Who should write?

Expansionists vs. Limiters

Years ago, I talked to an editor about what percentage of people that pitched him were what he would consider good writers. He started doing the mental maths before eventually settling on a small number that alarmed me at first. “Maybe about 1 in every 10 could string a sentence or paragraph together,” he said. “And of that population only a handful could handle telling an entire story. The rest were awful—and these were people who were either professional writers with good bylines or had ambitions of getting there.”

I chewed on that for a while and eventually, after I eventually started getting my own sets of loose queries from would-be writers, I started to think that number sounded about right. And then Substack made me think I had maybe overestimated the amount of serviceable writers out there. I’ll admit to using a circular logic of taste here, but writers should have to be good in order to be considered writers. Everything else is just typing, and there is too much fucking typing on Substack now.

Yes, I could just choose not to read many of those whose style or syntax or just whole thing I find disagreeable, it’s more than the platform itself has been stupidly picked as a replacement for legacy media institutions by people who make the sort of predictions otherwise intelligent people listen to. The back and forth between Becca Rothfeld (as sharp and generous a critic ) and Sam Kahn (who went to Yale I guess?) a few weeks back thankfully shrinks this discourse down into a diorama. I found Becca’s critiques of Substack less than scathing; a lot of it was arguing that writers needs editors to guard against their stupider impulses, which is doubly true when the writer in question is themselves stupid. (Many such cases in Substack’s upper echelons!)

Kahn’s response was… weird. It read like a defense of a technology company rather than writers as a whole, which is funny because Substack has no real value beyond its network effects. We’ve had this sort of website for like 20 years! The whole argument that it’s a vital engine in the democratization of art gives a little too much credit to a place where Noah Smith and Matt Yglesias’ scholarship is taken seriously, or that for some reason citizen journalism is less susceptible to corruption or distortion than legacy outlets. The argument that it’s open season on “scoops” where first movers, rather than well-connected journalists, are rewarded seems like a bad thing to me. Sure, sure, manufacturing consent and all that, but why do we think individuals are less susceptible to influence, especially if they’re operating in a one-person echo chamber.

Disagreements with the merits of the argument aside, this honestly was the graf in Kahn’s piece where I just had to close my eyes and rub my temples:

That’s the real value of Substack — and of new media as a whole. What we’re really on the cusp of is a whole different way of being — which is to be boundlessly expressive and creative, without first having to fight for access to column inches or a gatekeeper’s seal of approval. It’s what Whitman talked about when he described the “new, superb, democratic literature.” Whether we make use of that or not is really up to us. The point is that there is a new technology that makes it possible — and it’s our choice whether we want to be excited about a free-wheeling, genuinely democratic means of expression; or whether we want to just be annoyed by how many e-mails we’re getting in our inbox.

Sir, this is a blogging platform/Wendy’s. Tech determinists like Kahn end up getting their arguments backwards, where all the arguments get reversed engineered from a single point of conclusion. It’s something you see a lot in the tech industry, where evangelism is both a point of spirit and remuneration. You have to believe this is the answer because if it’s not you’ll just end up a middle class schmuck and will never get that membership to Bohemian Grove.

People that loosely orbit the arts—critics, benefactors, artists themselves—tend to fall into two separate spheres. There are the expansionists, who have a wide view of what the evolution of art looks like, and there are limiters who are they conservative foils. (Yes, I know there are more historically accurate taxonomies and labels for these groups of people but just let me have my little exercise.)

For expansionists, the art world is a big tent that is in a sort of permanent red-shift. New mediums enter, new perspectives and approaches emerge, and that is all good for art. There is both an aesthetic and a moralistic [wc] rationale for the expansionists: new art is good (even in its rough draft infancy) and new artists need to be cultivated in order to eventually make that art something worthwhile. It’s a circular logic but also most how things have moved forward for hundreds of years, as being an especially attuned expansionist is a decent way to make a lot of money.

Limiters want art to remain small and dense. You might think of this crowd as snobs or haughty—and some of them are. But, like the expansionists, they have their own two-step goal. In order for art to remain ‘good,’ the barriers to entry for artists and their work has to be significant. That also means that artists that clear the bar are better off for it in the long run, as are we.

On most days, I count myself in the happy tribe of expansionists if only because I find the not insignificant amount of handwringing over culture being ‘boring’ because of technology and algorithms annoying. Critics are irritated because now, instead of handing over a record sleeve stuffed with cash to a radio DJ, record labels just wire money to streaming platforms. Algorithmic recommendations are an innovation in the same way that the robot pancake machine at a Hampton Inn is an innovation. Sure, things move faster, but have we actually created something novel or interesting?

This doesn’t mean that I think that every viral TikTok or mumble rap hit are valuable entries in the artistic ledger. I know it sounds crazy but some things are good and some things are bad and recognizing the difference can actually be an important exercise in resolving subjective and absolute questions of taste. An expansionist view doesn’t have to be a merrily generous one, where all pieces of art are equally important and valid. Confidently saying something sucks is a way of expanding things as something sublime now has something to bounce off of.

The one space I increasingly identify with limiters, though, is right here. Like on this platform. I’ve thought about the bloated ranks of Substack writing since Emily Sundberg’s somewhat viral missive from a few months ago. Sundberg is deeply impressive when she can locate the intersection of business, culture, and millennial neuroses. Her brain sees the world as a series of linked cultural chains, which I very honestly envy not least of which because she’s cultivated a loyal paying audience in an expertly excavated niche.

The essay—well worth reading in its entirety, by the way—is piece of business and aesthetic criticism. Substack sees its future as a commerce engine, which has in turn led more writers to pursue readers’ eyeballs and attention through lazy list-making or lightweight confessionals. As a tech platform Substack is expansionist by default, so this makes sense. They are compelled to growth by investors and executives and ambition. It’s not enough to say that ‘bigger is better’ for technology companies because that would suggest some sort of comparative positioning. Growth is not a good thing in Silicon Valley, it is the only thing.

And it’s in that desire for runaway growth on a platform meant for writers that I find myself slowly entering the orbit of limiters. I know anyone can start a Substack, and that some of the promise here is that you too can make a living sharing whatever pops into your head rather than dealing with the whims of an editor and net-30 payment terms. Some genuinely excellent writers and thinkers have even made nests here in the last few years: Max Read and Naomi Kanakia, Phil Christman and John Ganz. Those people have used the format to drive original ideas forward. They also, as it happens, are all incredibly talented writers to begin with, and many of them have been shaped by editors or as editors themselves.

You cannot learn how to be a good writer by having a Substack, successful or not. What you may learn is how to optimize the timing or length of your posts to maximize conversions or affiliate sales. That’s a grim idea of what writing should be, and if Substack actually does begin to replace the flawed library of legacy outlets—something I very much doubt by the way, even as media continues to find new ways to bottom out—I worry about what value writing will have outside of its ability to coddle feelings through diary entries or drive purchase intent through an annotated, hyperlinked list of goods. So yes, this is an argument in favor of gatekeeping or snobbery or elitism—I think all of those things are good and formative forces that create better art in the long run. But I think those things get conflated with elite or snobbish institutions which I am very much not in favor of; I went to BU not Yale for chrissakes. By saying that everyone is entitled to be a writer we are simultaneously arguing against the providence of talent or ambition or skill. The ratio of good writers to bad ones should be as small as it is, otherwise what’s the joy in reading one author over another? There would be no difference between good and bad, it’s all just grist for the content mill.