Welcome to Fax ad Noctem
Works that are light, but never trifling: a torch at night.
For years, I have resisted writing on Substack. I have resisted it not out of inertia, ignorance, or laziness, but for a devotion to truth and quality, and out of shameless self-interest. In keeping with the tradition of tragedy that seems to haunt all such righteous acts of resistance, this particular act of resistance will only be recorded here, on Substack. And it has already failed.
It’s rare for good writing to emerge without the interventions of professional editors. As such, I haven’t wanted to waste my time reading blog posts that fail to demonstrate good—or even factually correct and logically sound—writing, nor to produce bad writing of my own. Further, I am reluctant to produce work for a platform whose business model is based on proliferating (potentially, frequently) bad writing. Substack explicitly prompts writers to push out high volumes of words, fast.
And it implicitly incentivizes this sort of quantity-over-quality writing process with algorithmic rewards like increased traffic and subscriptions. This is the direct inverse of the sort of process needed to produce good work. This incentive model undermines the integrity of the craft itself. And, sure enough, much of what I have read on here has been unworthy of their pixels and the pints of petroleum some server binges to keep them on the screen. There have been a few exceptions to this, a few glimpses of good writing, but my original aversion to the platform has been vindicated.
Professional, traditional forms of media provide many important services beyond good editors, such as fact-checking, gatekeeping (complimentary), verification, standards of transparency, legal protection for sources and writers, and, as fleeting as it is important, stable compensation.1 Substack offers none of these and, by providing a platform where writers hand over their craft for free, undercut these vital services of traditional media. This is unethical on its own, but also presents many practical problems, given that those services are needed now more than ever. Anyone can write anything and put it online. And they do. Falsehoods spread faster than novel airborne viruses like bird flu. As Winston Churchill said in his characteristic vulgar pugnacity, “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”2 Fake writers are pumping helium-brained prompts into copyright-dodging theft machines, which hurl back viscous nonsense. The Internet is clogged with inelegant sentences, lies, semi-lies, obfuscations, and bad opinions. Good writing was rare and precious enough in the times before all this suffocating detritus, and truth just as priceless before this increased mass of calculated deceit. What chance do they have now, tossed around on a leaky dinghy in seas churned by hurricanes of babble?
My resistance to using Substack comes from a very practical objection to producing work without compensation or any quality-control, using my limited time and energy to write word combinations that may not be my best. Every writer has a fixed number of words he can produce in a lifetime. He won’t know the number until he writes his last one. I want as many of my words as possible to be written to my best ability. This is probably the only job I will or can have, and doing it for free is unlikely to help me get better paid in the future. I don’t have, or want, a huge following on Twitter from which to harvest subscribers, which seems to be the only way to make money on Substack.
Nevertheless…
In the seven years that I’ve been selling analyses to publications, I have had many, many drafts and pitches rejected. Usually, after a pitch has received a certain number of consecutive rejections, I have reflected on the piece and decided that the gatekeepers are right, this just isn’t good enough, or relevant enough, timely, catchy, or interesting enough. And then I discard it, repurpose some of it, or revise it beyond recognition. On other occasions, I’ve decided it’s not me that’s out of touch, it’s the publications that are wrong.3
I intend to post here material that falls into that latter group: works that couldn’t find a home in traditional media because of an editor’s difference of opinion. Alternatively, I will aim to post works that are so formally outside the scope of what is typically commissioned, or so thematically outside the scope of my established specialty, that I haven’t even bothered to pitch them elsewhere. Here you’ll find things4 that, though they could not be published elsewhere, I believe are still worth writing and reading.
Here will be flashes that will either illuminate or will blow down the wind. But in the night, a few tattered embers can still count for something.5
This is not a comprehensive list. There are other benefits to traditional media like standards of impartiality, laws and regulations, accountability, and more. But it is also true that many traditional media institutions have been failing at these basic services and responsibilities for many years, with some outlets actively subverting them. This is of course due to the long-running corrosion of media by perverted ideological zealots and bloodthirsty finance savages who have shorn their minds down to the tiniest marbles, capable of containing only one impulse: the profit-motive. (Look at this, ejecting standards of impartiality is fun.) Substack, Inc. is not some special star outside that galaxy of mindless goons.
There’s no evidence that Churchill ever said this, but with no fact-checkers here, we can all spread lies with impunity, and so so fast. But, sincerely, I won’t do so again, to the best of my ability. That was my one lie. Source: PolitiFact
Yes you’re right, referencing old Simpsons jokes is not the best way to demonstrate that I’m not out of touch.
Including copious footnotes.
I considered naming this account “Ragged Sparks” from a paragraph in Blood Meridian that goes, “The ragged sparks blew down the wind. The prairie about them lay silent. Beyond the fire it was cold and the night was clear and the stars were falling. The old hunter pulled his blanket about him. I wonder if there’s other worlds like this, he said. Or if this is the only one.” (McCarthy, p. 334, Picador 2015.) Then I thought about how McCarthy wrote his whole corpus on a portable typewriter, lived in poverty for long stretches for his art, and died without having any (known) online accounts. And I thought about how he might feel if one of his perfect descriptions adorned a blog on Substack.