Stacked crooked
In media studies, you will often see derided the "hypodermic needle" theory of media effects — the idea that the media can inject ideas into the passively receptive minds of consumers, who then accept them and reproduce them at face value. Over the decades, I've certainly mocked that theory myself and its implications that people are easily manipulated against their will and that consumers share no responsibility or take no pleasure in being swayed by propaganda.
That said, however, the idea that consumers are sovereign individuals and immune to manipulation or forms of groupthink coordinated from above is preposterous. (Just ask Q.) It's the same logic that holds that anything that people do within market structures reveals their true preferences and expresses their freedom and unfettered agency. Scorn for the "hypodermic needle" is meant to protect that fantasy of agency. It's a piece of counter-ideology that not only upholds the "individual" as the only meaningful unit of social analysis but also, as Victor Pickard details in this recent essay, protects capitalist media companies from any substantial criticism over their implications and capabilities.
Pickard argues that Cold War pressures, capitalist hegemony, and academic funding constraints reoriented the communications studies away from the study of propaganda:
Disproportionate funding for administrative research uninterested in power relationships obscured American media’s systemic problems — especially related to commercialism — and pushed critics of American imperialism and corporate power to the intellectual margins. Ultimately this conditioned mainstream communication research to de-emphasize structural problems endemic to unregulated, commercial media systems. Today we reap the consequences of this decades-long accommodation to corporate power ... In such subtle but significant ways, critiquing the American media system’s commercial nature — and its effects on media content and people — increasingly fell beyond the bounds of acceptable academic discourse.
That seems especially true in the way social media and other forms of networked culture have generally been discussed. Not to say that there aren't lots of structural critiques of their capitalist forms, but often critiques of the effects of social media will focus on bad actors rather than business models, with the problems being understood in warped, individualistic terms (Help, I'm being cancelled!) rather than in terms of the systemic exploitation they rationalize. The proposed solutions then fall somewhere between more "regulation" (with rules written and enforced by the companies themselves) and more "empowerment" of individual users (i.e. more systems for making individual users responsible for their own safety and more invasive data collection to power algorithms meant to circumscribe their experience).
At the same time, to be taken seriously as a media commentator generally means operating within the same horizons. One can maybe denounce "capitalism" as a vague abstraction when complaining about some of the ramifications of tech "innovation," but usually the emphasis falls on what people can do to cope with it or how they have the power to stand up and make better choices. The sovereign individual still reigns supreme, and lots of "critique" has the ultimate purpose of reinforcing that notion.
This backdrop helps, I think, when one considers the ret-conning of "the golden age of blogs" to conform with the recent maneuvers of Substack. There is a surface similarity between Substacks and mid 2000s-era blogs in that they typically offer an unedited individual voice giving a perspective. But early bloggers were often unpaid, nonprofessional writers who managed to gather an audience by adopting critical stances and rhetorical standpoints that "mainstream media" rejected. These were writers who were not offering institutionally disciplined "views from nowhere" but subjective accounts of things often informed by a depth of expertise that got filtered out of journalistic sources. They were often buoyed by writing and responding to each other, sustained by the assumption of good faith made possible by their operating largely out of the commercial sphere. "Blog" was then a widely used as a pejorative to discredit this noncommercial approach to writing; journalists endlessly derided bloggers for undermining "journalistic ethics" and failing to adhere to the norms and standards and ideological horizons that made media a valuable commodity. By contrast, high-profile Substackers are writer-celebrities leveraging their name brand, casting an aspirational cloud over the subordinate Substackers who don't rank on the "leaderboard." ("We at Substack hate algorithms, that's why we sort people directly by their earning potential.")
When Jeet Heer nostalgically describes the blogging discourse community in this Twitter thread, it's not entirely wrong. His claim that "blogging encouraged a kind of provisional, open-ended thinking — along with engagement with other bloggers" seems right, as does the claim that it "created a bridge between experts & wider community." But what is absurd is to compare that to Substack's heavily subsidized recruitment of established professional voices and blue checkmarks in the contemporary "public sphere" with advances and other inducements to their proprietary platform so that they can try to better monetize themselves. Heer claims that "Substack seems the best path for a return to a viable blogging culture (not just for me but in general)." It seems more like a way to bury the idea of "blogging culture" forever by recasting it in the image of the contemporary "creator economy."
The venture capital funding for Substack (detailed here), as with its funding of Clubhouse, comes with obvious strings: It brings a startup mentality to the creation of opinion, to the dissemination of "voice" and "personality," and establishes horizons for what that discourse can accomplish (the promotion of personal entrepreneurialism over collective approaches).
The blogging era fell apart for similar reasons. VC-subsidized social media platforms drained the energy and attention out of blogging, and media companies began poaching writers and assimilating them. Blogs became concretized as a professionalizing stepping stone to a media career rather than an alternative to that careerism where anticapitalist ideas could be articulated and tested. This combination of factors brought scale to what was a niche activity (sharing your thoughts with a mix of friends and strangers online) and allowed familiar hierarchies to sharply re-emerge. "Elites" talked to "fans" who liked and subscribed. Influencers, vloggers, streamers, podcasters and other "creators" came to the fore — people who learned how to reify and monetize personality and "belonging" and the sense of "hanging out" that replaces the experience of community (let alone the Habermasian public sphere) within digital platforms.
Ever since, media platforms have maintained star systems in which a few accounts drive the majority of the traffic while a few random users win the virality lottery here and there. This trains every user to try to professionalize their content in specific ways that work to the platform's ultimate benefit. Writers leaving media companies for Substack doesn't signal an exodus from social media or mainstream media; it just allows those writers to better understand their place in the hierarchy, and to encourage everyone else to see their possibilities for "relevance" in the same way — that they should see themselves as individual voices competing for attention on the platforms' terms. They should be "creators" rather than members of a discourse community.
As Will Oremus notes, "Paid newsletters are about consistently appealing to the interests of a loyal, niche audience." That suggests that eventually they come to prioritize the production of loyalty over understanding; they must produce personality cults, which inevitably culminate in overconfidence, myopia, self-aggrandizement, and paranoia. No wonder Substack is a happy home for the cancelled.