Hello again everyone. A quick reminder, I’m one of the writers at a new variety magazine cranking out 3 drops of excellence week after week. Variety and quality are our watchwords, and we hope you’ll incorporate our magazine into your relaxation routine!
Alright, we are going to talk about the simple fact that words cost money.
I've been trying to get my head around current written culture currently. Economic issues, supply, demand, bandwidth, keep coming up over and over, especially on this wonderful ecosystem you are currently using. I and many like me have struggled to find the modern path forward for those who feel they are called to craft culture with words.
It always seemed like we were looking back at some other world, a better world really, where it was easier in many ways for an author to impact the broader culture with their pen. Now I am fully aware that much of this nostalgia is misplaced. Simple golden age thinking that often struggles to deal with the reality of what the past was really like. I no longer wish for the era of gatekeeping institutions to return to dominate the written page. I'm glad that we live in a new wide open-range frontier of all-you-can-publish-or- read insanity.
But I think that it's time that this internet boomtown began to settle down a little bit, put up some houses, build some fences, and maybe even hire a sheriff and a preacher or two. The frontier always reaches points of stagnation, then acculturation and stabilization.
I see our current period as one of these.
It's time for us to look around, see the revolutionary concepts that aren't going anywhere, and then discard the things that really aren't working for us that well. And you know what seems to me the biggest harmful remnant of the internet explosion?
Free.
Free is currently harming internet written culture.
Words are not free. Words should never have been free.
The work of inscribing your thought, of externalizing your soul in ink-and-paper ice to be thawed out in contact with someone else's soul, is a curious mix of art and commerce. And it is not one that comes without cost. Therefore, it ought not to be one that can be obtained without cost.
In the olden days of yore, anybody who wanted to obtain written entertainment or education or anything else for that matter, obtained it at cost. Newspapers, magazines, books, all of these things required some outlay, however small, by the eager reader. This fed a limited culture of reading. One could not read all the books, one couldn't even access many of the books, and therefore everyone constantly made fiercely individual, limited and metered choices about what they would and could take in. You could learn something about a person by the curious mix of magazines, books, and newspapers that they chose to bring into their life at cost. This wasn't all good, but it wasn't all bad either.
Now, along came the first era of the internet. With a seismic depth charge detonation, cost went to zero. Many people assumed this was forever. Many insisted that there would no longer be any way to charge for digital information.
I don't believe that anymore.
We are rapidly discovering that the cost never really disappeared. It was simply arbitraged away, hidden, by increasingly byzantine and disturbing networks of advertising, data farming, and just general snooping. The cost of a new hyperlibrary of information published each day is demanded in moments, privacy, and attention. These things are not limitless. We are limited beings. People don't like this world anymore.
When all of the information taps are turned on full blast, we are confronted by a deluge of information, unable to sort, understand, or truly enjoy anything. I believe the time is coming for a return to metered information. Information that costs something. Information that hits you in the wallet.
Do you know why?
Because this will force us limit ourselves by our own human boundaries.
I used to bemoan confronting my Substack inbox, filled with eager authors hoping for payment in exchange for their work. I'll never be able to read all of this wonderful paid content, I thought sadly. I can't afford it, and I don’t have time. Even the act of forcing us to use free email subscriptions for content on Substack demands at least some cost of us. Cost of mental space, inbox clutter, and attention. How can I continue to read all of the good things that Substack contains?
This is the wrong question.
Even if every wonderful, skillful, artistic author on this platform took away every paywall tomorrow, I could never hope in a thousand lifetimes to enjoy everything that they've created. And by forcing me to confront this fact, the return of paid written media and free subscription relationships demands me to choose what I most desire and encourages me to actually enjoy it. It builds into the process my support of the creators I most believe in. Letting go of algorithmically-served constant flows and returning to a buffet of selections requiring even tiny commitment forces choice. This is good.
It will limit markets, yes, but the previous era of free media wasn't, it turned out, actually going to benefit that many creators anyway. It created outsized benefits for the few who had the ability to leverage the algorithm and generating piddling amounts or nothing for everyone else. There is more opportunity in a truly free market that will allow each creator to make a case for why they should be one of the few and the proud to occupy your mind, to fill your heart with their words. That is a special thing and something that we need to stop taking for granted.
I can't read everyone's thought. I shouldn't read everyone's thought. I need to be more picky and more selective. And scarce words help me do that.
It's time to stop thinking in terms of limitless content.
It's time to remember that words aren't free.
Have a good day in the metaverse. Spend yourself wisely.
You make some excellent points about how cost drives selectivity. Although I haven't given the whole "free internet" thing very much thought, two points come to mind right away:
1) Substack in particular seems guilty of overhyped its own product to writers. But at ~50-60 $ per subscription, the whole Substack ecosystem seems unsustainable. That's the price of a subscription to a print magazine, which would give you access to a dozen or so writers. I am not able to afford subscriptions to as many s
Substack writers as I would like to support. Perhaps the way forward is micropayments?
2) it is, perhaps, time for enterprising individuals to poach good writers from the free internet and hire them to write for the new generation of print magazines. The blogosphere is a good place to sharpen ones skills as a writer, but at a certain point it becomes time to graduate to the next level.
Bringing a little life to Deadwood, eh?
In cases that have successfully been out west, as it were, I agree. If you have a claim to sell and stories to tell, it might be speakeasy time.