Why Does Everyone Have a Substack?

Do we need another one?

What Midjourney thinks a substack is

Everyone has a substack now because self-identified smart people want to be known for having good ideas and Medium couldn’t figure out a business model. Also, big tech has a monopoly on email so you can’t run a newsletter without joining some sort of cabal first.

I started this newsletter/whatever because I wanted an excuse to write blog posts about psychology, tech, and related stuff without having to do much actual research or visual design. Everyone wants to know why everyone does all the weird things that they do, and this newsletter will answer all the hard questions. Well okay, mostly it will answer questions I asked myself while reading random articles on the internet. I do promise that the posts won’t be too long and they will be at least partially accurate!

Back to the actual question, the human desire to look smart in front of other people has been one of the most important motivations behind our success as a species. Using expertise to raise our social status makes us happy, and writing is pretty good for establishing expertise. Sure, most important technology was developed to solve practical problems or enhance cultural evolution, but why do individual scientists and authors put themselves through the stress of actually publishing things? The inherent joy of discovery is enough to motivate hermits, but if humans weren’t motivated to share their work we’d never be able to build on top of it and make actual progress.

So why do we need other people to know we good ideas? Well, there are the obvious economic incentives for writing things that people actually appreciate. Apparently some people make real money on this site and persuasive writing is used to push all sorts of perversely exploitive ideologies, but that can’t be the entire explanation. No, being smart is part of our Identity: the way we see ourselves and understand our own actions and desires. I could (and maybe should) have written all of this in a private journal, but I’ve decided to embrace my writer/thinker identity after years of focusing on being quiet implementer and facilitator in the video games industry.

Of course this all sounds pretentious, because it literally is. By publishing my ideas I am implicitly claiming that I have Great Thoughts which are more important than the cultural status quo. This is an obvious pretense, because I haven’t developed the kind of skill and social connections that would give my written ideas any actual influence. But, the best way to find out if my ideas are worth anything is to claim they are valuable and see if anyone else agrees.

I am curious what will happen to Substack over the next few years now that it’s past the initial hype phase of platform excitement. Self-hosted Wordpress and Medium blogs are still around and producing lots of great writing, but they don’t excite the techno-cultural hipsters that drive the meta-discourse of modern communication. On the other hand Twitter is somehow still culturally relevant after dozens of corporate mistakes so maybe this platform will stick around for a few more years. Maybe I’ll even write something important before it becomes completely irrelevant.