait… You can express them (free speech) but they don’t have to be pushed into feeds just because they generate engagement (free reach). Free speech does not entitle you to be heard. No one owes you their attention, but when internet drama, personal attacks, or falsehoods are pushed into feeds or onto recommended lists, it’s hard not to give them attention.
So, when I browse Substack’s science leaderboard and see, among solid quality work, baseless health claims, vaccine misinformation, and pointless psychobabble, my heart weeps. Don’t even get me started on the politics or popular culture (aka delusional gender wars) section.
Perhaps we should accept that this is part of building a virtual public square. After all, people pontificating on soapboxes are part of public squares. Or perhaps we should look at DiResta again when she points out that social media (Substack too) is not so much a public square as a gladiatorial arena. You perform, preferably by ‘owning’ others and stirring outrage, and accrue followers and clout in return.
Clout? Let’s take a detour to the clouds and the gardens that live there.
Hanging gardens
Over 2,500 years ago, the great Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II honored his love for queen Amytis by building gardens that rivaled the one of Eden. In another version of events, the gardens were a project of the legendary queen Semiramis.
Regardless of their origin, Ancient Roman and Greek historians describe the gardens as remarkable feats of engineering; mountains bustling with biodiversity and tiered constructions with a variety of plants on different levels. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon are one the of seven wonders of the ancient world. To this day, we don’t know if they truly existed.
In its best incarnation, social media/Substack can help us build gardens, but that requires more than free speech.
Free speech is not about companies or social media. It’s about providing checks and balances on the power of the government to influence the press or suppress protests. The First Amendment reads,
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
It is ostensibly not about social media platforms or private companies. So, whenever your favorite political loudmouth complains about social media suppressing conservative voices or unfairly promoting liberal/left/etc. voices and cites the First Amendment… Well, it simply doesn’t work that way. Internet companies are not (yet?) state actors.
The flip side is that Substack and other platforms can’t actually use the free speech get-out-of-jail-free card when it comes to disinformation, hate speech, and so on. What they allow is always their choice. Lax content moderation under the pretext of free speech is laziness. In all fairness, content moderation is an incredibly difficult balancing act. You don’t want to quash dissenting or minority viewpoints, but, ideally, you also avoid turning it into antisocial media that plays into our basest instincts, painted red in tooth and claw. Purely engagement-based recommendation algorithms, I worry, tilt the balance toward the red.
What, then, am I still doing here?
Well, I float.
Sunk cost
In animal behavior, ‘the Concorde fallacy’ refers to the tendency of animals to defend resources or territory even when that defense is more costly than finding other resources/territories. Humans are animals too, and compared to other animals we tend to be even less rational when faced with the Concorde fallacy. We can pull apart the human tendency to fall for the fallacy into two linked lessons:
we suck at letting go of the emotional attachment we form to things, people, and places.
we suck at letting go of anything that has already required an investment of resources, time, etc.
That second lesson is the (in)famous sunk cost fallacy.
So, is Substack a sunk cost for me? Around 180 posts, many of which represent hours of background research and reading. Am I simply unwilling to walk away from it, even if many observations in the two first sections of this post make me squirm in discomfort?
Partially, sure.
But, not quite. Not completely.
There is one more element of my time on Substack that I can’t shuffle aside so easily and it’s the one that saves me from being pulled down by a sinking cost.
People.
If engagement-driven algorithms and floundering content moderation paint social media/Substack red in tooth and claw, people can turn my little corner of it into a garden, vibrant and green with life and growth. This, for now, for me, is reason enough to stick around. I’ve met remarkable people here, from all over the world. That would not have happened without Subtle Sparks. I don’t want to walk away from that just yet. On good days, it feels like a hanging garden; a place, floating in the world of ideas and emotions, for me to be… me. Perhaps the roots will find their way to others, perhaps the fruits and canopy can provide some nutrition and a place to rest for a moment because, as Audre Lorde wrote, the machine will grind us into dust anyway.
The sensible response is probably the British option.
The truth is that I struggle, still, again, always, with placing Subtle Sparks within the writing I want to do.
The truth is that I am still here because I want my garden and my jungle to thrive.
The truth is that I am still here because of you reading this.
Whether you’ve just arrived or have been sparkling here since the early days, thank you for reading and being my flotation device.
Writing like yours — thoughtful and carefully crafted — takes time, and that doesn’t go unnoticed. Substack is a better, richer place because you share your work here. Thanks, Gunnar. I’m glad you’re here.
Grateful for you Gunnar. Engagement algorithms do not capture the immeasurable depth of certain writing that stirs, moves and helps to work through the mental cramps of the human condition. Your writing does that.