Sam Kahn on a fête worse than death

This is a very good post. Thank you for being so civil. And this actually helps to clarify a lot of the points of disagreement - which just goes to show how great Substack is! I may respond at more length, but I think those are both very smart points about the differences of influencer/institutional modes and describing Substack as largely 'parasocial' performance - which is a nice way to put it. I do know, for instance, that a short story or a substantive essay I post on Substack is going to do less well than a piece in which I pick a fight with Becca Rothfeld - and that is a kind of unfortunate feature of online discourse. Certain kinds of institutions, like universities and newspapers, have standards that compel them to put out work even if that work isn't going to be popular - and you're right that that's a valuable endeavor. And sorry if I overreacted to jokes in your original piece. So I guess the point of disagreement is basically just optimism/pessimism about this platform. And I really am very optimistic. I do think that institutions like your employer have real structural problems that are essentially unfixable - and there's a bit of a tendency as legacy institutions struggle to accommodate to the digital era to sort of blame digital space for their woes. (To some extent, at least tonally, your piece participated in that mode of thought.) And then I just think that Substack - or the blogosphere in general - represents a thrilling new thing in the world. There just never, ever, has been the possibility for so many people to express themselves without constraint - and I can't think of any reason why that shouldn't be celebrated. The fact that so much content on social media isn't very good - and that goes for this platform as well - is, I would tend to think, more a matter of failure of imagination that an inherent limitation of the form. If we believe that a form like this is only good for snarky tweet-type posts, then that's what it will be. If we try to bring our best work here, though, than I think we may be pleasantly surprised by the results - and that's been my experience here so far fwiw. Cheers, Sam