Substacked to the max

Substack is now home to some brilliant thinkers, so it's a shame that subscribing to them all would bankrupt a small country

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This column has been running for over 30 years and has never felt like a chore. I garner ideas from problems with my computers, from films, websites, books and papers, and I note them down using some software tool that has changed repeatedly over the years - from Idealist to Google Keep, from saved HTML to Pocket, and now Instapaper. No matter how I record these ideas, the process is simple: I then write a few hundred words and then send a file by email to a publisher who prints onto paper using heat-set web-offset lithography. The publisher sells the result to you, and to advertisers, and pays me for writing it. That has always just been how the world works, and I've barely thought about it. In recent months, however, it’s begun to feel like a rare privilege, and that’s because I've started using Substack.

I opened my Substack account back in 2018 when it was a different beast altogether, intended for online self-publishing of lengthy works such as books with a builtin payment mechanism. I tried it with little success, eventually switched to Kindle and then forgot all about it. In the meantime, Substack expanded its features to include blogs, podcasts and Twitter-like short notes, before taking off like a rocket in 2025.