Neutrinos at the Houseparty

On Substack as a medium

“The medium is the massage.”
- Marshall McLuhan (from a misprinting he kept)

Today marks the 11th issue of Chasing the Sundog. 11 weeks: is it the average lifespan of a bedbug or a respectable tenure in internet writing? It feels inconclusive, and I like it that way. I feel inconclusively about it, too, in my heart: like one part of me is still beginning this essay project, and another part is ready to step back and reassess.

So, if you’ll indulge me, I want to begin today’s essay with a story of something that happened to me recently — on this website, Substack! — that caught me rather off guard. Along the way, we’ll touch on the future of media, the unintended consequences of making good design accessible, and one strange tribute to Yayoi Kusama. I promise.

And so, our story begins with this graph:

This is a graph of the individual visits to this Substack, Chasing the Sundog, beginning with the day this project was born. I don’t like to admit it, being rather critical of most quantitative metrics myself, but the shape of the graph is familiar to me: its peaks, coinciding with every Wednesday when a new essay comes out; its valleys, coinciding with the quiet periods in which I write, dream and collect ideas for new essays. It has a kind of rhythm that by now, I know well.

Midway through July, though, a strange thing started to happen. You might see it if you look closely at the graph: the valleys began to fill out. In other words, the “quiet periods” I was used to, in which the view count for the work would usually drop to the single digits, were becoming busier, and I was waking up on otherwise nondescript weekdays to the email notice that someone new had subscribed — often someone whose email I had never seen before. Something had subtly tipped in the air: I was no longer the primary driver of my readership. People were just kind of… showing up.

In the movie version of my life, this period should have coincided with an uplifting chick flick-type montage, beginning with a scene where I stare dubiously at the laptop then fist-pump the air. Hall and Oates would start playing and I’d bop down the street with my headphones in, shooting finger guns at dapper hipsters in the Junction, swerving cars and hip-swaying my way to RGLR Coffee. Meanwhile, the graph would tick up and up, and in the next scene I’d be being interviewed by Trevor Noah, slow-blinking my big masacara’d eyes in demure disbelief. Someone would mention “The Four Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss. I’d move to Bali, find love, adopt a samoyed. Then, drinking a cortado in the literal ocean, I’d be struck by an idea for the perfect essay… a faultless mathematical proof for the superiority of socialism…

Gif source unknown.

In the real version of my life, I was sitting in my muggy bedroom, the sheets needing washed. And I just felt kind of scared. And then I felt surprised that I was feeling scared, because new readers are usually a blessing, and I had been working tirelessly to bring about this very turn. So, what gives?

I did then what I always do when I encounter some frivolous but interesting inconvenience: I texted my friend d.

How he’s put up with this for nearly a decade is anyone’s guess.

One of the things I landed on in that conversation — or, rather, that unholy monologic issuance — was the idea that I had been using the wrong mental model in my head for this project, and for Substack newsletters in general. As I said to d. above, I had been imagining this space as a kind of room, a weekly houseparty perhaps, where I stood up and said something essayistic every week. People would listen politely and do what they usually do in such situations: graze on gluten-free snacks, chitchat, check out the other cute and single leftists… you know. Houseparty stuff.

And until mid-July, all of the feedback I got from the Substack website fit into this model. I’d post an essay, then cross-post to Twitter, maybe send it to a few friends. Big spike with the essay, big drop off once I stopped sharing it around. All of the traffic felt linearly correlated with my own effort, as though every person who showed up had received an invitation personally from me. And for some time, this was basically true.

Then, in mid-July, people started showing up that I hadn’t invited. I mean, I had invited them — I had even gone to the effort of making hand-drawn posters I put up around my Toronto neighbourhood, to the delight of the two friends I was texting at the time — but I hadn’t expected they’d show up the way they did: anonymously, without using the door, without introducing themselves, strange as wraiths, immaterial as neutrinos. It wasn’t their fault — it was mine. I thought I was in a room when really I was in something else, some immaterial zone where people came in and out of focus, some staying and others merely floating through. The numbers didn’t care to discern; the numbers, in some fundamental way, didn’t even know. Turns out, I was at a houseparty, but I did not own the house. We owned it together. And “we” was constantly shifting. And the party went on as I slept.

One of the aforementioned hand-drawn posters. This one ended up on University of Toronto campus.

This isn’t a bad thing. (And if you are one of my new readers, welcome! Welcome to the neutrino houseparty. It’s yours as well as mine.) But it is a new thing. New not just in the sense that I had never personally experienced it before, but also new in the broader cultural sense, of struggling to come up with an analogue for the experience, of struggling to articulate what gives this version of creatordom its particular thrill, alienation and wooziness. Perhaps I am overstating the range of my emotional intuition when I say this, but I think this is what it feels like, to be working in a new medium: you are constantly at the cusp of your mind’s map, of your culture’s map. The maps must be made anew.

It took me a little bit of time to accept this — to journey from my initial feeling of unfamiliarity to locating that unfamiliarity not merely in myself, but in the culture around me. One reason for this is that Substack does a very good job of signalling its continuity, as a medium, with journalism, print media, and other forms of the written word. Consider its landing page:

Screenshot as of mid-August 2022.

To take this slogan at its word, we’d think that Substack is merely about writing and reading. But of course, it’s not: it’s also about community, transmission, the individuation of media, the fragmentation of the news in toto, and the (rather radical) idea that we should pay writers directly to read their work. In other words, the newest things about Substack are not what are displayed here; here, in an understandable bid for connection, are the oldest things about Substack. (Far as we know now, human reading and writing is somewhere between 9000 and 6000 years old.)

The other thing I want to point out about this landing page is this: it’s rather tame, isn’t it? A friendly serif slogan on stock footage of a hand scrolling through text. A minimalist, floating navigation bar. And on the bleached wood desk in the background: a houseplant. Guitar picks. A calculator. A desk-sized sculpture by Yayoi Kusama.¹ The aesthetic is so generic, so painlessly bourgeois, it somehow manages to communicate both wealth and boredom at the same time. This app is not cutting edge. It’s just… reading and writing, really. Nothing new.

There’s a world in which the visual language of this webpage could be construed as a misrepresentation, or even a mistake. But I don’t think it’s that; rather, I think Substack is being successful in strategically painting itself as a reliable, stalwart source of good writing — like the New York Times, but tailored to you. If it declared itself so utterly as a new medium, I’m not sure it would be as possible to attract the audience it currently has. But there is a bit of collateral to this approach.

The collateral is this: by presenting a new medium as essentially old, you risk foreclosing alternatives for how it could be. If you say that Substack is just like the news, people will use it to report on news stories — and they do. If you say that it’s just like a blog, people will use it to blog — and they do. There’s nothing wrong with any of these uses, and heaven knows I’m hardly pushing the envelope by writing old-fashioned essays (which most say date back to Michel de Montaigne, late 1500s), but there’s a part of me that wants us all to collectively acknowledge the fact that this medium is unfinished. It is not just unfinished in the way all media are unfinished — as they are constantly being reinvented — it is unfinished in an even more pronounced sense, in the sense that the majority of the degrees of freedom available to it seem to exist in the future as opposed to the past. And that is a very, very interesting place to be.

There’s a broader version of this phenomenon I want to touch on, and it has to do with “good enough” design in general — the kind of design that is at play in the landing page above. These days, anyone with an hour can create a website, using templates from a site like Squarespace, that exudes an aura of legitimacy. The confidence of a thought-about brand has now become another commodity we can buy. And that feeling that powerful brands give us — that they are somehow eternal, that they hold their values to be both sacred and definite — is just a gloss we can pass over anything, really, through the magic of an accessible visual language.

There are obviously many, many reasons why this is good. I’d certainly be the last person to advocate for the returning of design to the high-gated towers of the art school elite. But I want to focus on one downside to all of this, which is that: when it is easy to make things seem final, it becomes harder for us to question them.² And question things we must, in order to deeply understand the media we swim in: their crop and their consequence.

Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn, every once in a while, to a different kind of aesthetics altogether— the aesthetics of possibility. The hand-drawn, the scribbled, the quick-cobbled take. Not just in writing, but in music: bedroom pop, the warbling distant hipster voice; and in art: Basquiat. Claes Oldenburg — who died in mid-July — may his ginormous cardboard hamburgers rest in peace. Every once in a while, I like to see the seams, even if the seams themselves are constructed; I like to be reminded that things are the way they are not because they are perfect, but because each thing registers its own history, and that history could have happened differently.

One day I’d like to see a new medium wrapped not in a cloak of corporate slick, but its own translucent skin: gurgling. Awkward. Ugly.

And honestly, dear friends, a lot of the writing on Substack is rather bizarre. Even writers who are wonderful when they work in the form of the novel — Salman Rushdie — seem rather plain when they grace our inboxes every week. (Perhaps the girl that glittered all night, in the periwinkle gossamer gown, wasn’t really the same girl who’s sitting with us over breakfast, cheeks blotchy with substandard sleep, pushing her scrambled eggs around on the plate.) There are whole sub-genres of Substack writing that are glorified diaries, or dressed-up lists of one’s favorite things, as in Haley Nahman’s “15 Things I Consumed This Week.” It seems that when writing is not set aside from daily life, but forced to participate in it via the consistent rhythms of the “creator economy,” it quickly turns towards the literary device of the catalogue. Here’s what I ate. The song I listened to. Other articles I read. This very week! Unprocessed, unconsidered, but still glowing with the digital qualia my generation calls “vibes.” We aren’t reading to read anymore; we’re reading to vibe. Politics, personal accounts of depression, a close-reading of the TV series Severance: vibes. When writing enters the digital flow, it must mutate to survive.

I’d like to watch the mutations unfold. After all, media at the end of the day are not empty vehicles that move our thoughts around, polite delivery drivers for ideas untouched and untousled. As McLuhan famously knew, they rearrange us, reinvent us, fuck us up: and in the process, they make new worlds possible.

(Image source unknown.)

How else do I explain this intimacy I feel, writing you, dear reader, a letter that is somehow both private and permeable? How do I account for the familiarity in my tone — something I only recently noticed when I exported one of these essays into a standalone Word doc, and was shocked at the affection it exuded? How do I account for the rather irritating Substacker habit of counting the number of missives, issue eleven I began this essay with, issue eleven? We are doing something here together, something that I do not fully understand. You are overhearing me, and I am letting you; no, I am speaking to you, but I am also speaking to them; no, I am speaking to myself and hoping you’ll speak these same words to yourself. That’s not quite it. It’s unfinished.

I’ll end with this, with McLuhan again. We all know his famous quip: “the medium is the message.” He delivered on this idea by unpacking the ways in which different media had fundamentally changed human relations, not just through the content they delivered but through their very form, the way they arranged human bodies and attention in time and space. What he didn’t write about, though, was what we ordinary folks had to do to “receive the message.” After all, if the medium is indeed the message, it’s hardly a well-written one.

If the medium really is the message, what kind of message is it? It’s certainly not a message the way a letter from the bank is a message, or a love-note is a message. If anything, it’s a message the way a long, drawn-out song in a nightclub is a message, or the smoke behind the stage at an Enya concert is a message. It changes something inside us, but we aren’t quite sure what it is. Real but diffuse, definite but not lexical, certain in space but unfolding in time. We cannot merely read a medium the way we read a letter. Instead, we have to let it happen to us.

Thus, my actual favourite quote from McLuhan is from the book he published later, using the printer’s typo as the title: The Medium is the Massage. I think he understood, as much as he loved reading media himself, that the experience of new forms of communication had to be bodily, visceral. We had to submit ourselves to the hands of strangers, in the hopes of letting go.

Photograph by Stephen Arthur Milner.

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Thanks for reading Chasing the Sundog, the newsletter where we try to crack everything for the flesh within. If you liked this post, you might like this essay on the early internet, or this essay on laziness in Pakistan. As always, here is the complete archive of past essays. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support the work.

1. See? It came back around.

2. And a big part of questioning, I might add, begins with taking our feelings seriously — of small-scale betrayal, surprise, delight… when we feel things we didn’t expect to feel, they become doorways for theory. Or so I wish to put to you on this bright Augustian morning.