This week Substack rolled out Notes, a tool for sharing and commenting that bears a strong resemblance to Twitter, at least superficially. In a post announcing the new feature, the founders of Substack explain its purpose: “Notes will give [writers] the ability to recommend almost anything—including posts, quotes, comments, images, and links. Our goal is to foster conversations that inspire, enlighten, and entertain, while giving writers a powerful growth channel as these interactions find new audiences.”
Again, this sounds like Twitter, or what a naively optimistic person might imagine Twitter to be. While Twitter does occasionally ‘foster conversations that inspire, enlighten, and entertain’ the thing it does most consistently is amplify derangement. With views, likes, retweets, and algorithmic promotion it rewards the most strident, usually dumbest opinions on any particular issue. It rewards bad faith, misreading, and caricature. It rewards engagement above all, which means it particularly rewards anything that entertains idealogical allies while enraging common enemies.
This is a standard critique of social media, and I’m sure the creators of Notes will have it in mind as they attempt to balance spreading interesting ideas with virality as an end to itself, fostering open and sometimes critical conversation with limiting the impact of trolls, and so on. For an excellent, granular discussion of the specific features that could help Substack flourish as a broader information system, check out this post by Giorgos Terzakis and Nikita Petrov.
But I see another problem.
The Town Square
The promise of social media, at least as the version of it coming to Substack, is access to the very best ideas from anyone, anywhere, along with the ability to interact with the authors of those ideas. It will be the platonic town square (or bar or coffee shop or main street), a place to go rub shoulders with friends, acquaintances, and strangers, a place to bandy about ideas, make jokes and arguments, a place to hear the latest news.
Even if this perfect version is realized, a fundamental problem remains: to the extent that it works, it will likely do so in the same manner as not just social media but almost all online activity. That is, it will do so by supplanting life in the material world.
Online life generally and social media in particular are excellent at fostering an illusion of importance. It feels important to keep up with the latest news. It feels important to keep a finger upraised to monitor which way the fickle, ever-shifting discourse is blowing. It feels important to know what all those people in the digital town square are up to.
In reality, for all of us who are not navigating an active war zone or advising an actual policymaker, these activities are no more materially impactful and far less funny than reading The World of Jeeves for the fifth time. For the most part they are a dour preoccupation, and they will soak up our time and attention as readily as a never ending reality tv show.
If the goal is to make a new, hopefully less stupid form of entertainment, to be Twitter but less obnoxious and more interesting, Substack’s end point is easy enough to imagine. But if the goal is to solve the fundamental problem of social media, which would require making it something that has a symbiotic rather than parasitic relationship to actual, in the flesh social life, the path forward is unclear.
Inspire, Enlighten, Entertain
The framing I’ve laid out presumes that a real town square of streets, benches, bars, and diners is superior to the virtual town square. There was a time, not so long ago, when this would have self-evidently been the case. To take an example from my neck of the woods, back when every acre of viable farmland around here was devoted to dairy production, not just farmers but the owners of all the businesses ancillary to farming had strong economic incentives to keep up with each other, to discuss markets and cow health and planting schedules. If such conversations could happen over a beer or a cup of coffee, so much the better. As the small farms left, the need for this localized discourse went with them.
In other words, the geographically bounded meeting place’s loss of practical utility, in political as well as economic matters, facilitated the rise of the digital town square. Before the internet existed in any recognizable form these places had already become primarily for socializing, rather than for a mix of conversations of necessity and conversations of pleasure. When social media arrived, there was no bulwark of pragmatism blocking it from replacing in person interaction with digital interaction.
I happen to believe that this trade is a poor one for fundamental reasons. But it is also bad in that the only realm in which most of us can directly do anything to improve our own lives or the lives of others is in our own neighborhoods. When we allocate an excessive amount of our limited time to obsessing about world-shaking events and ideas we trade attempting to make modest changes for making no changes at all.
Even if the internet didn’t exist, revitalizing the local meeting place as a catalyst of more than exclusively social interactions would be worthwhile. Local politics are the most obvious area in which a few motivated individuals can have a real impact, but there are an endless number of other possibilities, from volunteering to hanging out with retirees to attending an art opening or concert.
To succeed at being a truly revolutionary form of social media, Substack Notes will have to entertain. But inspiration and enlightenment require more than reading, or even reading, Noting, and Restacking. They require disengagement with the virtual and reengagement with the material.
Practical Limits
I am skeptical that there is a way to square this particular circle, to make a functional social media network that encourages robust engagement with the physical world. All the incentives align against it. The virtual and the material seem to be in a largely zero sum relationship.
Nevertheless, here are a couple proposals.
1.) Let Writers Be Local
While it would not be particularly useful in places like NYC and San Francisco, where writers are thick on the ground, allowing anyone who chooses to opt in on location based searching could let both readers and other authors find regional neighbors. It would make it easier to gauge interest for local projects and cultivate a local conversation.
2.) Don’t Allow Notes on Phones
I know, it will never happen, and putting in such a restriction at the outset would limit the number of people willing to try notes Notes. But introducing a modicum of friction would make conversations at least marginally less stupid. And if Notes really takes off, not allowing it on phones would be good for the unquantified but large subset of users who are prone to obsessively checking social media to the preclusion of everything else.
These Are Bad Ideas
At least, I doubt they would do much to encourage the sort of fuller engagement with material reality that I believe to be critical to navigating not just social media, but to navigating the endless landscape of our technologically mediated world more broadly. The only way to have perspective is to have distance; none of us can see a thing if we spend all our time in using it.
I think Notes has a decent chance of being substantially better than the alternative, and I intend to try it out. But I expect it to be an improvement of degrees rather than a revolutionary advance in what social media can be.