🏮 e6 // A web worth belonging to

e6 // a web worth belonging to

0:00

/2384.875102

1×

I have, once again, recorded a podcast episode where, during the edit and upload, I’m no longer sure to what degree I agree with myself. But I have so many of these unpublished soliloquies (too many), so I thought: heck, just release it. You will understand.

This podcast was made mostly in response to friends who find themselves in a bind: they know social media is bad and that they don’t enjoy it—yet they also feel obligated to participate and be seen. What I hope to offer here, to quote How to Lead a Quest, is an invitation to the viable alternative options that lie beyond the extractive capture of centralised platforms. And beyond the half-step measure that is Substack alone.

First—some quick updates

Thank you to the few hundred who joined my secret ‘pop-up’ museletter. That experiment has concluded, and I believe my brand new email address—fox@foxwizard.com—is now sufficiently warmed. I also revealed the working title of my next book there. 🦊

Tomorrow, I shall be sharing another podcast episode with you. It’s already recorded, and I’m in the midst of editing it now—except unlike editing my own monologues, this one has me laughing and grinning like an idiot. I think you’ll love it. Here’s a preview-tease:

Kindred Spirits—a popup-podcast of whimsy, whisky and wiles! Join John Anthony of Transcend and myself whilst we sip and talk shop (sans AI slop).

More on this one in the next museletter. I’m worried you’ll miss it as I will be sending it from fox@foxwizard.com ... In fact, I might even send two emails to you so that you have a heads up. This has been the most fun I’ve had on a podcast since forever. And I can’t wait to have you join us.

And now: back to imploring you to come frolic with me on the independent web. (Not that I’m fully there yet; I oscillate betwixt. But you can begin to venture and foray with me.)

An overview

I employed a shoggoth to summarise this one for you, which I have lightly edited for my own sanity. Here’s what this episode covers, along with references I allude to.

If you’re feeling disenchanted with social media...

Good! This is an apt response.

We are living in a technological coup, as investigative journalist Carol Cadwalladr asserts in her recent TED talk (released earlier this week).

It’s been a long while since I watched a TED talk, and this one was so refreshingly real. It felt like listening to a human with heart, delivering a vital message that needs to be heard. This is an act of infinite play; Carol is in service to the infinite game—no matter the cost to herself. She has all of my respect.

Watch, take heed, and be galvanised. And then, perhaps, you’ll understand why I am so reticent to encourage friends to sacrifice more time, energy, attention, and talent into ‘creating content’ for these extractive surveillance platforms.

The tyranny of convenience

The historian Timothy Snyder, in his book On Tyranny, reminds us that authoritarianism doesn’t just arrive all at once. It creeps in through apathy, convenience, and acquiescence. Today’s centralised web is fertile ground for that kind of creep.

This has me recall a piece from a few years ago where I began to see the limitations of ‘solarpunk’. Even as an advocate for the sensibilities of solarpunk—and the call to move quietly and plant things (as distinct from moving fast and breaking things, like what we are seeing tech do to democracy)—I’ve come to find that lunarpunk is a necessary complementing force.

On the topic of antimemes—something I am oddly ‘seeing’ all over the place now (but are we actually seeing what needs to be seen?)—here’s a quote from an essay on Memetic Warfare, pertinent to both Carol Cadwalladr and Timothy Snyder’s warning.

“Privacy has been hijacked by a sophisticated anti-meme. This anti-meme is so powerful and has been spread so masterfully that it has redefined the entire privacy memeplex, even orientating entire classes of privacy developers in its service.

The anti-meme says:
Why do you need privacy if you're not doing anything wrong?

The basic impulse of the anti-meme is to align privacy with criminality. This memetic connection flourishes in a world in which surveillance is already totally normalized. It makes denying surveillance through privacy tantamount to a criminal act.

To say that the anti-meme has put privacy on the back foot would be an understatement. It's a psychological hijacking of the privacy memeplex that tricks us into a surveillance death-trap.

[..]

Privacy is Normal is the flip side of anti-meme reaction, the side that says No to the narrative that privacy is for bad people doing scary things.

[...]

The implication is privacy is something day-to-day and average. Actually, it's surveillance which is the aberration. Privacy is Normal, surveillance is for bad people doing scary things.”

Just to be clear: I’m all for transparency, openness, and trust—but such things need to be mutual and generative. One must demonstrate trustworthiness in order to be worthy of trust. Have our politicians and the corporate oligarchs they serve demonstrated this trustworthiness? I’m not so sure.

Privacy ought to be normalised and respected. This is something web3 developers have been working on—but of course, such developments have had shade cast upon them.

A better internet is possible

It was so much nicer back in the early days of web1. So innocent and authentic. Naïve, yes—but generous too.

Back in the days of web1, people made websites because they wanted to share something. Hypertext Markup Language was handwritten. Blogs were personal. Forums were weird and alive. There was no algorithmic feed, no dopamine metrics, no surveillance capitalism. The prevailing philosophy was to make everything free.

But when things are free, and scale is rewarded, the incentives come indirectly. What started as a free web slowly became an ad-driven one. From there, it became something else entirely: web2.

Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn made it easy to create and share. Suddenly, everyone could post. But the tradeoff was centralisation: you no longer owned your audience, your connections, your data, or your tools. You rented them from platforms whose priorities could change overnight.

These platforms, shaped by power laws and VC incentives, reward conformity. Some topics on some platforms are actively censored. Other topics go weirdly viral. But we don’t know exactly how or why—because it’s hidden from us. And so we’re left guessing as to what will and won’t be rewarded by The Algorithm.

Over time, these centralised platforms shifted from serving users to extracting from them—what Chris Dixon, author of Read. Write. Own. calls ‘platform capture’.

It starts as empowerment, and ends as enclosure. Audience capture, algorithmic capture, platform capture. One way or another—you’re going to get captured.

Unless…

1) You keep your wits about you.
2) You think: independent web first.
3) You maintain cognitive defences.*

* More on this below.

In response to the tyranny of web2, web3 emerged with a simple premise: let people own the digital spaces they use and help build. Instead of platforms, you build on protocols—shared infrastructure that no single company controls. You keep your identity, your data, your creative output. And if the app changes, you can leave—with your audience (and all of your connections) intact.

But! Protocol development is hard.* It requires deep thinking around incentives, governance, resilience, and interoperability. The most promising future lies in building protocols as public goods—maintained by communities, not corporations.

* And: the space is still fraught with peril. Some wholesome progress has been made, but it is dwarfed by the grift. It really requires keen sensemaking to find your way to what works. And even then, you have to keep your wits about you.

The “Summer of Protocols” is an open initiative looking into protocol development. Around this time two years ago I was tentatively optimistic about the space. That optimism has waned a little—but there still remains some merit amidst the mess.

Farcaster is a ‘sufficiently decentralised’ social media protocol. I’m on warpcast and the people are nice. Bluesky is also on the road to decentralisation (but it’s not there yet). Mastodon.social is wonderful (and has an inspiring set of ground rules). And Ghost (the platform I run this site and newsletter from) is integrating with the ActivityPub—an open, decentralised social networking protocol. This is lowkey quite a big deal, and still: early days. You can glean more insight from this interview with the Ghost ceo John O’Nolan (who’s described as ‘an inverse Peter Thiel’, ha).

But the real flex...

... is wholesome activities offline. Manu Moreale—a writer and web designer who hosts People and Blogs and Ye Olde Blogroll—recently wrote about online counterculture.

[...] “The way I see it, the true online counterculture is not to join Mastodon or Bluesky. That’s just a different spice of the rotten experience that’s social media. True online counterculture is rejecting social media altogether. [...] Counterculture is spending time making zines and sending them out to 10 people across the globe, rather than posting shorts on fuçking TikTok. Counterculture is sharing things you’re passionate about not because you plan to make a living out of it but because you believe connecting with other human beings is important. Counterculture is forming online bonds with 20 people you get to know over time, rather than amassing hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram.”

This is something I hope to rekindle with The Rekindling someday. This was our gathering of contemporary ‘druids’ (my term) to discuss and deepen over post-doom sensibilities for the collapse-aware. It was a haven-salon for the post-tragic amongst us who:

• aren’t in denial of the metacrisis and its related ecological crises and economic crises and wars; and
• aren’t naïvely grasping for technological ‘solutions’ to ‘fix’ the metacrisis, nor placing undue faith in eco-modernity and the same paradigm to see us through; but
• are acutely attuned to the importance of this time that calls for a paradigmatic shift in how we live and lead our lives.

These were intentionally offline spaces. So: no recordings* and no photos. It was/is a ‘real flex’; it scales only via this museletter, warm connections, and word of mouth. (I’ll let you know when the next one is—don’t worry—and yes, we’ll do some online ones for all my friends scattered across this planet too).

* Except one recording, that might come one day.

Terrible segue, but—

What about Substack?

Substack is a half-step in the right direction. It’s web2.5 in that it’s much like web2—only you get to export the list of subscriber email addresses. Otherwise, it’s still a centralised platform backed by venture capitalists.

I think of it like a shopping mall. I don’t like shopping malls—too loud, too many people, too many downlights. But it’s convenient to have everything in the one place. And besides: a lot of people I deeply respect and admire hang out in the shopping mall that is Substack. If you’re a department store, or you’re just starting out, Substack can be great. It’s centralised and super convenient. And, frankly, it’s better than legacy social media platforms.

But—that’s a low bar. And if you’re going to make the leap, why not go all the way and have your own independent publication on somewhere like Ghost?

Here’s a post on Migrating from Substack to self-hosted Ghost that might convince you. Cathy Sarisky can help you (as she helped me).

And there are other options, too: hugo and eleventy if you have technical skillz. Or write.as, micro.blog, bearblog.dev, or flowershow.app—coupled with buttondown for email. You have many options.

I was early to Substack, and I still maintain a light presence there. I really loved the original vision; it was focused on writers.

But when Yanyi (a writer and poet we admire) shared why he was leaving Substack, it became clear to me that writers would not be protected from anti-trans hate speech. “I can no longer stand aside while a small tech elite hoards the knowledge to be technically autonomous from those who need it most,” Yanyi writes. “I choose to believe that we are still capable of building a different kind of world, one not locked into choosing between lesser evils. I am, at the end of the day, a writer and technologist invested in a world with more imagination. A world in which the survival of my friends is not a luxury but a baseline.”

What was it that Geralt of Rivia said?

“Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference. The degree is arbitrary. The definition’s blurred. If I’m to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all.”

Hence: the move to a more independent web. I left Substack just over two years ago, bringing the museletter to Ghost on April Fool’s Day 2023. (Not that I believe in ‘Evil’ with a capital ‘e’).

Later that year it was revealed that substack has a nazi problem. I don’t like nazis, fascists, Holocaust deniers, genocide apologists, labels, or anyone advocating for racial supremacy. I know this is the world we live in, and if you want to jump into the arena you’ll need to contend with all sorts. And there’s a higher part of me that seeks to weave better relational dynamics across all perspectives.

But—do I want my shopping mall cubicle to be positioned next to a nazi storefront? Hell no. Not even in the same building. Do I want the mall owners to benefit from promoting such content to my readers, and profiting from the subscribers of hateful content? Also: no. (I’m exaggerating to make a point—it’s probably not that bad {is it?}—but the warning signs are there.)

The nazi problem was enough for Casey Newton to move his publication, The Platformer, with its 150,000+ subscribers over to Ghost (you can read Why Platformer is leaving Substack but the tl;dr is “we’ve seen this movie before—and we won’t stick around to watch it play out”). In a post describing everything that happened after we left substack, Casey shared:

“When we learned about the extent of far-right extremism, Hitler worship and Holocaust denial on Substack, you pressed us to investigate. And when we published our findings, you overwhelmingly encouraged us to find a new home on the web. 

During this time, I talked to several high-profile writers who collectively make millions of dollars writing on Substack. Their readers were also asking them to leave, too. In the end, almost none of them did. They bet that they could simply put their heads down and wait for the controversy to pass. And it worked! 

Substack’s nazi problem continues, but the news cycle has moved on. I suspect it will swing back around eventually.”

When I look to the landscape of my professional colleagues, I find the level of political and moral apathy absolutely staggering (bar a select few). It really made me so sad for so long. But I’ve also come to recognise: moral ambiguity is so much better for business. And besides, people are too busy to look into any of this or care (thanks, capitalism!). Convenience trumps ethics.

This is the platform trap.

Still, I’m glad for my move, and heartened to see others wisen up. Hence my advice to friends: break the spell & join the independent web.

And if you currently have a publication on substack, at the very least: Don’t call it a Substack. “Imagine the author of a book telling people to ‘read my Amazon’,” Anil Dash writes. Further, he asserts:

“Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators' work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable.”

John Gruber disagrees with this sentiment.

“I know quite a few people whose opinions I admire who feel the same way as Dash here. I’ll disagree. I think Substack sees itself as a publishing tool and platform. They’re not here to promote any particular side. It makes no more sense for them to refuse to publish someone for being too right-wing than it would for WordPress or Medium or, say, GitHub or YouTube. Substack, I think, sees itself like that.”

Sure, this is true. But there have been opaque advances and other incentives to attract certain writers to the platform. And when they decided to move towards integrating algorithmically generated feeds, gamification (rankings, badges, subscriber counts), and soon TikTok-like video reels, it’s clear: it’s not just a publishing tool. It’s a platform. And it’s not neutral (nothing is)—even if they might like to pretend to be.

Still, whilst John disagrees, in his piece titled Regarding – and, Well, Against – Substack he explicates that this is a platform trap. He offers the following advice:

My advice to any writer looking to start a new site based on the newsletter model would be to consider Substack last, not first. Not because Substack is a Nazi bar, which I don’t think it is at all, but simply because there are clearly better options, and the company’s long term goal is clearly platform lock-in.

Joan Westenberg, in her piece titled Why I Won't Write on Substack, offers the following conclusion:

No platform is ever truly free. That applies whether we’re talking about TikTok, Google, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook – or Substack. And if you think to yourself, this time, it'll be different, good luck to you. It might not happen today, it might not happen tomorrow, but sooner or later, you're going to get fuçked.

Tyler Denk explicates in Death by a thousand substacks:

“The problem? As I alluded to above, the incentives between publishers and social networks are entirely at odds:

Lack of ownership. Social platforms act as gatekeepers, owning the relationship with readers while sidelining publishers.
Algorithmic dependency. Distribution becomes unreliable as platforms shift priorities to serve their core interests.
Erosion of brand identity. Social platforms homogenize content and experiences at the expense of publishers’ unique identities.
Lack of data and analytics. Publishers receive little meaningful audience data, restricting how they understand and engage with their audiences.

Anyone who has interacted with the Substack platform might recognize these shortcomings — but make no mistake, these are deliberate features, not bugs.

Substack is deploying the classic social network playbook: Gradually eroding the ownership, identity, and independence of writers on the platform. From Substack’s perspective, this makes perfect sense — it may be the only way to justify its lofty 2021 valuation.”

Alan Jacobs offers this succinct sentiment:

“[...] every Substack user needs to realize that (a) Substack writers are not truly independent, (b) Substack will almost certainly undergo enshittification, and, therefore, (c) anyone using the platform needs an unenshittifiable backup.”

So—is Substack really as bad as I make out? No, not at all. Maybe? It’s still better than web2.

And remember: so many people I respect and admire are on the platform. And they are smart and lovely people, being actually effective instead of whatever it is I’m doing. Substack is not ‘evil’—it’s just that some of us are familiar with the pattern and can see where the incentives lead. And my hope is that those who use centralised platforms know what they are doing, and do so with both eyes open.

How to both/and this

Much as I would like to, it often isn’t feasible to completely abandon mainstream social media. That ship might be sinking—but it’s a big ship, and there are still so many people on board (many of whom are my clients). It’ll take some time before it properly sinks. And so, for those of us who can see beyond the convenience and the network effects—those of us who can see through the spell, and know a more wholesome web is possible—must act as ferry-people. We must oscillate betwixt.

It’s as I say in the podcast: it’s okay to have a presence in such spaces (if you must)—but build your home somewhere more reliable.

Investigative journalist Dave Troy offers the following advice to readers and creators on substack.

“Pro-democracy creators currently publishing on Substack should be cognizant of the fact that they are operating behind enemy* lines, and that the company's backers are antagonistic to your goals. Be sure to export your subscription lists early and often, as there is no way to know when this feature may be removed or curtailed. Assume the worst.

Readers engaged with creators on Substack should be prepared to migrate to other platforms on a moment's notice — and be generous with your support, especially during any transition. Exit is costly and difficult, and your relationship with creators you care about is paramount. You may also wish to send this article (and others linked below) to creators whose work you value; they may not be aware of the dilemma yet — though many are, and don't know what to do about it.

People looking to launch new content sites now should avoid Substack entirely because of the substantial risk of capture. Ghost, especially when self-hosted, is a much more open (and less expensive) option. Wordpress is also a very workable alternative, but has recently been mired in its own controversy over aspects of its governance.

Those who value democracy should steer towards adoption of designs built on the open web and internet. Walled gardens with impressive network effects can lead to short term gains, but they almost always come at the expense of long term sustainability, openness, and freedom.°”

* Part of me likes the notion of ‘operating behind enemy lines’—much of my work is with activated sleeper agents—but I don’t believe in having ‘enemies’. There is no us-and-them, not really. There’s just the all-of-us and how we can collectively co-create a world more curious and kind (and a future less grim).
° I have allergies to both the individual words ‘freedom’ (too reckless and self-serving?) and ‘responsibility’ (too serious and self-sacrificing). But when the two are combined, they alchemise into something wonderful.

So! The thing is: be prepared, and be patient with folks making their transitions. Having done it myself, I can attest: it’s a pain. I mean, exporting emails is easy. Exporting content whilst preserving links? A lot trickier.

One person that is doing this well is Yancey Strickler. Yancey has his ‘home base’ on Ghost. This is where posts are first published, before being mirrored across to his profile on substack (likely with canonical links pointing back to Ghost). It’s a bit messy, as you’re running with two lists. But it also means: he has a secure and genuinely independent home base for his writing, while also benefiting from the exposure and network effects of Substack.

I have to sit with myself a little longer in order to figure out how best to play this. I am, after all, still a mercenary wizard. Complicit yet conflicted. I need to be visible and ‘top of mind’ for folks seeking my services. I need to make hay where the sun shines. Which means: I still need my web2 (and web2.5) presence. Seemingly.

So, let’s see. At the very least, to the handful of friends who have asked me about this, I hope this might encourage you to invest in something for the longer-term. You can be a part of co-creating a web worth belonging to. And you can quietly tend to your own temple—whilst still visiting the various walled town squares as needs be.

Perhaps it starts with a deeper enquiry into what you’re actually about. If you are purely looking to hack your way to greater reach and profit—much of what I have to share likely won’t resonate.

But if there’s something deeper at play, you can make money without becoming  what W. David Marx describes as a ‘double sell-out’—“Creators who produce market-friendly content to achieve fame—and then use that fame to pursue even more commerce-for-commerce's-sake.” They further write:

“If we want different outcomes, we can change the norms, which conveniently costs no money. If we want culture to be culture and not just advertorials for a sprawling network of micro-QVCs pumping out low-quality goods, an easy step would be to re-shift the norms towards, at least, “Don’t be a double sell-out.” This is already a quite generous compromise in that it blesses artists to be conventional to stabilize their income and try to win over large fanbases. But this esteem must be given on the promise that the money and fame are used in pursuit of artistic or creative innovation. Double sell-outs don't deserve our esteem as ‘creative’ people. They should be content with the reward they chose: the money extracted from fans who snap up their mediocre commodities out of parasocial loyalty.

The challenge for our times is to locate and elevate the artists using their platforms for art and other social goods rather than just securing further personal profit. Every time we don't condemn the double sell-outs, we're insulting those in pursuit of what used to be the clear goal: to move culture forward.”

Ha, I’m not sure it would be fun or nice to ‘condemn’—but we can be intentional as to where we direct our attention.

A quick note on cognitive defences

I mentioned this in the podcast and couldn’t quite find where to include it above.

Peter Limberg, on substack (lol), recently wrote a piece on Digital Entities, AI Parasites, and Cognitive Security. As someone concerned about homogenised intelligence, this resonated.

There’s an allure to artificial intelligence. Not simply because it is fast and convenient. But also because it flatters you, mirrors you. And—it too is not neutral.

I’ve witnessed friends become AI-pilled. First they are sceptical. Then they start using it. Then they become AI experts and offer courses to teach others how to use it. If this were an entity seeking autopoetic memetic propagation—it’s doing supremely well.

Peter Limberg is one of my favourite writers, and a reason I remain conflicted about Substack. Here is one of the concluding tidbits of advice from his post:

Beware of “Centaur Thinking.” This is the fusion of human and AI thought in a way that shapes your creativity and decision-making. It often starts innocently as “brainstorming” with AI but can become a slippery slope where your most important ideas and choices depend on having a chatbot nearby. Centaur thinking can become AI thinking.

Uphold your cognitive defences.
Keep your wits about you.

Thank you for reading.

This museletter is delivered every whimsday. If you have a friend who might appreciate these insights, please forward this onto them, along with a little note.

They might also like to subscribe.

Warmth,
—fw

PS: I’ll be sending a fun new podcast episode to you tomorrow-ish. Please keep an eye out for an email from fox@foxwizard.com 🧡🦊
PPS: Still feel free to share this on social media—I’m not as pure as I pretend to be. If this resonated, any sharing is appreciated. 🫶