The Business of Being Read
There’s a new breed of prose jockey out there, and they’re hell-bent on cornering the market on words. They’re not journalists, not novelists, not even the rugged, chain-smoking bloggers of yesteryear—no, they’re Substackers. These digital scribes have proclaimed themselves the saviors of the written word, promising to deliver insights, frameworks, and hot takes straight to your inbox for the price of a good cocktail.
Once upon a time, this might’ve been honorable work. Blogging, in its golden age, was a noble art—a little like monastic illumination but done in dim apartments lit by the glow of WordPress dashboards. Bloggers weren’t writers in the traditional sense, but they didn’t pretend to be. They were diarists, documentarians of the internet’s wild frontier, their posts a patchwork quilt of hyperlinks, personal reflections, and the occasional bit of hard-won wisdom.
Substack, though, isn’t that. Substack is blogging’s glossier, monetized cousin, surgically stripped of its raw sincerity. What’s left is a sleek, hyper-optimized machine for delivering content to an audience with the attention span of a caffeinated squirrel. And worse, it’s staffed by a rising class of writers—if you can call them that—who are less interested in storytelling and more interested in audience segmentation.
Substackers, for all their hustle and sleek monetization, are creatures of a very specific economic moment—an era shaped by zero-interest rate policies (ZIRP). These policies didn’t just pump cheap money into the market; they pumped cheap ambition into the creative class. Substack, with its endless pitches of “monetize your expertise” and “build your personal brand,” is a direct product of this environment. It thrives on the promise of easy gains and perpetual growth, much like the tech startups that funded their early days in a world where borrowing money cost next to nothing.
Readers
Ah, the upward mobile soon to be precarietat—those fine, well-dressed souls clinging desperately to the illusion that they’re not the ones who planted the seeds of their own destruction. You see, they’ve become addicted to distractions, quick talking points, and hot takes served up like fast food for the mind. Anything to keep them from acknowledging that their entire existence—your overpriced avocado toast, their weekend getaways to Napa, that smug “I’m voting for change” bumper sticker on the Tesla—has been built on a shaky foundation of capital, exploitation, and outright greed. They don’t want to hear about it. They don’t want to know about it. So, instead, they’ll gobble down whatever shallow nonsense they can find to soothe the gnawing panic that, deep down, they know the whole thing’s about to come crashing down.
And that’s where the optimizers come in. The Substack hustlers, the life coaches, the “CEO advisors” who churn out perfectly polished, 400-word pep talks designed to keep these over-extended mortgage-repaying rich folks just distracted enough to maintain the illusion that their wealth came from hard work rather than decades of unsustainable profiteering. They don’t care if it’s garbage—so long as it’s a neat, digestible pile of pseudo-insight that fits nicely in an inbox and doesn’t require any of that pesky “thinking” thing. It’s not about substance; it’s about keeping the show going, making sure the masses stay just uninformed enough to keep forking over the cash while the whole system spirals into the abyss. Exactly. And that’s what Substack is for. It’s the modern-day opiate for the overextended bourgeoisie, a perfectly curated digital cocktail of distractions and feel-good nonsense, tailored to make them feel like they’re doing something meaningful while they continue to scroll past their mounting existential dread. Forget about digging into uncomfortable truths or examining the crumbling world around them. No, no—Substack is here to give them their “daily dose” of self-assured, bland wisdom from people who’ve figured out exactly what the 1% wants to hear and will happily cash in on it.
The Substack Dream
The archetypal Substacker dreams of one thing: scaling. They aren’t slaving over the next great American novel or chiseling a piece of poetry from the rough marble of the soul. No, their mission is to “grow the list,” optimize their opening lines for “click-through rates,” and get retweeted by the tech elite. They don’t write for people; they write for personas, those mythical creatures conjured by marketing guides and UX design blogs.
Substackers live for the dopamine hit of a paid subscriber. They obsess over their analytics dashboards like hedge fund managers tracking portfolio performance. Their prose? Slick, digestible, and painfully useful. These people don’t want to write War and Peace—they want to write Five Leadership Lessons from Napoleon You Can Use Today.
The Rise of the Optimizers
Armed with Substack newsletters, SEO manuals, and the smug certainty that they were here to save writing from itself. “Save” it? These people wouldn’t know a sonnet from a spreadsheet, yet they’ve somehow rebranded themselves as the necessary custodians of modern prose. Their mission isn’t to create art but to churn out content—neatly packaged, hyper-relevant, and optimized for the attention span of a fruit fly.
They dissect language like surgeons performing unnecessary amputations, shaving off complexity, nuance, and soul. Metaphors are “inefficient,” humor is “distracting,” and anything that requires a second reading is deemed a failure.
These are the optimizers—slick, well-coiffed peddlers of bite-sized takeaways, selling the illusion that if you just “optimize” your mindset, your habits, your morning routine, you’ll magically rise above the chaos you’ve helped create. They’re the digital equivalent of snake oil salesmen, except instead of curing disease, they’re curing guilt. Want to feel better about the fact that your wealth is built on an ever-expanding pyramid of exploitation? Just read a couple of motivational articles about how it’s all about mindset and how the future is “now,” delivered with a splash of minimalist design and a dash of faux-wisdom. Substack isn’t a place for writing; it’s a glorified Band-Aid, stapled over the hemorrhaging truth that these folks have been living the good life on borrowed time—and eventually, someone’s going to come collecting. But until then, Substack’s here to keep the game going.
The Corporate Delusion
The Optimizer’s wet dream is to be noticed by a CEO who totally gets it. They fantasize about writing pithy insights about productivity and “taking ownership” that will one day grace the margins of a Silicon Valley PowerPoint. Their ladder to greatness involves being retweeted by Naval Ravikant or having their wisdom cited in Forbes.
Meanwhile, they scoff at the Writers. “Who has time for all that?” they ask, referring to the kind of painstaking craft that involves grappling with sentences for hours or inventing phrases no one will appreciate until 2043. Optimizers view this as indulgent, naive. They imagine themselves pragmatic revolutionaries, clearing the literary forest for “value-driven” saplings that yield immediate ROI.
The Crime Against the Future
But here’s the rub: Optimizers don’t write for the future because they don’t believe in the future. Their world ends at the quarterly report or the latest growth hack. Writers, by contrast, know that good writing is often unread for decades, if not centuries. They know that planting an idea in words is an act of defiance against the fleeting nature of existence. That it’s worth it even if only one person reads it and understands. Optimizers live for the now, not the long arc of history. Their prose is disposable, written to die in the inbox of someone who skimmed the first paragraph before opening TikTok. The art of writing is being replaced with the business of “being read,” and the irony is that nothing written by an Optimizer will ever truly matter.
It’s not that writers don’t like money or fame or recognition—of course they do. Who wouldn’t want their name lit up in marquee letters or their bank account fattened by royalties? These things are intoxicating, seductive even, and any writer who denies their appeal is lying or has already gotten too much of them to care. But here’s the truth: however important those things may be, they are not the main act. They are the sideshow, the after-party. The main act is the writing itself—messy, maddening, glorious writing.
For real writers, the process of writing is all-consuming. It’s the thing that swallows hours, days, sometimes years, without offering a guarantee of fame or fortune on the other side. Writing demands more than just labor; it demands time. Time to think, to wrestle with ideas, to chase sentences down blind alleys and drag them back kicking and screaming. Fame and money, if they come, are mere by-products of that slow, agonizing process. Writers don’t reject them—they just know that chasing them directly is like planting a tree and expecting fruit the next morning. The fruit, if it grows at all, takes its own damn time.
Writers as a Problem
“Real” Writers—the kind who’d claw their way out of their graves for the chance to revise a half-finished sentence—don’t fare well in this brave new world. Substackers dismiss them as anachronisms, too preoccupied with literary flourishes and slow-burning ideas to survive in an inbox-driven economy.
“Who has time for that?” the Substacker sneers. “Nobody wants to read your dense prose that won’t even be relevant for twenty years.” They say this, of course, while furiously threading tweets on “how to write for busy executives.”
Irrelevance is sometimes the whole point of writing because great ideas often begin their lives as outcasts, misunderstood or ignored by the present moment. Writers know this. They understand that the act of writing is not always about catering to the zeitgeist, but about resisting it—about planting seeds in the soil of irrelevance, seeds that may not sprout for decades. To write something meaningful, you sometimes have to accept that the world isn’t ready for it yet, that it might sit unread, unappreciated, or even mocked. That’s not failure. That’s patience.
In many ways, irrelevance is a test of endurance. Writing that is too tied to the moment—the kind of optimized, click-driven work that Substackers churn out by the gigabyte—might thrive today, but it’s also likely to expire with the next algorithm update. Truly ambitious writing, on the other hand, aims to transcend its time. It’s a message in a bottle, sent out into the unknown in the hope that someone, somewhere, someday will crack it open and understand. Writing is a gamble on the future, and irrelevance is the price you pay to play. For the writer, that’s not just acceptable; it’s essential.
Cycles
But here’s the thing about zero-interest bubbles: they don’t last. As interest rates rise and capital tightens, all that speculative froth—Substack included—will start evaporating. Those shiny subscriber counts and meticulously groomed email lists are going to start blowing up like supernovas, spectacular and short-lived. The hard truth is that writing tied so tightly to economic cycles has a shelf life. When the money dries up, what’s left? For most of these Substackers, not much. Writing for algorithms and growth metrics leaves no foundation, no lasting mark. It’s the kind of work that dies the moment the machine stops feeding it.
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