Substack Matters
While it let's writers practice free speech
The ten years prior to 2020, my reading of the world outside had left me uninspired but just short of a permanent twitch. The clown world I saw mentioned in 2020 was real, but had begun much earlier than people think. A world of inane phrases that had no meaning deployed by empty talking heads and repeated by the masses. For these years, I thought that the broader world we inhabited was dumb and shallow and petty : a sure sign that societal collapse was around a distant corner, but a corner I couldn’t quite see. And I didn’t live around the people who inhabited this clown world, and my life was good. So let the world eat itself.
Then Covid happened. And the clowns came for us. They came with restrictive shut-downs and judges and “law” (which amounted to weaponized bureausociomedia rules that were ever-changing and often self-contradictory). None of it even pretended to operate scientifically.
I lived mostly unmasked and entirely unvaxxed (the Control Group tee was my travelling suit) in a world where the population was absent or hidden behind fabric and plexiglass, getting experimental shots in both arms and all of their children. How far people went to self-neuter/-castrate/-lobotomize was shocking. As the world went to Zoom meetings and performative rituals thinly veiled as Science, it took even an old cynic like me by surprise. I laughed, I might have cried a bit. But mostly, I walked about muttering to myself : They lost their minds. No way. This can’t be real. What happened here?
You know, the normal response. It took all of a few weeks to figure the lay of the land in Reality 2020 :
Truth Slips Through the Cracks
March 2020. The beginning of The End Times, the rise of The Great Human Death Cult, or more prosaically, “The Pandemic.” Those of us who continued to live and work in the physical world, were not regaled as heroes by the cloistered masses. Instead, those who kept the heat going were subjected to masked people standing outdoors while yelling: ‘Keep you…
After a year of living in my head as the madness unfolded, Substack made it to my awareness. Sometime in early 2021, I began to read and find writers here. I made a tentative comment here or there. And then I decided to write my first online essay and throw it into the digital void. A sort of writing ritual that helped me purge some poison from my head, to release some of the steam from the burning bullshit that had built up over the preceding year. And maybe someday, I would hear an echo back.
Substack, it turns out is full of those echoes, and those echoes are thousands of other humans speaking into the void. Some are to my tastes and some are not. But Substack has been the only place that someone like me can come and interact directly with intelligent folks from all walks: professional journalists, scientists and doctors, disaffected intellectuals, men and women from Zoomer to Boomer, and all sorts of dissident, radical thinkers. And everyone, at least the people I read, are earnest and ready for conversation. Everyone who had seen the bullshit or tired of the lies and nonsense and had something to say seemed to end up here.
It has been quite a relaxing place for me, personally. I don’t pretend to be a professional writer nor of particularly advanced intellectual capabilities, but I know what real intelligence and thinking look like. They look like Substack.
Even the founders and team at Substack corroborated their vision for the venue vis-a-vis free speech:
As Substack grew and its denizens grew comfortable with the new platform, the scolds must’ve heard people enjoying the free exchange of ideas and just couldn’t stand it:
This (de)Platformer guy, not some supposed Nazi propaganda, are what are wrong with modern discourse. He just made money trying to destroy the very thing that allowed him to make money on his boring ass essay.
Perhaps, they could channel Tipper Gore and ask for explicit thought advisory labels on things. And when people ask for a definition of explicit The Committee of Imbeciles Who Decide can just say : “We’ll just know it when we see it” or something else founded in solid principles. Pro tip for adulting: if you don’t like something, don’t read it. Otherwise, please just stay on whatever platform you scolds enjoy and leave us free speech barbarians alone. Note: I believe this (de)Platformer guy actually took his ball and went home…but he’ll be back. His type always comes back.)
I fully expect entropy to bleed away some of the early pioneer esprit de corps of Substack but, while it lasts, this is the best and only free speech, long form writing venue where creators are happy and willing to interact with the proles and trolls. The interaction is not relegated to fellow PhD’s or popular Twitter personalities. These folks will interact with a random beginning writer of middle age who just needed a void to scream into but instead wandered into a true marketplace of ideas and thinkers.
Ultimately, though, it is all about the writing. And the dissidence has brought the best writers to be found on the internet all to this one place. So cheers to Substack as it exists — an oasis in the Sahara desert of that is our online world.