2025-09-08, 1011h, On using substack

People who are mad I syndicate excerpts from my website on my Substack would probably get mad when some cop googles "nihilist jouissance" after reading it in one of my emails.

To paraphrase Utah Phillips, folk gotta learn from somewhere; where else are these folk gonna hear these things?

No, really: Tell me where else someone who gets their political knowledge between Bluesky and Substack is going to learn about Indigenous anarchism, if someone isn't talking about it someplace they can hear?

Cause I'll go talk about it there, instead, if you can make a solid case for it accomplishing the same thing.

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Also, a lot of this "this platform is unethical!" stuff has a lot less to do with ethics and a lot more to do with what affect people are craving. This has to do with like, influencer authenticity and affect theory. (Both real things people take real time to study, not terms any person can 100% fully understand the first time they hear them.)

A lot of folk think it's ethical to be mad, and so they don't like places like Substack because it makes people feel good about being mad - which is calming, not maddening.

They do like places like Fediverse.

This has less to do with corporate ownership and more to do with genre formatting: certain affective registers are easier in some forms of writing than other, simple as that.

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It makes folk real mad when I say plainly, "I use Fediverse to incite anger, and I use Substack to soothe sadness, and that, more than anything, determines what I post where,"

Because it rejects a lot of the common framings about what's valuable about what, on the Web.

But if you wanna see things differently, declining to look at them the way you always have - even if you aren't sure you'll like the new way of looking at them - is a start.

Also y'all know that Mastodon and related softwares were developed with grants and such from a bunch of corporations? I know it feels nice to think of this place as cobbled together by a bunch of trans catgirls living in squatted basements, playing Stardew Valley while they 3D print hydroponics equipment, but it was actually cobbled together in convention centers by underpaid white cishet men being promised prestige (and not really any more money) if they could standardize Internet alterity.

And, I feel like, I should highlight that they developed the software into what it is today over the direct and well-formed objections of many many people, including quite a few trans catgirls, one of whom I know did squat a basement and 3D print hydroponics equipment. Dunno their games.

There were also a lot of other folk of various marginalized/invisibilized positions that tried to influence the software (and thus platform's) direction, and they (like me with my critique of Kass) followed the rules of the industry.

But they didn't follow the invisible rules that determine, software needs to make users feel certain ways, and it's those "feeling rules" and the related affective economy that were really what Mastodon et al. were cultivated to industrialize, not any values rooted in anything else.

If I remember correctly, the current alt-text stuff was planned and developed (in a slightly different way) by some independent developers, and repeatedly denied.

Then there was a grant available for increasing accessibility (I think it was Samsung + Google?) and suddenly the same features were worth implementing and bragging about!

(Hey wait, Samsung and Google? The same companies that work together on lots of AI image recognition stuff? Well, let's nevermind them paying folk to label their images and feel like they're moral for doing so...)

[edit to add: I am in favor of alt-text, generally speaking. That is, I'm generally against platformized Internet, but, since we have it, and must use it, I'm for alt-text. But I'm not ignoring the mechanical consequences.]

Anyway going back to the idea in OP, I wanna connect this to an idea I know from Indigenous resistance, which is basically, people will grift: go to a space where the meaning of something isn't established, and establish it as meaning something that benefits them, not necessarily something true.

Right now, weird discursive purity, combined with an over-reliance on institutional dialectics, is combining to mean that the left, especially anarchists, is being completely re-defined in some spaces. Like, if you don't know about "leftist postliberalism," and how that's mostly a euphemism for a certain brand of Catholic ecofascism, and that this is becoming an increasingly prominent idea on commercial Websites, where most people hang out...

...then you're not going to know that when you talk about mutualism to your coworker, they're thinking about Augustinian virtues, not Bakunin.

And you'll end up having a very agreeable conversation appreciating the beauty of the hyperobject that emerges from your polysemic discourse, but that's what the conversation will be: a sequence of mutual feeling-toward-concept.

To explain why this isn't great I'd need to dive into concepts best situated by schizoanalysis and governmentality, but: Checking that people mean the same things with words, not just feel the same way toward those words, is important in avoiding letting what a word "feels" like becoming its sole meaning, which is important in allowing for difference between your own world and others.

Why that is important is kind of a big ethical claim I'm making a priori that has a lot do with, not being a selfish asshole, and explaining the nuances of what that means can be even more complicated, lol.