In a footnote at the end of an essay about aging, eternalism, and (um, I think) the unreality of time, the writer Sam Kriss dropped an observation that encapsulates one of society’s most annoying problems. “We are no longer comprehensible to each other,” wrote Sam, after 3,500 words that included a deft defense of Lena Dunham’s singular voice and a brief visit to a school of Buddhist thought that posits that the present, and therefore every graspable fact, is constantly being extinguished. I read the essay on Monday afternoon, after I had written a bad draft of a post that we intended to publish today about a package of work Substack has been doing to promote better discourse around the U.S. election. I had sent the draft to my colleague Fiona. Obviously, I was supposed to have written the piece well in advance, but I have a charming tendency to ignore writing assignments until the deadline has passed. Did she have any thoughts about it? “It seems clear and straightforward,” she texted. “It doesn’t stir any emotions. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.” That’s Fiona’s way of saying it sucks. I wasn’t sure I was up for improving it. Honestly, I am quite tired of writing and thinking about politics. Maybe it would be best to just blurt out a few perfunctory paragraphs about how some of the best political writing in the world is on Substack and then move on. Unfortunately, I was born with a conscience. I didn’t want to disappoint Fiona. “We are no longer comprehensible to each other, we inhabit different systems of signifiers, and all the mediating fantasies have melted away,” wrote Sam, in his little afterthought. Well, damn, I thought. That’s exactly how I think about the problem we are facing. As mainstream media has become more ideologically narrow, with each outlet speaking only to a cultivated perspective, and as social media has turned political discourse into a game with the greatest rewards going to those who can most spectacularly bash their opponent’s head against the wall in front of a crowd of braying supporters, humanity has been reduced to a seemingly infinite number of bands of political tribes and subtribes, each with their own language and purity codes, each dedicated solely to the inflation of themselves and their in-group members as The Most Righteous, a dynamic that teeters on the edge of a catastrophe should the most ardent of the online warriors risk logging off for even a few minutes so they can translate their febrile ravings into something akin to real-world action. (Come to think of it, you don’t have to look hard to find some very prominent names among their number who are trying to do just that.) Which is to say that the dominant media system’s incentives are busted. We no longer seek to understand each other. We are too busy shouting to even hear one another. No political statement can be made online without an “lol” or a “you do realize that” or “you are the dumbest person alive” in response. For nearly two decades, billions of us have been congregating on social platforms that mine our attention and sell it to advertisers. Through generations of iterations and refinements, these amazing tools, which were ostensibly built to give everyone a voice and help us feel more connected, have resulted in a system in which the ruling political philosophers are reply-guys, screechers, and memelords. I don’t subscribe to Sam Kriss’s politics. I’m not sure whose politics I subscribe to anymore, actually. But Sam Kriss can really write, and on his Substack, Numb at the Lodge, he can do so without limits and about anything he chooses in whatever style he pleases. “I would like to see if, in the belly of the dying internet, it’s possible to create something that is not like the internet,” he wrote in his first post. “I wonder if it’s possible to talk about things differently. Not rationally or calmly, away from the cheap point-scoring of online discourse—that would also be boring—but with a better, less sterile kind of derangement.” Sam’s essays are too dense to play well on social media, and he has made a point of turning off the comments and likes for his posts. He doesn’t tweet. The writing he seems to most enjoy doesn’t fit well in mainstream publications, so, even though he has plenty of traditional media bylines, when he does venture into foreign lands it tends to be to outsider journals like Compact, Damage, and The Lamp. But it’s only on Substack where you’ll find him slip into a turbulent daydream about “ante-Semites” jumping off a bridge into the Thames in the midst of a report from a mass protest. Only on Substack will you find his incisive cultural commentary on how Taylor Swift’s once-steadfast refusal to show her belly button plausibly implicated her as a 5,784-year-old demon: “The primordial ex-girlfriend, the ex-girlfriend who hissed the magic of the earth at the very dawn of time.” It’s only on Substack where you will find Sam musing, in a post-assassination-attempt love letter to America, that “it would have been very chic of Donald Trump to have died.” And it’s only on Substack where such a writer, in this moment of history, could make a good living from such work and, through delectable derangement, inadvertently highlight how perverse it is that we must live in a world where so much of our cultural debate has been hijacked by dreary old bores who shout in the cloud. On Substack, you can be a reader again. You can reclaim your attention, reclaim your dignity. You can spend an hour online and not have to feel disgusted with yourself. Just leave the Noble Voices, carnival barkers, and thread-boys to themselves in their little simulation. Leave the preeners, affiliate linkers, and brand-slingers to the perfect squares. Come, instead, to the place where demented poets and twisted intellectuals thrive on the support of those who seek something more nourishing than the weak gruel of profile-pic activism and I know you are you said you are. Read Sherry Ning (“I want memories that last in my mind like the crenulated imprint left by the band of my skirt”). Read Stella Tsantekidou (“I too am an unfuckable hate nerd”). Watch Patrick Hicks (“This is the story about the greatest comeback in music history”). Come for the old cranks, lapsed Tumblr girls, obsessed rationalists, uppity iconoclasts, and worshippers of the sublime. And, yes, come for the sharpest minds in politics too. They are all here—alongside Sam Kriss, who might accidentally say something smarter than anyone, in a footnote.
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‘A less sterile derangement’
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