, and Marshall McLuhan, offering an accessible leftist lens on everything from celebrity culture to the changing seasons. On her newsletter’s About page, Nahman explains that her goal is to make subscribers feel like they’ve just had “a long talk with a friend”—“slightly less anxious or confused about the alien hellscape that is the modern world.”
People working in and around Silicon Valley tend to be early adopters of new consumer products, and so there is a glut of newsletters written by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, about venture capital and entrepreneurship. There are also newsletters dedicated to sexism in sports, witchcraft, design, cricket, bread baking,concerts throughout history, “The Hudsucker Proxy,” and human-animal relationships.
When Substack launched, in 2017, the founders posted a mission statement of sorts to “Substack Blog” . After beginning with an anecdote about how, in 1883, the New YorkThe great journalistic totems of the last century are dying. News organizations—and other entities that masquerade as them—are turning to increasingly desperate measures for survival. And so we have content farms, clickbait, listicles, inane but viral debates over optical illusions, and a “fake news” epidemic.
I can answer that. No. It's not. Media is a part of the public Commons and it does it best work when it's out in the open and accessible to all. Paywalls and subscriptions do not do that and when information is hidden, that is when corruption and authoritarianism thrive.
More like the ancestor, I would say. Sure, we didn't usually pay for blogs in the 2000s and 2010s, but the dwindling attention span makes Twitter and short-form social media the current thing.