This is such a helpful framing. I agree that economics and infrastructure are upstream of what kind of art and criticism can exist. But I keep wondering about a second upstream variable: the formation of taste. Even with better funding models, we still need publics who have the habits to seek out difficult work, reread, tolerate ambiguity, and reward risk. Otherwise new money just amplifies the same attention incentives. So yes to the two fronts you name, and I would add a third: rebuilding the conditions where attention and discernment are actually cultivated.
Thank you for reading! I agree and I think you're right to propose it as a third front (it's also the front that W. David Marx persuasively argues for in Blank Space!)…having a cultivated audience is really important, and it might mean that attention and money can then flow to the most 'deserving' works, which is to say—the most innovative, ambitious works.
This might be one of my favorite articles of yours. It felt like a walk down a lane that I was exploring last year, because I stumbled upon the Esquire article and the NYT Gen X article as well, while trying to find an answer to: how to "make it" as a writer while having a day job as a ghostwriter. "Become independently wealthy, and then make your art" and "Become an outlier" were the paths that appealed to me the most, but after years of working on the verge of burnout, I'm taking a step back to chill out and reassess what I really want from writing. But this post also got me thinking about the institutions and incentive structures in the art world.
I ran across a video featuring David Markovits recently – he's a professor who talks about the myth of meritocracy. He says that success has three ingredients: ability, effort, and training. While "ability" is randomly distributed and most successful people emphasize the value of "effort", the role of training is usually downplayed. But training is important. Training depends on access to resources, time, and even building an awareness that you can aspire to live a certain way – yes, anyone can learn to hit a curve ball, but a baseball pro's son who starts learning when he's three years old has a way bigger head start. Anybody can technically take a risk and "start a business," but an entrepreneur/billionaire's kid grows up with an intuitive sense of risk-taking and a safety net that most other kids would lack. Agency and the "you can just do things" ideology might work, but it's a trained skill. So yes, there's effort, but the institutions and structures that back the "training" give some folks an unfair advantage.
Reading your article, I feel like this gap could have accelerated in the artistic world over the last however many years – both on the consumption and creation side. People who develop a familiarity with the institutions of the art world – the networks, the aesthetics, what's hot and what's not, etc. – have a better chance of both appreciating art and creating art that's appreciated (Naomi Kanakia's article on what having an MFA means for your writing career taught me a lot about this). So there's a possibility that this world becomes an isolated bubble of its own, with a few people rising to the top in the bubble and the others reading them. I'm going on a limb here, but I'm saying the artistic world is becoming less democratic, and with the rewards not being proportional to the risk, fewer people have the safety net or fanatical passion required to stay in this world. Maybe there were a lot more people willing to take the risk of being Herman Melville/Charles Bukowski and there was a way bigger discerning readership back then – now the reward structure hasn't improved, but the risk has continued to grow.
"By limiting the number of people who can go to live in cities…we may also be missing out on the new ideas that drive society forward." Spot on. Unless there are institutions – like the London Review's underwriter – to support newcomers, the consumption and creation of art feels like an ideological battle in some sense.
And yet, it's worth doing. In some sense, this piece feels like a companion piece to your earlier piece – writing is an inherently dignified human activity – in which you talk about why art is worth making despite all the odds stacked against it. One uplifting thing about following your Substack is that I read pieces here and think they're so involved and deep that there must hardly be a handful of people who would be interested in this sort of thing – and then I see there are 30+ thoughtful comments and 200+ likes, which are insane numbers on Substack. There's still hope!
Very interesting take on "Nostalgia is not a strategy." "People who would have never made it into the inner sanctum of American culture — even at a defiantly countercultural publication like the Voice — can now, for the first time in history, publish from anywhere and reach an audience everywhere": This part reminded me of Ratatouille, which is one of my favorite movies.
RIP Aaron Swartz. One of my heroes. Also found Biggar very inspiring. Thanks for writing this.
Thank you for this incredibly thoughtful reply! I almost feel it deserves to be a post of its own, tbh…not hidden in the comments where fear not many will read it!
Your and Markovits's point about training is so crucial—I do think that ability must be refined and channeled in a specific way to achieve excellence, and often that requires training, and the best teachers and learning environments tend to involve a lot of institutional filters. A contemporary artist who does a Yale MFA is probably much better-equipped (and better-connected) than if they hadn't gone to Yale. And so much worldly success hinges on how people can strategically make their work and socialize their work…it's one thing to make something really amazing; it's another to put it in front of people who are tastemakers, who can start treating you like the next new talent, who can introduce you to other people and help you become an acclaimed mid-career artist someday.
This is very succinctly and excellently worded: 'the reward structure hasn't improved, but the risk has continued to grow' in pursuing an artistic/literary career.
I do think there is something profoundly rewarding about writing these newsletters and coming into contact with so many brilliant, generous, thoughtful people—it is something the internet excels at, and it's why I'm not particularly nostalgic about the past. There IS an intellectual life and a life of the mind available to us in 2026…we just need some of the supporting structures too!!
Except that not everyone can go to Yale and "tastemakers" are an exclusive club. There is such a thing as an autodidact and while that is not necessarily common, requiring training through the usual - unaffordable and exclusive channels - is discriminatory and elitist. People find their path and excel in all kinds of different ways, and this situation with schools being the only place which create an acceptable community with a supportive group of powerful people is just wrong. This is the beauty of the internet - it allows people with talent who never had access to those exclusive circles to create their own following and support. Creativity should NOT be determined on where you get your training.
Thank you so much for the kind words Celine! The article moved me so much that I had to write the comment. I actually cut out a lot of it for brevity haha.
"it's one thing to make something really amazing; it's another to put it in front of people who are tastemakers, who can start treating you like the next new talent, who can introduce you to other people and help you become an acclaimed mid-career artist someday." – 100%. I think this has been a struggle for artists, maybe since forever, but a risk that's possible in recent times is the access to an audience that could give you validation without deep engagement. e.g "Likes" on a low-effort post giving the illusion of engagement, when it "costs" the consumer of art nothing. Another system design problem.
Another sentence I really loved in the article was – "One of the most violent things you can do to a young woman’s intellectual development, I feel, is to convince her that she has to be a ‘math person’ or a ‘humanities person,’ and not both." (Agree!) As someone who loves both the technical world and the art world, I've struggled with trying to reconcile these ideas and felt frustrated by the ways people feel forced to slot themselves into one of these buckets. And I've also seen this gender association play out very strongly, at least in the society/culture I live in. Usually it's "guys-math, girls-art", or some variation of that, or at least the idea that you have to be one of these but can't be both. It also perpetuates this idea about the rigid, unpoetic way in which math and technical subjects have to be approached, which I think kills the romance in math ("A mathematician's lament" by Lockhart captures this angst – https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician's_Lament.pdf). This is a topic I'd love to see you write more about, because I think you inspire people to question definitions and rigid boundaries with your essays (I've shared your Agnes Callard essay with so many people to challenge their idea of what aspiration and growth are "supposed" to look like, for example). Would also like to read about the work you do in Climate Tech and how you navigated your career to get to where you are.
And totally agree that it's very rewarding to discover cool people on the internet with such diverse perspectives. I didn't realize it until you pointed it out, but reading these articles on Substack and making notes in the margins, commenting, going down rabbitholes, seeing themes repeat across articles, and writers evolve in their understanding of a topic etc. feels like having a conversation with a friend and having a shared journey in some way, and it's very rewarding.
We're all on a spectrum of missing out on something. Why is our missing out more important than the person below or above us?
Starving people in Africa are missing out on a ton more. I know it doesnt negate our current challenges. But I feel like no matter where you are on the ladder. You will always lack something and someone will always have an "unfair advantage" in some way.
I think the best way to handle all of this is to completely ignore all unfair advantages and solely focus on ones oppurtunities and abilities.
Doing the opposite hurts our creative energy and focus.
So much to ponder, but here is a thought off the top of my head about resolving the dilemma between "information wants to be free" and "writers deserve to be paid":
Something heartening I've seen here at Substack and in other parts of the internet are the writers who are making a making a full-time income, or a decent side income, thanks to the patronage model. Of course, this isn't the most stable model and it requires a lot of work upfront if it's ever to succeed (hence why you rarely see it recommended as a viable path in the creator economy). BUT. It's a real thing. There are people out there (including me) who are spending more money each year on supporting creators they care about than they do on Netflix. I guess that's unusual, but unusual is okay: the Pareto principle, or some form of it, seems to be the norm when it comes to source of income. A few generous donors, and a slightly larger amount of mini-donors/fans, can make all the difference and allow everyone else to read for free and help the writer grow by word of mouth. You probably won't be rich if you follow this path, but you'll have your basic needs met, which is what matters most to most of us writers.
PS. Of course, it's easy to argue that we don't see a lot of examples of the patronage model and therefore it's not truly viable etc., but the fact that we _do_ see it means that it's possible. And with things constantly changing and evolving and finding their footing, I like to stay hopeful.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment! It's so interesting you bring up the Substack subscriptions–versus–Netflix thing…many people frame this as, oh, it's so irrational for people to pay $50/month for 10 different Substacks when Netflix gives you way more! Or: it's irrational to do that when a New Yorker or Atlantic subscription gives you way more!
But I think this kind of calculation totally misunderstands the relationship between Substack writer and reader…it's much more intimate, direct, and invested than a relationship between a magazine and reader.
Precisely! When I give my money to a small publication or writer, it's not just because I love their writing but also b/c I know I'm making a difference to them and there is real satisfaction in that. That's an aspect of buyer psychology, I think, that gets overlooked.
The problem Substack (or someone else) needs to solve I think, is how do you build an ecosystem where brand new writers can rise enough to make a full time living.
As of now, my impression is most Substackers who make enough to live off of their writing alone either have a big following on social media, or were already successful journalists/writers.
I would actually LOVE for Substack (or some other creator economy analyst…firm…etc) to look into who's made a living off of Substack by converting an existing audience, vs who has essentially created a just-from-Substack audience.
I think the latter group is bigger than we think; Emily Sundberg (https://www.readfeedme.com/) is probably the most visible example, and Henrik Karlsson for a specific sector of in-the-know tech people (https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/), but there must be others.
Footnotes and Tangents is another great example; https://footnotesandtangents.substack.com/. Haisell recently was able to go full-time; he did a lovely interview with Sarah Fay about it.
I agree it's probably a bigger group than we think, and I suspect the biggest reason for that is "non-business" writers, by definition, aren't focused on talking about their income. They're too busy writing about the things that made us love them in the first place.
Agree that there's hope for readers supporting writers they care about and information that is useful to them. It's helped me make a living off of Substack, writing for American readers while living in India.
Want to add something here, though – purchasing power parity didn't matter when blogging was free, but it does matter when monetization enters the picture. A "reasonable" price for an American reader can be wildly expensive for Indians, even if the subject matter could be equally appealing. Over time, this shapes incentives – writers could start biasing their content for paying audiences. Maybe we need features to price differently for different regions of the world... or come up with some other way to encourage global patronage.
Yes, it's really sad. I was reading Sarah Schulman's The Gentrification of the Mind last summer, as part of my research for this essay (I ended up not quoting her directly, but the ideas in it definitely shaped me), and her description of the pre–AIDS crisis West Village culture, and what happened afterwards, is quite depressing
Love this essay. As a writer, I feel it. As a former magazine editor, I can see the difference in pay. It happened during my time working as a magazine editor. As the host of a podcast about magazines, well....there's hope. But no money. My podcast, The Full Bleed, is about "the future of magazines and the magazines of the future." Another podcast by our producers, Print Is Dead, is about "the golden age." The two could not be more different. One has discussions about expense accounts but also about the time and energy they would spend to "get it right." The other is about the hustle of creating a media in a post-ad supported age and the steep learning curve when it comes to distribution. I think The Full Bleed is far more inspiring. Because, you know, nostalgia ain't a strategy.
I'm really glad to hear that the economic arguments resonated with you (as I've not really worked in the magazine industry at all…I'm essentially an outsider!)
Also thank you for mentioning your podcasts—I'll just link them in case others are interested!
The Full Bleed, which has recent interviews with editors at Viscose Journal (such a great fashion criticism mag), Rest of World (really good reportage outside of the US/Anglosphere more generally), Cake Zine (beloved by all!!!!) https://www.spd.org/the-full-bleed
I would like to have been a writer but I've also loved reading and always come away from this with more to be excited about exploring. Also I really really liked Zhuangzi.
I've been so enamoured by Zhuangzi but I am also intimidated by the prospect of writing about it…I barely Get It though I am diverted and entertained…but very eager to hear what other people love about Zhuangzi!!
It took forever to figure out a response to this. Partly out of being unsure how to say something substantial but I can at least say that it has aspects of things I like and like reading about: poetry, wisdom literature, consciouness and even folklore without being any of those things. Its always engaging, and also I like works that are in multiple categories generally (but not only in genre).
Also do you happen to have read Elizabeth Hardwick's essays? I'd be curious to know what you think of her work if so, but if not the collected essays are worth getting.
It's also self-defeating, because if writers, critics, journalists, poets, even, made more money, then they would purchase more media and boost pay across the board. I wish I could subscribe to all the newspapers and magazines I want to read and buy all the books from independent booksellers, but as a worker in the same field, I can't afford to.
This is a really great point. Other writers, artists &c are very aware of the difficulty of Making It Work and always eager to support their peers! Which is really touching…but also stressful for people in more precarious situations.
One thing I’ve been thinking about (and actually wrote about, obliquely, in a previous newsletter: https://www.personalcanon.com/p/how-to-expand-the-market-for-literature) is how much the literary/magazine world would benefit from a wider readership, especially people not working in the field…it’s so meaningful to have that cultural cross-pollination, and there are a lot of highly-remunerated workers in other fields who can easily afford to have their intellectual life expanded, daily, by magazines arriving on their doorstep.
i'm really sad that the micropayment approach brave (which is now apparently a crypto-oriented browser??) tried which you put in however much $$ you wanted to a month and it paid it out based on which websites you visited and spent time on
honestly a part of me is like…maybe I should go back to my one true love, Reeder (one of the best Mac OS apps ever designed) and read everything through there
re: micropayments and splitting money across the people you read…I can't find the reference now (writing this comment omw to work!) but in either the latest No Tags volume (a podcast/newsletter/occasional book series from Chal Ravens and Tom Lea https://notagspodcast.substack.com/) OR a collection of Shawn Reynaldo's writing on electronic music (https://velocitypress.uk/product/first-floor-volume-1/)
—there's are mentions of an alternative Spotify revenue model, where the $10 or whatever you pay per month gets properly, equitably split between the people you're actually listening to, and without the distorted percentages that major labels have negotiated for their artists (which disadvantages indie artists)
An interesting idea, but don't you think that might create the incentive for artists to go for quantity over quality to capture attention share? It's kind of like Medium's model vs Substack's model, and it looks like Substack created a healthier alternative for writers in the end because Medium shaped the system in a way that incentivized you to keep grinding out content.
Celine, this is really interesting. I think, tying both the problems and the potential solutions back to technology, it would be interesting for people to try to make more technologies that enable more revenue sharing with artists (especially in this era of easy software making!); I also wonder if there is some expectation or culture one could cultivate especially among middle and upper middle class people that you “tip” your writers, like your waiters or Uber drivers, and that it’s simply not polite to not leave a dollar or two (split between the institution and the writer/editor) after you’ve read an article you enjoyed. I think that comes with the software piece – how do you actually have the broad infrastructure to do that — but could potentially be one viable path
Saffron! Thank you so much for reading; genuinely such a pleasure to read your latest work and be informed by your ideas, too…
I do think there’s a need to simultaneously establish new technical infrastructure and new social norms for artistic compensation. I’ve been really fascinated by the work @Metalabel is doing, and especially how Mindy Seu’s newly released book, A Sexual History of Internet, is using Metalabel to split profits across all the book’s contributors. This is obviously theoretically possible with other infrastructure, it’s just inconvenient…and I really think software shows, so obviously, that inconvenient things just don’t happen, and convenient things enter a positive feedback loop.
The tipping comparison is so interesting…I do think broadly there needs to be some re-normalization of paywalls, or other ways of making creative work less invisible. (I almost want to make some commodity fetishism argument here…we think of content as something plucked from the void, not produced by specific material circumstances and also constrained by them, and we forget that there is a person behind it all…)
As a musician and writer with a day job, there's a lot here that resonates with me! True that we will continue to make art regardless of economic value; true also that we continue to straddle the difficult line between accessibility of art-making (e.g., demoing at home in my bedroom) and its growing lack of financial support (see horrific pay rates from music streamers). I think the point made about growing audiences who want to engage in art that is "difficult," slower, more X than the mainstream, is especially sharp. I see this especially re: the way music and literary tastes are homogenizing via spaces like BookTok and music virality among independent artists. I like you have no answers, except to keep making and keep trying to find my people!
Thank you for reading! And I really want to write something about the pay structures in music/streaming soon…I’m not an expert, so it will really just be a compilation of what Liz Pelly (the writer of Mood Machine:The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist) + @Shawn Reynaldo + @No Tags have already written on this.
I do think that we’re reaching a kind of peak–social media, peak-streaming, peak-slop inflection point (or at least that’s what I’m manifesting for 2026). We recognize that music, and other art forms, are such subjectively and phenomenologically rich experiences that make our lives better; and we’re also realizing that the lean-back, let-the-algorithm-serve-you-a-song experience doesn’t let us access the transformative experiences promised by art. Audiences want the difficult, rewarding experiences imo! So hopefully there can be some kind of double movement where audiences seek it out, and cultural producers/distributers find ways to make it more economically viable.
> 8,000 francs in 1904, or about €3.5 million today
I think this conversion is wrong by a factor of 100, and it should say €35,000 today (a little under 37,000 according to the INSEE's converter, https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/2417794 ).
France replaced the old franc with the new franc in 1960, with one new franc equalling 100 old francs. The converter website you used appears use new francs regardless of year, with no sudden jump in 1960.
i feel like social media by creating a continuum series of impulses of fast satisfying reaction to our brains through the fast scrolling of algorithmic suggestions are leading people to abandon any form of intellectual that takes more time to realese dopamine on the reader. I’d argue also on the fact the social media offer free entertainment that requires no energy to find nor to acquire as it’s free. By that i would say that the verticalization of social media is a huge factor that both lead people to abandon reading and that de increase the chance of people spending money and paying for art.
definitely agree that the speed of social media…and the feeling that infinite content is available, essentially on tap, without having to pay for it (the quality of the content is another matter…but tbh there is still SO much good free content!) probably makes it FEEL very strange to pay for anything!
Regarding EA, I love to say that talking to an EA person makes perfect, even exceptionally clear sense for the first 20 minutes of conversation, but any longer than that begins to devolve. (The way they talk about environmental issues in particular is kind of crazymaking!)
I mean, I really agree that more affluent people should be redirecting their money to those who need it…and it is completely and horrifyingly shameful how many preventable diseases still afflict people in the world…
but I did come across one particular effective altruist's argument recently that we should just accelerate AI development in the hopes that it will solve political disagreement + climate change…these are social problems that require consensus building and culture change, not technical problems imo…it's hard for me to follow that argument!
Yes, they're not good at the cultural side of things, and they also make a ton of assumptions. You must know much more about this than me, since you’ve clearly reconciled both, and I’m sure opinions vary a lot, but using climate/environmental work as a litmus test, I have in-real-life argued with EA people about the following:
- That the sixth great extinction is nbd because animals in the wild are clearly suffering and it’s better off if they’re dead, and also, “we’ll just bring them back”
- That climate change is generally deprioritized in EA “because a lot of people are already working on it” (does that mean we’re actually figuring it out??) and because “it won’t actually make us extinct but AI will” (who cares if we’re not extinct if the planet sucks to live on?)
- That the usual line about fossil fuels—they are worth burning through because they catapult countries past industrialization—justifies their existence, since they allow more sentient creatures, and more sentient creatures =good
There are just so many assumptions behind each of these things—that suffering is ultimately quantifiable and the sole determinant of moral action, that more humans and more activity on a problem=problem getting solved (resting on assumptions nestled deep within ideals of linear progress), that quality of life doesn’t matter as much as extinction speculations, that tech can fix anything (including bringing animals back for our amusement, without an ecology to sustain them), that stadial history is correct, that the Industrial Revolution’s huge sacrifices of life and quality of life for vast quantities of people were worth it because we get to enjoy the benefits, etc.
I don’t even know where to begin with how wrong they are about all of it. A healthy relation to the environment is already extremely tough to theorize in Western philosophy, and they hit all the bullseyes of why. At least they do it openly?
On the other hand, though, you’re correct that it clearly it effectively obligates people who should spend their money to spend it, and they have made more thoughtful and reasonable choices as a result. I have a friend whose sister donated her kidney due to EA, etc. And we should credit them with bringing the whole preventable disease thing to greater public consciousness.
Again, for a brief period, just to problem-solve your time and resources toward the human good, it’s great. If you think in terms of one human life can do, you aren’t going to run seriously afoul of a lot of these issues because they simply must be solved at higher scales, in most cases. Most people would probably be better off with talking to an EA life counselor for 20 minutes!
This is such a helpful framing. I agree that economics and infrastructure are upstream of what kind of art and criticism can exist. But I keep wondering about a second upstream variable: the formation of taste. Even with better funding models, we still need publics who have the habits to seek out difficult work, reread, tolerate ambiguity, and reward risk. Otherwise new money just amplifies the same attention incentives. So yes to the two fronts you name, and I would add a third: rebuilding the conditions where attention and discernment are actually cultivated.
Thank you for reading! I agree and I think you're right to propose it as a third front (it's also the front that W. David Marx persuasively argues for in Blank Space!)…having a cultivated audience is really important, and it might mean that attention and money can then flow to the most 'deserving' works, which is to say—the most innovative, ambitious works.
(To quote Fran Leibowitz: 'An audience with a high level of connoisseurship…is as important to the culture as artists.' https://youtu.be/WT3SdN0YVx8?start=126&end=134)
(updated my post with a quote from you, btw!)
That’s really kind, thank you! I’m glad it was useful, and I appreciate you weaving it in.
This might be one of my favorite articles of yours. It felt like a walk down a lane that I was exploring last year, because I stumbled upon the Esquire article and the NYT Gen X article as well, while trying to find an answer to: how to "make it" as a writer while having a day job as a ghostwriter. "Become independently wealthy, and then make your art" and "Become an outlier" were the paths that appealed to me the most, but after years of working on the verge of burnout, I'm taking a step back to chill out and reassess what I really want from writing. But this post also got me thinking about the institutions and incentive structures in the art world.
I ran across a video featuring David Markovits recently – he's a professor who talks about the myth of meritocracy. He says that success has three ingredients: ability, effort, and training. While "ability" is randomly distributed and most successful people emphasize the value of "effort", the role of training is usually downplayed. But training is important. Training depends on access to resources, time, and even building an awareness that you can aspire to live a certain way – yes, anyone can learn to hit a curve ball, but a baseball pro's son who starts learning when he's three years old has a way bigger head start. Anybody can technically take a risk and "start a business," but an entrepreneur/billionaire's kid grows up with an intuitive sense of risk-taking and a safety net that most other kids would lack. Agency and the "you can just do things" ideology might work, but it's a trained skill. So yes, there's effort, but the institutions and structures that back the "training" give some folks an unfair advantage.
Reading your article, I feel like this gap could have accelerated in the artistic world over the last however many years – both on the consumption and creation side. People who develop a familiarity with the institutions of the art world – the networks, the aesthetics, what's hot and what's not, etc. – have a better chance of both appreciating art and creating art that's appreciated (Naomi Kanakia's article on what having an MFA means for your writing career taught me a lot about this). So there's a possibility that this world becomes an isolated bubble of its own, with a few people rising to the top in the bubble and the others reading them. I'm going on a limb here, but I'm saying the artistic world is becoming less democratic, and with the rewards not being proportional to the risk, fewer people have the safety net or fanatical passion required to stay in this world. Maybe there were a lot more people willing to take the risk of being Herman Melville/Charles Bukowski and there was a way bigger discerning readership back then – now the reward structure hasn't improved, but the risk has continued to grow.
"By limiting the number of people who can go to live in cities…we may also be missing out on the new ideas that drive society forward." Spot on. Unless there are institutions – like the London Review's underwriter – to support newcomers, the consumption and creation of art feels like an ideological battle in some sense.
And yet, it's worth doing. In some sense, this piece feels like a companion piece to your earlier piece – writing is an inherently dignified human activity – in which you talk about why art is worth making despite all the odds stacked against it. One uplifting thing about following your Substack is that I read pieces here and think they're so involved and deep that there must hardly be a handful of people who would be interested in this sort of thing – and then I see there are 30+ thoughtful comments and 200+ likes, which are insane numbers on Substack. There's still hope!
Very interesting take on "Nostalgia is not a strategy." "People who would have never made it into the inner sanctum of American culture — even at a defiantly countercultural publication like the Voice — can now, for the first time in history, publish from anywhere and reach an audience everywhere": This part reminded me of Ratatouille, which is one of my favorite movies.
RIP Aaron Swartz. One of my heroes. Also found Biggar very inspiring. Thanks for writing this.
Thank you for this incredibly thoughtful reply! I almost feel it deserves to be a post of its own, tbh…not hidden in the comments where fear not many will read it!
Your and Markovits's point about training is so crucial—I do think that ability must be refined and channeled in a specific way to achieve excellence, and often that requires training, and the best teachers and learning environments tend to involve a lot of institutional filters. A contemporary artist who does a Yale MFA is probably much better-equipped (and better-connected) than if they hadn't gone to Yale. And so much worldly success hinges on how people can strategically make their work and socialize their work…it's one thing to make something really amazing; it's another to put it in front of people who are tastemakers, who can start treating you like the next new talent, who can introduce you to other people and help you become an acclaimed mid-career artist someday.
This is very succinctly and excellently worded: 'the reward structure hasn't improved, but the risk has continued to grow' in pursuing an artistic/literary career.
I do think there is something profoundly rewarding about writing these newsletters and coming into contact with so many brilliant, generous, thoughtful people—it is something the internet excels at, and it's why I'm not particularly nostalgic about the past. There IS an intellectual life and a life of the mind available to us in 2026…we just need some of the supporting structures too!!
Except that not everyone can go to Yale and "tastemakers" are an exclusive club. There is such a thing as an autodidact and while that is not necessarily common, requiring training through the usual - unaffordable and exclusive channels - is discriminatory and elitist. People find their path and excel in all kinds of different ways, and this situation with schools being the only place which create an acceptable community with a supportive group of powerful people is just wrong. This is the beauty of the internet - it allows people with talent who never had access to those exclusive circles to create their own following and support. Creativity should NOT be determined on where you get your training.
Thank you so much for the kind words Celine! The article moved me so much that I had to write the comment. I actually cut out a lot of it for brevity haha.
"it's one thing to make something really amazing; it's another to put it in front of people who are tastemakers, who can start treating you like the next new talent, who can introduce you to other people and help you become an acclaimed mid-career artist someday." – 100%. I think this has been a struggle for artists, maybe since forever, but a risk that's possible in recent times is the access to an audience that could give you validation without deep engagement. e.g "Likes" on a low-effort post giving the illusion of engagement, when it "costs" the consumer of art nothing. Another system design problem.
Another sentence I really loved in the article was – "One of the most violent things you can do to a young woman’s intellectual development, I feel, is to convince her that she has to be a ‘math person’ or a ‘humanities person,’ and not both." (Agree!) As someone who loves both the technical world and the art world, I've struggled with trying to reconcile these ideas and felt frustrated by the ways people feel forced to slot themselves into one of these buckets. And I've also seen this gender association play out very strongly, at least in the society/culture I live in. Usually it's "guys-math, girls-art", or some variation of that, or at least the idea that you have to be one of these but can't be both. It also perpetuates this idea about the rigid, unpoetic way in which math and technical subjects have to be approached, which I think kills the romance in math ("A mathematician's lament" by Lockhart captures this angst – https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician's_Lament.pdf). This is a topic I'd love to see you write more about, because I think you inspire people to question definitions and rigid boundaries with your essays (I've shared your Agnes Callard essay with so many people to challenge their idea of what aspiration and growth are "supposed" to look like, for example). Would also like to read about the work you do in Climate Tech and how you navigated your career to get to where you are.
And totally agree that it's very rewarding to discover cool people on the internet with such diverse perspectives. I didn't realize it until you pointed it out, but reading these articles on Substack and making notes in the margins, commenting, going down rabbitholes, seeing themes repeat across articles, and writers evolve in their understanding of a topic etc. feels like having a conversation with a friend and having a shared journey in some way, and it's very rewarding.
We're all on a spectrum of missing out on something. Why is our missing out more important than the person below or above us?
Starving people in Africa are missing out on a ton more. I know it doesnt negate our current challenges. But I feel like no matter where you are on the ladder. You will always lack something and someone will always have an "unfair advantage" in some way.
I think the best way to handle all of this is to completely ignore all unfair advantages and solely focus on ones oppurtunities and abilities.
Doing the opposite hurts our creative energy and focus.
So much to ponder, but here is a thought off the top of my head about resolving the dilemma between "information wants to be free" and "writers deserve to be paid":
Something heartening I've seen here at Substack and in other parts of the internet are the writers who are making a making a full-time income, or a decent side income, thanks to the patronage model. Of course, this isn't the most stable model and it requires a lot of work upfront if it's ever to succeed (hence why you rarely see it recommended as a viable path in the creator economy). BUT. It's a real thing. There are people out there (including me) who are spending more money each year on supporting creators they care about than they do on Netflix. I guess that's unusual, but unusual is okay: the Pareto principle, or some form of it, seems to be the norm when it comes to source of income. A few generous donors, and a slightly larger amount of mini-donors/fans, can make all the difference and allow everyone else to read for free and help the writer grow by word of mouth. You probably won't be rich if you follow this path, but you'll have your basic needs met, which is what matters most to most of us writers.
PS. Of course, it's easy to argue that we don't see a lot of examples of the patronage model and therefore it's not truly viable etc., but the fact that we _do_ see it means that it's possible. And with things constantly changing and evolving and finding their footing, I like to stay hopeful.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment! It's so interesting you bring up the Substack subscriptions–versus–Netflix thing…many people frame this as, oh, it's so irrational for people to pay $50/month for 10 different Substacks when Netflix gives you way more! Or: it's irrational to do that when a New Yorker or Atlantic subscription gives you way more!
But I think this kind of calculation totally misunderstands the relationship between Substack writer and reader…it's much more intimate, direct, and invested than a relationship between a magazine and reader.
Precisely! When I give my money to a small publication or writer, it's not just because I love their writing but also b/c I know I'm making a difference to them and there is real satisfaction in that. That's an aspect of buyer psychology, I think, that gets overlooked.
The problem Substack (or someone else) needs to solve I think, is how do you build an ecosystem where brand new writers can rise enough to make a full time living.
As of now, my impression is most Substackers who make enough to live off of their writing alone either have a big following on social media, or were already successful journalists/writers.
I would actually LOVE for Substack (or some other creator economy analyst…firm…etc) to look into who's made a living off of Substack by converting an existing audience, vs who has essentially created a just-from-Substack audience.
I think the latter group is bigger than we think; Emily Sundberg (https://www.readfeedme.com/) is probably the most visible example, and Henrik Karlsson for a specific sector of in-the-know tech people (https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/), but there must be others.
Footnotes and Tangents is another great example; https://footnotesandtangents.substack.com/. Haisell recently was able to go full-time; he did a lovely interview with Sarah Fay about it.
I agree it's probably a bigger group than we think, and I suspect the biggest reason for that is "non-business" writers, by definition, aren't focused on talking about their income. They're too busy writing about the things that made us love them in the first place.
Agree that there's hope for readers supporting writers they care about and information that is useful to them. It's helped me make a living off of Substack, writing for American readers while living in India.
Want to add something here, though – purchasing power parity didn't matter when blogging was free, but it does matter when monetization enters the picture. A "reasonable" price for an American reader can be wildly expensive for Indians, even if the subject matter could be equally appealing. Over time, this shapes incentives – writers could start biasing their content for paying audiences. Maybe we need features to price differently for different regions of the world... or come up with some other way to encourage global patronage.
This is why NYC can never be what it once was -- creative artists can no longer afford to live there.
Yes, it's really sad. I was reading Sarah Schulman's The Gentrification of the Mind last summer, as part of my research for this essay (I ended up not quoting her directly, but the ideas in it definitely shaped me), and her description of the pre–AIDS crisis West Village culture, and what happened afterwards, is quite depressing
Love this essay. As a writer, I feel it. As a former magazine editor, I can see the difference in pay. It happened during my time working as a magazine editor. As the host of a podcast about magazines, well....there's hope. But no money. My podcast, The Full Bleed, is about "the future of magazines and the magazines of the future." Another podcast by our producers, Print Is Dead, is about "the golden age." The two could not be more different. One has discussions about expense accounts but also about the time and energy they would spend to "get it right." The other is about the hustle of creating a media in a post-ad supported age and the steep learning curve when it comes to distribution. I think The Full Bleed is far more inspiring. Because, you know, nostalgia ain't a strategy.
I'm really glad to hear that the economic arguments resonated with you (as I've not really worked in the magazine industry at all…I'm essentially an outsider!)
Also thank you for mentioning your podcasts—I'll just link them in case others are interested!
The Full Bleed, which has recent interviews with editors at Viscose Journal (such a great fashion criticism mag), Rest of World (really good reportage outside of the US/Anglosphere more generally), Cake Zine (beloved by all!!!!) https://www.spd.org/the-full-bleed
and Print is Dead, with the one and only Graydon Carter; an art director at the New Yorker; a designer for some of my favorite design magazines (Eye, Blueprint) https://www.spd.org/print-is-dead-long-live-print/category/podcast
Thanks for the links! Though the SPD links aren't complete. Here are the proper ones for The Full Bleed: https://magazeum.co/full-bleed
And for Print is Dead: https://magazeum.co/pidllp
And for Magazeum as a whole (all things magazines): https://magazeum.co/
I would like to have been a writer but I've also loved reading and always come away from this with more to be excited about exploring. Also I really really liked Zhuangzi.
thanks for reading (and leaving a comment!)
I've been so enamoured by Zhuangzi but I am also intimidated by the prospect of writing about it…I barely Get It though I am diverted and entertained…but very eager to hear what other people love about Zhuangzi!!
It took forever to figure out a response to this. Partly out of being unsure how to say something substantial but I can at least say that it has aspects of things I like and like reading about: poetry, wisdom literature, consciouness and even folklore without being any of those things. Its always engaging, and also I like works that are in multiple categories generally (but not only in genre).
Also do you happen to have read Elizabeth Hardwick's essays? I'd be curious to know what you think of her work if so, but if not the collected essays are worth getting.
It's also self-defeating, because if writers, critics, journalists, poets, even, made more money, then they would purchase more media and boost pay across the board. I wish I could subscribe to all the newspapers and magazines I want to read and buy all the books from independent booksellers, but as a worker in the same field, I can't afford to.
This is a really great point. Other writers, artists &c are very aware of the difficulty of Making It Work and always eager to support their peers! Which is really touching…but also stressful for people in more precarious situations.
One thing I’ve been thinking about (and actually wrote about, obliquely, in a previous newsletter: https://www.personalcanon.com/p/how-to-expand-the-market-for-literature) is how much the literary/magazine world would benefit from a wider readership, especially people not working in the field…it’s so meaningful to have that cultural cross-pollination, and there are a lot of highly-remunerated workers in other fields who can easily afford to have their intellectual life expanded, daily, by magazines arriving on their doorstep.
bring back RSS feeds.
i'm really sad that the micropayment approach brave (which is now apparently a crypto-oriented browser??) tried which you put in however much $$ you wanted to a month and it paid it out based on which websites you visited and spent time on
honestly a part of me is like…maybe I should go back to my one true love, Reeder (one of the best Mac OS apps ever designed) and read everything through there
re: micropayments and splitting money across the people you read…I can't find the reference now (writing this comment omw to work!) but in either the latest No Tags volume (a podcast/newsletter/occasional book series from Chal Ravens and Tom Lea https://notagspodcast.substack.com/) OR a collection of Shawn Reynaldo's writing on electronic music (https://velocitypress.uk/product/first-floor-volume-1/)
—there's are mentions of an alternative Spotify revenue model, where the $10 or whatever you pay per month gets properly, equitably split between the people you're actually listening to, and without the distorted percentages that major labels have negotiated for their artists (which disadvantages indie artists)
A small part of me wants to spend free time on coding up the perfect RSS reader for myself.
An interesting idea, but don't you think that might create the incentive for artists to go for quantity over quality to capture attention share? It's kind of like Medium's model vs Substack's model, and it looks like Substack created a healthier alternative for writers in the end because Medium shaped the system in a way that incentivized you to keep grinding out content.
Celine, this is really interesting. I think, tying both the problems and the potential solutions back to technology, it would be interesting for people to try to make more technologies that enable more revenue sharing with artists (especially in this era of easy software making!); I also wonder if there is some expectation or culture one could cultivate especially among middle and upper middle class people that you “tip” your writers, like your waiters or Uber drivers, and that it’s simply not polite to not leave a dollar or two (split between the institution and the writer/editor) after you’ve read an article you enjoyed. I think that comes with the software piece – how do you actually have the broad infrastructure to do that — but could potentially be one viable path
Saffron! Thank you so much for reading; genuinely such a pleasure to read your latest work and be informed by your ideas, too…
I do think there’s a need to simultaneously establish new technical infrastructure and new social norms for artistic compensation. I’ve been really fascinated by the work @Metalabel is doing, and especially how Mindy Seu’s newly released book, A Sexual History of Internet, is using Metalabel to split profits across all the book’s contributors. This is obviously theoretically possible with other infrastructure, it’s just inconvenient…and I really think software shows, so obviously, that inconvenient things just don’t happen, and convenient things enter a positive feedback loop.
The tipping comparison is so interesting…I do think broadly there needs to be some re-normalization of paywalls, or other ways of making creative work less invisible. (I almost want to make some commodity fetishism argument here…we think of content as something plucked from the void, not produced by specific material circumstances and also constrained by them, and we forget that there is a person behind it all…)
As a musician and writer with a day job, there's a lot here that resonates with me! True that we will continue to make art regardless of economic value; true also that we continue to straddle the difficult line between accessibility of art-making (e.g., demoing at home in my bedroom) and its growing lack of financial support (see horrific pay rates from music streamers). I think the point made about growing audiences who want to engage in art that is "difficult," slower, more X than the mainstream, is especially sharp. I see this especially re: the way music and literary tastes are homogenizing via spaces like BookTok and music virality among independent artists. I like you have no answers, except to keep making and keep trying to find my people!
Thank you for reading! And I really want to write something about the pay structures in music/streaming soon…I’m not an expert, so it will really just be a compilation of what Liz Pelly (the writer of Mood Machine:The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist) + @Shawn Reynaldo + @No Tags have already written on this.
I do think that we’re reaching a kind of peak–social media, peak-streaming, peak-slop inflection point (or at least that’s what I’m manifesting for 2026). We recognize that music, and other art forms, are such subjectively and phenomenologically rich experiences that make our lives better; and we’re also realizing that the lean-back, let-the-algorithm-serve-you-a-song experience doesn’t let us access the transformative experiences promised by art. Audiences want the difficult, rewarding experiences imo! So hopefully there can be some kind of double movement where audiences seek it out, and cultural producers/distributers find ways to make it more economically viable.
> 8,000 francs in 1904, or about €3.5 million today
I think this conversion is wrong by a factor of 100, and it should say €35,000 today (a little under 37,000 according to the INSEE's converter, https://www.insee.fr/fr/information/2417794 ).
France replaced the old franc with the new franc in 1960, with one new franc equalling 100 old francs. The converter website you used appears use new francs regardless of year, with no sudden jump in 1960.
great catch, thank you so much!! updated and added this to a footnote: https://www.personalcanon.com/p/weve-created-a-society-where-artists#footnote-4-178020629
Never realized Engels was Wupper class
Wuppertal is such a funny city…famous for:
the choreographer Pina Bausch's Tanztheater Wuppertal;
Open Ground, the best techno club in the world (according to Michael Lawson https://ra.co/features/4444);
the oldest suspension monorail in the world;
and being Engels's birthplace
You have a next-level knowledge of Wuppertal
thanks for this amazing essay 🙇🏻♂️🙇🏻♂️🙇🏻♂️
thank you for reading and commenting!! 💝
i feel like social media by creating a continuum series of impulses of fast satisfying reaction to our brains through the fast scrolling of algorithmic suggestions are leading people to abandon any form of intellectual that takes more time to realese dopamine on the reader. I’d argue also on the fact the social media offer free entertainment that requires no energy to find nor to acquire as it’s free. By that i would say that the verticalization of social media is a huge factor that both lead people to abandon reading and that de increase the chance of people spending money and paying for art.
Do you guys feel somehow the same or...?
definitely agree that the speed of social media…and the feeling that infinite content is available, essentially on tap, without having to pay for it (the quality of the content is another matter…but tbh there is still SO much good free content!) probably makes it FEEL very strange to pay for anything!
Regarding EA, I love to say that talking to an EA person makes perfect, even exceptionally clear sense for the first 20 minutes of conversation, but any longer than that begins to devolve. (The way they talk about environmental issues in particular is kind of crazymaking!)
I mean, I really agree that more affluent people should be redirecting their money to those who need it…and it is completely and horrifyingly shameful how many preventable diseases still afflict people in the world…
but I did come across one particular effective altruist's argument recently that we should just accelerate AI development in the hopes that it will solve political disagreement + climate change…these are social problems that require consensus building and culture change, not technical problems imo…it's hard for me to follow that argument!
Yes, they're not good at the cultural side of things, and they also make a ton of assumptions. You must know much more about this than me, since you’ve clearly reconciled both, and I’m sure opinions vary a lot, but using climate/environmental work as a litmus test, I have in-real-life argued with EA people about the following:
- That the sixth great extinction is nbd because animals in the wild are clearly suffering and it’s better off if they’re dead, and also, “we’ll just bring them back”
- That climate change is generally deprioritized in EA “because a lot of people are already working on it” (does that mean we’re actually figuring it out??) and because “it won’t actually make us extinct but AI will” (who cares if we’re not extinct if the planet sucks to live on?)
- That the usual line about fossil fuels—they are worth burning through because they catapult countries past industrialization—justifies their existence, since they allow more sentient creatures, and more sentient creatures =good
There are just so many assumptions behind each of these things—that suffering is ultimately quantifiable and the sole determinant of moral action, that more humans and more activity on a problem=problem getting solved (resting on assumptions nestled deep within ideals of linear progress), that quality of life doesn’t matter as much as extinction speculations, that tech can fix anything (including bringing animals back for our amusement, without an ecology to sustain them), that stadial history is correct, that the Industrial Revolution’s huge sacrifices of life and quality of life for vast quantities of people were worth it because we get to enjoy the benefits, etc.
I don’t even know where to begin with how wrong they are about all of it. A healthy relation to the environment is already extremely tough to theorize in Western philosophy, and they hit all the bullseyes of why. At least they do it openly?
On the other hand, though, you’re correct that it clearly it effectively obligates people who should spend their money to spend it, and they have made more thoughtful and reasonable choices as a result. I have a friend whose sister donated her kidney due to EA, etc. And we should credit them with bringing the whole preventable disease thing to greater public consciousness.
Again, for a brief period, just to problem-solve your time and resources toward the human good, it’s great. If you think in terms of one human life can do, you aren’t going to run seriously afoul of a lot of these issues because they simply must be solved at higher scales, in most cases. Most people would probably be better off with talking to an EA life counselor for 20 minutes!
Sadly true