I have not been writing newsletters as of late. A few things happened that eliminated much of my free time, and then I grew to be disgusted with the Substack platform and decided it was time to close up shop there and move somewhere else. I downloaded my subscriber list and post archive and canceled my account with no real plan for where I would move my newsletter, but with an intention to start it up again. I am only now finding a little time to do that, so here I am now at Buttondown—a no-frills platform that doesn’t have the investor growth demand that was making Substack an increasingly miserable place to hang out as it kept implementing more “social media” like features.

I’ll say a little more about what sparked my decision to leave Substack so abruptly in a bit, but first, I’d like to give a bit of a personal update about what’s been going on and where my time has gone besides the newsletter. I also want to lay out some sense of what I might continue to do with this platform in case some of my old subscribers waiting on certain promised series decide to jump ship (no hard feelings).

A few things have changed about my work situation. For one, I started a new second job as a test prep tutor. I’m only working at this 5-10 hours a week, but getting my first students and getting through training has been taking a bit of time. I had to become the math person I’ve never been—somehow, I like math now. It’s not a bad gig; I like working one-on-one with students, and I have always enjoyed teaching.

The bigger change is that I have a new title at my main job (no raise, though), and with that title, new pressures to publish in academic journals. This has been the cause of particular consternation at work for me and many colleagues, as the university forced through a publication requirement for all NTT faculty in our contract negotiations. It is not a particularly heavy publication requirement: one peer-reviewed article every three years. But we are all being forced to publish in “Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.” The basic problem here is that so-called SOTL is a research field—and not one I have ever studied or worked in. It is not that there is no possible overlap with scholarship I have done, but it is a different body of secondary literature, journals, and publication norms. It’s a field that people study and rightly take very seriously. A lot of the pedagogy conversations in my research field are happening more informally, not through double-blind peer review publication, but that is all that will be accepted for my publication requirement. So, I have to figure out this field. Some colleagues have spearheaded a new digital journal in SOTL, and I’ve agreed to serve as an editor. I’m hoping to get a crash course. I need to start writing and sending off the scholarship relatively quickly, given academic publishing timetables.

I had started this newsletter as a way to cultivate my writing practice beyond academic venues. Now I’m being dragged back to those venues in a new field. I’m not thrilled, but I want to keep my job, so I will do the work, and I do have some research projects in mind, taking a far more critical stance on algorithmic capitalism in the classroom than I’ve seen thus far in pedagogical boosterism for AI adoption. Unfortunately, it means working less here.

Beyond this increase in my workload, there has been an ongoing medical situation in my wife’s family, and we’ve been doing a lot of driving to PA on weekends so I can bring her back and forth to help her family with care work. I’m happy to share more about this with any personal friends who subscribe, but I have a slightly larger subscription base now, so just shoot me a message.

All that said, I will have much less time to write here and will need to focus my reading more closely on my research and teaching. As such, I am abandoning promised projects on French New Wave and Critical Theory. So, if that’s why you are here, feel free to unsubscribe. I’m sad to do this, but it’s just not realistic for me at this moment to spend the needed time to do that work well. I suspect what I write here will be far more occasional responses to events, probably a bit more focused on politics and contemporary affairs, books, and essays than I have been in the past. The pedagogical research project I foresee right now is the aforementioned critical response to ed-tech AI boosterism. Out in the real world, people are probably sick of reading criticisms of AI, but you’d be shocked at how little common critiques are showing up in academic spaces. The university is increasingly captured by the very forces behind the AI bubble (private equity and tech platforms), and more dissent is desperately needed. I expect that work to show up here in some form. And I’ll try to keep better updates going for friends and family on occasion as a way to keep in touch, since I’m not anywhere else online.

Why I Left:

My qualms with Substack are many, but they might not be the ones you expect. I’m not a Bluesky-er. I don’t think it does those of us on the left much good to shut ourselves in an echo chamber in this critical moment. I don’t like that there are so many Nazis on Substack, but they are a lot less significant than the masked ICE agents kidnapping people on the street in my neighborhood. I think we have to face the reality we are living in, and one of the great problems of social media has been how it’s trapped everyone in bubbles. I always appreciated that Substack was exposing me to opinions and ideas significantly more conservative than my own, and on balance, it was worth doling out some blocks to explicit racists to have more diverse ideological content in my feeds. I know where my values and heart are. I’m not interested in more conservative points of view because of some false faith in the marketplace of ideas. But rather because I think our silo-ing in leftist/liberal discourse bubbles has been catastrophic in our ability to adapt, respond, and fight the rise of the far right in our time, not to mention building coalitions with people we might disagree with about some things to offer alternatives to authoritarian populism.

People object to Substack often because it “platforms” far-right speech and makes money from the growth of newsletters that are damaging and hateful. I used to more or less agree with typical left-wing arguments about platforms and speech, but I have significantly rethought my point of view on this issue, as many of us have. I will probably write it up at some point, but for now, I will say I think finding tech (or even old media) platforms that do not in some way materially benefit from the rise of far-right voices is self-marginalizing at this point. The world is not what we want, but we can’t retreat from it. We have to find ways to speak in a decayed and fractured public sphere that grifters and nazis dominate. Blue Sky is just us talking to ourselves.

Rather, I left Substack for personal mental health reasons, which are nonetheless connected to some larger societal problems with social media. I will admit to significant misgivings about Substack’s partnership with The Free Press just as it was becoming an openly genocide apologist propaganda arm of the Israeli state. There is a difference, in my mind at least, between simply letting people speak on a platform and making massive business and promotion deals with a transparent government propaganda operation trying to excuse war crimes. If you haven’t followed this story, Drop Site covered it at length here: The Free Press Called Out "Incomplete" Reporting on Gaza's Starving Children. Here's the Complete Story.

If there’s a hell, there’s a special place in it for people who look at famished children and try to deflect blame for their suffering onto congenital defects. Even Last Week Tonight saw the ridiculousness of this in their hit on Bari Weiss last weekend, which is worth watching if that name is new to you with her CBS News appointment.

But Drop Site itself is still publishing on Substack, because that’s the platform with the widest reach for their work.

The problem is me. Substack had implemented a Twitter copy-and-paste social media feed as their homepage called Notes. As a user, it is unavoidable. Even if you just wanted to work on your own newsletter and read others, you are constantly funneled towards it and pumped notifications from your Notes feed. There is no way to disable this function. The claim of the company is that the feed is there to aid in the discovery of new content and newsletters, but it’s quite obviously a monetization path doing the same data scraping and surveillance capitalism playbook as every other social media platform before it. It employs all the same addictive features of other social media platforms, including an algorithm that seems engagement optimized, an infinite scroll, and like buttons. Books like Stolen Focus by Johann Hari, and the ex-Facebook employees at The Center for Humane Technology have detailed how the choices to implement these features were driven by willful desires to addict users to their feeds because that was the path to monetization, and I don’t want to rehearse those stories here.

The issue is, I am an addict. The mix of social anxiety, political anxiety, depression, and loneliness I have experienced at different points in my life, left me very susceptible to this technology (and I am far from alone in this). As far back as high school, I was hooked on LiveJournal and instant messenger, spending all my time there instead of doing homework, reading, or productive hobbies like picking up the guitar. It continued in college, as my school was an early Facebook pilot school in my sophomore year. And while I avoided Twitter for many years, I sank in deep leading up to and during the COVID lockdowns. Whatever old Twitter was, I was there, with a large network of mutuals I never met, ranting into the void.

At some point, I realized how much of my life and focus was being absorbed by false lives, how little I had been doing things I love, like reading or practicing music, since COVID began, how much of a struggle it was to focus, and how little control I had over my usage habits. So, I made the decision a few years back to close all my accounts, and I never looked back. One of the best decisions I have ever made. I’m hardly alone in this, but I encourage it.

When I came back to something like social media with Substack, I was initially finding a better relationship with it. Substack posts were longer form, had more thoughtful ideas and patient analysis, and didn’t generate a constant feed of endless reading. It offered a daily, limited inbox of new posts to look through more intentionally, like I was reading a magazine. As Notes was getting rolled out, around the time I joined, it initially seemed supplemental to the main newsletter platform, and I thought, despite its addictive features, I could manage it for the benefits of having a Substack, which was rewarding to me.

I was wrong, I was an addict relapsing. And Notes was also transforming Substack into something quite degraded, an unholy mix of LinkedIn (the most depressing place man has ever created) and old Twitter; flame wars and engagement bait next to sycophantic performances of personal value and buy-in to the capitalist work ethic. And I was endlessly hate-reading it all. I tried to manage it by keeping it off my phone, but I have to spend enough time on my laptop for work that it didn’t really matter. And of course, I was posting, joining in with my own rants, desperate for those quick, empty dopamine hits of a like.

The awfulness of this as a way of existence and engagement really came home after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. It probably doesn’t need to be said what I felt about Charlie Kirk; he started as a McCarthyite making lists of faculty for Turning Point to target with institutional pressure to fire, and its readers to pelter with harassment and threats—and they still do that. So contra-Ezra Klein, I do not think he was doing politics the right way. But I honestly had not thought about Kirk much in recent years, despite his prominence in spreading MAGA on campuses—probably because they weren’t on my campus. (Although they will be soon).

Nevertheless, I am a teacher who lives and works on campuses, and I thought his assassination was as horrifying and traumatic as any shooting on any campus. Students should be able to learn free from the threat of violence erupting, and it shows how far we’ve gone that campuses are now at the center of a cold cultural war growing hot. Of course, Turning Point itself had helped set the stage for campuses becoming central ideological battlegrounds through its McCarthyism. Beyond that, it was obviously VERY BAD for the left on campuses: a creation of a “free speech” martyr for a rightist movement that was just starting to fray a bit under the strains of Trump’s constant failures to deliver a better life for anyone.

The nature of engagement-driven feeds is to throw the most outrageous comments into everyone’s face. So my feed, like many others, was full of celebrations of Kirk being killed. I was disturbed by this, and felt drawn in, anxious, wanting to point out that violence on campuses is bad, that we are fueling the right’s persecution complex, etc, even though I had no desire to defend Kirk’s legacy, like other liberals did. It made me miserable and anxious, and freaked out that this would in fact be a “Reichstag Fire” moment and fuel support for authoritarian crackdowns. It was so obvious that Trump, Stephen Miller, and the far right were hoping to cynically operationalize it for just this.

But then I said to myself, who are the accounts saying this stuff? They were anonymous nobodies. Some real people said things equivalent to “you reap what you sow,” and whatever your sense of how useful such smugness is in that moment (I said similar in private but not public, where you can always say nothing), it is hardly celebrating violence. It’s just the opposite. If you actually think through the logic of the statement, it’s a warning against celebrating violence, lest it be returned onto you. Not that this stopped right-wing mobs from braying for the blood (and jobs) of people who responded this way.

But if you looked through actual leaders, organizations, and public figures on the wide left, I could not find a single person celebrating or laughing at this killing (please send me examples if I missed someone). Nearly everything I read condemned violence and called it a tragedy, from staid Democratic Party figures to Jacobin.

Yet, my Substack feed had many posts celebrating the violence in some way and even more posts condemning those celebrations as if they were widespread in media and political organizations. But it’s just what people’s feeds looked like, because outrageous posts provoke engagement, get elevated, get responses, and drive monetization. Algorithms love them. The internet is a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters: some group of people will say any outrageous thing that might make you mad. But because outrage drives engagement, high visibility in the algorithms, and follower/subscriber growth, many reckless and cynical people of all political stripes have been iteratively incentivized to be outrageous. Arguably, Charlie Kirk himself knew this well and played this game with many of the things he said and argued in public.

An illusion was cast by the algorithmic infrastructure of social media of widespread support for terror and violence. How many times has this happened in the past? How many times will it continue to happen? The internet went mad with it, the right weaponized it in campaigns to seek out targets for harassment, the vice president encouraged them, and people indeed got fired and harassed. Can we not see how dangerous and addictive these online illusory dramas are, how they erupt into the real world, degrade our public life, institutions, and barrel us towards extremism and authoritarianism?

I was, like everyone else, miserable, sick to my stomach, afraid of crackdowns on speech and higher education, and disgusted by my own addiction to this diabolical machine that ultimately enriches so few people and makes so many of us poor and miserable, trapped in illusions and out of work, increasingly terrified of our neighbors and government. The fear of our government is warranted to an extent. Trumpism really is an authoritarian project, but stepping back from the hot house of social media feeds, it looks to me like it is not actually that successful, except in a few areas. Charlie Kirk became a martyr for the right, and certainly unified a fraying movement, but the rightist conquest of civil society and its institutions continues to get tripped up just by people saying no and not falling for the threats, and by a popular base of support for lower-case “l” liberalism that the right fails to perceive. I think John Ganz has been astute on how this has devolved into a war of position. If you are unsure about my claims above and think Trump has been more successful in his program than that, I recommend listening to this discussion with Dylan Riley, a scholar of fascism. You may not come to agree, but it’s the best articulation I know of where the Trump 2.0 project is running aground.

Roughly speaking, this is why I could not be on Substack anymore. For my own happiness and time, I have to stay away from addictive social media, and Substack has transformed itself into the same type of platform everyone else has always been. I still subscribe to Substack newsletters, but I filter them into an email folder and read them in my inbox, not on the website. You are only forced into Notes if you are writing your own newsletter on the platform. But I want to write, so I will continue here, hoping someday we will break the tyranny of the algos and get our brains back.

I have more thoughts about this, about the obsession of politics today with what happens in certain rooms at the expense of any attempt to build coalitions and transform society beyond those rooms. I’m borrowing some of this language and ideas from Olufemi Taiwo’s work on Elite Capture, which I highly recommend. And it’s probably a topic I will return to as the occasion provides. For now, I’m back, and hopefully will get to something of a regular posting schedule, but it will be significantly less ambitious due to the demands of my work life. Talk soon.