Why I’m Using Substack “Notes” Sparingly and May not Use it At All Going Forward

Notes Seems Less Impressive as the Days Go By

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

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I agree: So far, Substack Notes is superior to Twitter.

Mainly I say this because, unlike Twitter, again so far, there isn’t the general grotesque, toxic feeling you get when on the other app. That said: Given contemporary human psychology, and what we know about “the madness of crowds,” aka about social-media-driven group think, nasty, ruthless angry tribal diatribes wherein entropy occurs more rapidly than waves crashing on a random shoreline, I’d say it’s only a matter of time. Give it a few months.

But also, if I’m being fully honest and responsible and self-aware: There’s simply The Problem of Michael. Aka: The Problem of Myself. Like all of us (to varying degrees) I have an ego. Clinging between the Id and the superego, I sometimes react to things online childishly, and sometimes calmly, rationally and wisely. I think more or less all of us are to some degree affected by this unconscious conundrum.

The problem, for me, with Notes or Twitter or anything like it, is that it doesn’t provide a space for deep intellectual thinking. The reward systems seem to be very simple: Press a big, easy orange button, get the appropriate response from the clan or tribe who agrees with you. Whether you stand on the political left or the political right; this just sounds egregiously boring.

One thing that got me to join Substack from the start—I began my publication in late August, 2022—was the idea of providing a space for serious writers to write what they wanted to write without the culture of censoriousness we’ve increasingly witnessed on the cultural and political left. Now, I criticize the left far more often than the right because I am of the left myself. My theory is: Take care of your own house before criticizing someone else’s. Yes, the right has done some awful things—catering to Trumpism, January 6^th, defending January 6^th, election denial, the vast overreaction to “Wokeism,” state-sanctioned book-banning, fighting their own brand of [often white] identity politics, etc. And yet: It’s clear to me that, since around 2015, when Trump first descended that elevator and talked about Mexico and Mexicans in racist, non-flattering terms, the left has become captured by its fringe, most extreme wing. Since 2020, this has only expanded and grown worse.

Anyway. I don’t want to get into a boring, nihilistic left/right binary discussion. Click here for my book banning essay criticizing both sides, with plenty of articles, facts, links, etc.

Rather, my point in bringing up the political angle is that, as a classical liberal who still stands more or less where the party did circa 2015/2016, and as a writer published in traditional literary magazines and journals, a white straight male producing content online and physically, I was feeling more and more constricted as far as what material I could write, how honestly and openly I could cognitively explore on the page, and what, basically, I was “allowed” to say.