Amerika

Some time ago, posts from me started appearing on Substack, simply because it seemed like an interesting place to be. It sure beats regular social media, but like all social media type stuff, it requires a lot of time to keep up and somehow, you are always behind the curve.

Time is at a premium here. Things got bad during COVID-19, when half of the productive individuals just vanished from the workforce, and the rest of us had to fill in the slack. Time was already short because of a lack of people to take on the workload from the Other Site, but it took on a new level of urgency then.

However, in the big picture, the problem with Substack is the same as everywhere else: people are flocking to the easy answers. If you write long-form essays or fiction, you are going to get trampled as the herd flies to whoever is writing long but repetitive and nearly contentless pieces trumpeting whatever band-aid is in vogue that week.

In my view, most people have simply given up. Many have left the internet or retreated to cozy pastures where they can share cat pics. Others have thrown out the idea of coherence or long-term planning and instead are seizing on whatever the newest idea may be, like a drop of hope in a desert of futures.

Most people would rather stake their hopes on a simple idea which can never come to pass, like national socialism or libertarianism, than they would work slowly with what we have known for 2500 years works best for civilizations of Indo-European people, something achievable through steady pressure.

To win with this audience, you have to speak in terms of symbols, even though that is an artifact of the last age and not the future. Increasingly, many of us are choosing not to play: we would have to dumb down our message into religion and political bigotry and in doing so, it would lose its essence.

Consequently, while Substack offers a great format, it offers little in the way of numbers, in contrast to the audience that this site has built up over time. Social media and symbolism are the past, and the future requires the type of work we do here, even if the herd thunders on by as it always does, looking for futureless hopes.

Tags: amerika, novelty, social media