"... they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys; they don’t hate it because of harassment or any such thing. I don’t think they really hate it at all. Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it but it’s not important enough for them to hate it. What do they hate? They hate where their industry is and they hate where they are within their industry. But that’s a big problem that they don’t feel like they can solve. If you feel you can’t get mad at the industry that’s impoverishing you, it’s much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are unjustly succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly? Trying to tarnish Substack’s reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they can maybe do. Confronting their industry’s future with open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due.... Life in the 'content' industry already sucks. A small handful of people make bank while the vast majority hustle relentlessly just to hold on to the meager pay they already receive.... They have to tweet constantly for the good of their careers, or so they believe, which amounts to hundreds of hours of unpaid work a year. Their publications increasingly strong arm them into churning out pathetic pop-culture ephemera like listicles about the outfits on Wandavision.... [T]hey have a right to be angry. But they don’t have much in the way of self-awareness about where their anger really lies.... They’re so angry because they bought into a notoriously savage industry at the nadir of its labor conditions...."
From "It's All Just Displacement/Blue checkmarks are mourning bad careers in a broken industry" by Freddie DeBoer (Substack).
Posts
62 comments:
Substack is obviously of paramount importance, which is why the guys who can’t cut it in that environment hate it.
Haves and Have Nots, my experience is limited to another industry but that condition exists here too. He's correct that directing your energy toward the destruction of others rather than excellence in your craft produces little of value and is self defeating.
A small handful of people make bank while the vast majority hustle relentlessly just to hold on to the meager pay they already receive...
Are they suggesting that's Substack's fault? Hasn't that been journalism for like forever?
Do they not know what opinions are like?
Now Freddie de Boer is in Substack? Cool. It’s like all lefty writers who don’t follow DNC talking points, and occasionally call bullshit on their own side, are gathering there.
(Coming soon: robertcook.substack.com)
Watching journalists on Twitter is such a train wreck.
Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due
Learning how to trim down to one-liners might be worthwhile, not taught in college.
Learn to code.
Opinions are like cunts. Everybody has one.
"they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys"
Actually, they do. And of course many wokesters outside media also do.
"Life in the 'content' industry already sucks."
Welcome to the real world. Check in with classical musicians or aspiring athletes.
"They’re so angry because they bought into a notoriously savage industry at the nadir of its labor conditions."
They bought into what they thought would be a life of privilege. But for the moment at least actual market demand still has an effect, until the PTB require us to subscribe to Prda in its various forms. Gotta fix those "labor conditions."
Before long, everyone will be entitled to a job of their choosing, at a wage of their choosing, and lacking that, to a handout of their choosing.
"Life in the 'content' industry already sucks."
Can't wait to see CNN's viewership numbers when the airport contracts get canceled at the end of the month.
And the rest of us out here in White Supremacy land are laughing our asses off at their stupidity!!!
I don’t care about Twitter or MSM to read more than two sentences of the post. I see it is from sub stack, but I take it is a guy their just trolling his former coworkers. Move on.
There is some kind of application that pin points one of their big problems.
Here’s a sample... https://twitter.com/awstar11/status/1374564923842256897?s=21
No product, like information, can survive like that.
I believe the media has hurt the left most. The left’s uncritical status with the media has contributed to their derail.
[T]hey have a right to be angry. But they don’t have much in the way of self-awareness about where their anger really lies..
Same as it ever was. How many of these people became "socially aware" around the time of Occupy Wall Street, a movement where privileged college graduates who paid an outrageous amount of money for useless degrees because of a system set up and promoted by the federal government gathered together in Lower Manhattan to protest the banks who made the loans that both they and the government encouraged them to give just a few years before. (It was just a funny irony that, while they were doing it, they congratulated themselves for living like the homeless in an encampment they excluded actual homeless from.)
Hey, Ivy league, elite journos, robots can now contribute to the narrative and flip burgers at the same time, can you?
"Opinions are like cunts. Everybody has one."
Are you sure about that?
Learn to code.
Or better yet, learn a real skill.
I don't give one shit what these failures at a commodity skill (pretty much everyone can talk and slightly fewer can write) are bitching about.
Oh, because Saint Obama writes for Medium about how RACIST and MISOGYNIST the Mass shootings recently were...OH WAIT...He was WRONG again. Mental Illness, and a woke Muslim who hated Trump and his supporters instead. How about THAT???
It is amusing to me to see a bunch of idiots whose only real skill is writing snarky one-liners bemoan the success of actual journalists who investigate and write well enough to attract an audience. Twitter is toxic for a lot of reasons, but perhaps most of all because it has convinced a generation of morons that retweeting something while adding a sarcastic quip is valuable work.
These writers are essentially white-collar unskilled labor.
OH WAIT...He was WRONG again. Mental Illness, and a woke Muslim who hated Trump and his supporters instead. How about THAT???
The thing that gets me is that Obama knows all of that, yet wrote the article anyway. The narrative is more important than the truth for Communists, which makes what he wrote pure propaganda.
"Kayfabe"! I learned a new word today. Thanks Althouse! Fascinating article re how one makes a living in writing; explains how "jouralists" think up artices like "Top 10 Towns for People Who Like to Wear Shorts", then hope to get paid by content providers who don't want to pay them anything. I'd pay just to sit in a room with journalism school professors as they discuss their futures.
Substack has on balance more interesting writers, leave out yglesias hes trite as (redacted)
"Opinions are like cunts. Everybody has one."
Speak for yourself.
Whenever you read that Journalists/Democrats/Lawyers/etc. say: " I don't hate XYZ because its Center-right" its a lie.
That's why they hate it. They may have OTHER reasons, but the fact that its not SJW approved is the main reason.
It’s been a trend for awhile now:
1) journalism (unless you’re pretty enough to be on TV), doesn’t pay squat
2) the only people who can “afford” to be journalists are the scions of upper middle/lower upper class members of the clerisy
3) those people only become journalists because they’re too stupid/lazy to have daddy get them jobs in finance, consulting, or entertainment. They don’t (initially) have the connections to get their government sinecure.
4) they use their “journalism” job to re-scribble Democrat press releases in order to get that government job.
5) profit!
A bunch of wokesters butt hurt because they worked hard to take control of different platforms, and then the audiences for those platforms abandon them because their wokeness is so boooring. Much of the country knows that much of their job is propaganda, and who wants to spend their precious eyeball time knowingly listening to propaganda? Inga, sure. It’s comforting for some. But so boooring for many. It’s a cut throat business, based on the monetization of eyeball time. For the most part, if you don’t get the eyeballs, you don’t get paid. Substack is stealing eyeballs from other leftist sites, because they have picked up several leftist writers who aren’t boring, because they say things outside the groupthink. Things that need to be said, but the wokesters who control these other platforms don’t want to be said.
In short, the market at work.
Are those pretty girls who do the weather really meteorologists?
And why do they call it meteorology?
“ Oh, because Saint Obama writes for Medium about how RACIST and MISOGYNIST the Mass shootings recently were...OH WAIT...He was WRONG again. Mental Illness, and a woke Muslim who hated Trump and his supporters instead. How about THAT???”
There is a meme that mass shooters are inevitably white supremests. I saw a list yesterday put out by a major gun grabbing organization listing recent mass shootings. And very quickly noticed that the bulk of the cases cited were in heavily Minority, esp heavily pot black, parts of the country. They were, of course, including all the drive by and gang shootings. Then this morning, in response to the claim that it was rare for mass shootings to not be by white supremests, a chart showing pictures of the perps of recent mass shootings was produced in rebuttal - showing that maybe half the shooters were black, and that out of 20-30 photos of the shooters, only a couple were obviously white. Not a single blue eyed blond in the bench.
The problem is that they carefully select the selection criteria to yield desired results, then get crossed up when a different leftist goals yields conflicting results. The goals of the gun grabbers, to maximize the apparent mayhem caused by mass killings, conflicted with the white oppressor narrative. They pretend that this isn’t the case, but it is inevitably too obvious to really suppress.
""Opinions are like cunts. Everybody has one."
Are you sure about that?"
Rhardin's comment won the thread for me.
Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry;
A vastly larger industry that is getting vastly smaller in a big hurry.
62% decline in revenue in ten years.
"Rhardin's comment won the thread for me."
I too liked that one. In fact it sort of grabbed me by my pussy.
I think substack should get equal resources as the NYT, equal media coverage, and equal pay.
Carriage return?
Their publications increasingly strong arm them into churning out pathetic pop-culture ephemera like listicles about the outfits on Wandavision....
Nah, I'm sure their general lack of talent has more to do with that than their bosses do.
Writing is not a skill.
Good writing is a skill, and those are few and far between.
Today's 'journalists' monitor Twitter feeds of like-minded colleagues, private forums, and Democrat press releases and regurgitate whatever the party line happens to be that day.
Learn to fucking code.
There isn't a more deserving group of people on the planet.
"nadir"? Like, this is as bad as it gets?
More on kayfabe from Eric Weinstein:
https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11783
Well, now we've analyzed why these lying assholes hate Substack so much, let's try to figure out why we hate these lying assholes so much. For me, it's the sheer presumption of the fuckers, that they were going to get paid serious money to use their superior knowledge, education and analytic skill to decide what I should think, and tell me to think it. Like, I was going to be grateful to them, for sharing the watered-down regurgitations of the brain-dead academical hate-pap their crap-masters in the Universities fed them. You was had, Suckers. I wasn't. Now pay those student loans.
@ Jupiter
Well said.
But thinking about it that way, it seems like the Universities have victimized all of us. They have paid themselves immense sums of money to become top-heavy purveyors of third-rate propaganda. They exploit their credential monopoly to screw the last penny out of their "clients", scrutinizing their parents' tax returns for an extra dollar to be stolen. They take advantage of credulous, vulnerable young people, tricking them into signing away most of their disposable income for half their lives, in a transaction that cannot be altered by bankruptcy, in return for a handful of magic beans. They offer no guarantees, for the good reason that what they are selling does not function as advertised. They are frauds, grifters, criminal vermin preying upon the young, reeking chancres rotting the bones of society. What are we going to do about those bastards.
Roll on, Jupiter.
This is the best analysis I've seen of the substack controversy, and explication of substack's role in the publishing industry. Part 1 is free.
"They have to tweet constantly for the good of their careers, or so they believe, which amounts to hundreds of hours of unpaid work a year."
Well, no, since the marketing is for their own benefit, not some employer, it is not unpaid work. It is investment in hopes of future pay off, not unlike when a small business owner advertises or sponsors the local youth league.
As Mises said, in the precapitalistic age, writing was unremunerative, a liberal art, i.e, a hobby for the noble, cleric, soldier, etc. The "writers" often promote the post-capitalisitic age, so they might consider this a return to a "simpler" time. Too bad they aren't the aristocrats they imagine they are.
Luckily for them, English majors are known to write well structured code and to annotate it with uncommonly helpful comments. So they are better suited for a career change to leaning to code than the laconic coal miner.
rhhardin said...
Opinions are like cunts. Everybody has one
Just purchased a Fleshlight, so I'm in
Through this blog’s Amazon portal, I’m sure it’s safe to assume.
I was about to ask, but Meade got there first.
Bruce Hayden said...
Then this morning, in response to the claim that it was rare for mass shootings to not be by white supremests, a chart showing pictures of the perps of recent mass shootings was produced in rebuttal
Link? I've got some people I need to share that with.
Or should I just wait, and assume it will show up on Ace soon? :-)
At any time in the past 50 or so years, if you were to ask students why they were at J-school, they would all tell you that they want to change the world. Hard to feel sympathy for people who cannot make a living in the world they changed the old one into.
Greg,
Here is the mass shooters gallery.
Like, this is as bad as it gets?
@Jupiter, I think you and I agree that tat we’re nowhere near bottom.
Thank you Michael
I wonder how much longer Andy Ngo will last on Twitter? I'd subscribe to him on Substack
I just subscribed to Greenwald's substack. I don't do Twitter so I may miss out on a few.
Opinions are like assholes. Everyone's got one and most of them stink.
$ ANALYZE/CRASH SYS$SYSTEM:SYSDUMP.DMP
SDA> SHOW STACK
Current operating stack (KERNEL):
SP => 7FFE776C 00000000 handler
7FFE7770 00000000 mask/psw
7FFE7774 00000000 AP
7FFE7778 7FFE77C0 FP
7FFE777C 80000014 PC SYS$CALL_HANDL+004
7FFE7780 801302F2 PC (JSB @#SYS$CALL_HANDL)
7FFE7784 00000002 signal argument list. 2 arguments follow
7FFE7788 7FFE77A8 address of signal array
7FFE778C
They take advantage of credulous, vulnerable young people, tricking them into signing away most of their disposable income for half their lives, in a transaction that cannot be altered by bankruptcy, in return for a handful of magic beans. They offer no guarantees, for the good reason that what they are selling does not function as advertised.
This reminds me of my first engineering class. 100+ students are brought into a "classroom" the size of my HS auditorium. They are told to look left then right and to accept right then that only 1 of 3 of you will successfully graduate with an engineering degree. In short, 2/3rds are being fooled into giving their time and money to a venture that the university acknowledges will end in failure. For this reason, I recommend parents save their money and send their students to a smaller college first.
I told my students that opinions are like eyebrows-- everybody has one. (I wasn't paid the little I made to talk dirty in front of those that sought knowledge, however unwillingly.)
Engineering, ha! I devised a way to drive the geographically-challenged from my history classes by popping a a little world map exercise on them*. If only mere illiteracy and innumeracy were the problem.
But the world moves on, and where we used to need specialists (historians, librarians, etc) to help us understand things we now have Fact Checkers--twenty-something dimwits who know nothing outside their PC e-cult ideologies.
Narr
*No penalties, just a polite warning
Anti-woke: lucid. Woke: drowsy. Diversity [dogma] breeds adversity over a Rainbow of inclusive exclusion.
In short, 2/3rds are being fooled into giving their time and money to a venture that the university acknowledges will end in failure.
That's why colleges offer Psychology and Grievance Studies degrees.
This reminds me of my first engineering class. 100+ students are brought into a "classroom" the size of my HS auditorium. They are told to look left then right and to accept right then that only 1 of 3 of you will successfully graduate with an engineering degree.
I had the exact same experience except it was 1 of 4. Many years later, I took a programming course at a junior college. The first night, there was nowhere to sit. By midterms, the class was half empty and by finals there were four of us left, All but one over 50.
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