Stacksistence
as I commit to another year on a platform that uses content production to grow numbers and create success and stack sovereignty
What is this thing I am embarking on writing ‘into’ with some degree of commitment; if I wish to continue here, then what am I continuing, for whom and ¿for why?
This continues a thought raised here, then here.
I started 2024 with the strong, clear, unambiguous feeling: I do not wish to produce content. And for a long time, I have written about the Content Monster we all serve.
Well then, what then? Can I continue here; should I; should I if there are Nazis on substack; what’s the point – or meaning – for me and for you; where does this all point and lead to? Why do this for another year? Is it good? Is it meaningful? Is it worthwhile?
I still kinda want to. That’s the lukewarm answer. It doesn’t feel so urgent now, but it still feels marginally worthwhile.
Yet even this mild milk feeling is complicated when intending regular written expression on a platform called substack: a space that is so directly and overtly about getting your numbers up, growth, metrics. To quote what cybernetes tells me almost immediately when I ask it the relevant terms:
Substack provides a range of metrics to help you understand how your publication is performing. These metrics are available on the Home page, which offers a high-level overview of your publication's subscriber growth and engagement, gross annualized revenue, recent post performance, and strategic guidance.
This may be gross, but it is, after all, its ‘business model’; and we are invited to become enmeshed in it, to embrace the obscured paradox of achieving our writerly autonomy via dependency on it and its bumps, its nudges – in the hope that the algo hose will rain down subscribers upon our inscriptions, subscription from inscription, producing a win-win synergy, for our stack and for its stack and the stack above all. Sovereignty is an emergent property of the stack1. But then the stack ‘has’ sovereignty, by dint of our enmenshment2 in it; and we, rendered produsers, serve the stack?
Substack is hardly unique or ‘wrongful’ in all this. In offering writers a flawed model in the stead of the broken model of legacy media in its 2000s content monster mode, it partook of a 2010s cultural transvaluation, a shift into the collective fantasy of some kind of agentic willing-doing of-to the world.
This cultural change has been marked by the shift in English where ‘growing’ – but when did this happen? – became an active transitive verb-thing one can do and will (at will!). Growing became an complex of action one could ‘make happen’ by sheer force of content, whereas it had been something that happened in due course, with cultivation and patience, a garden beyond our control and focused attention. Gardens grew, but the gardeners of my younger days never ‘grew’ their garden. Nowadays we are enjoined to ‘grow our wealth’ and ‘grow our numbers’, and we accept this as our task and mission, and are glad when this happens, which we follow on the set of dashboards by which we monitor the progress of our life success.
I see how we have all been captured by this cult of growth and fetishised imperative of accumulation. I notice and wince that my erstwhile colleagues and I are all debilitatingly involved in this game where we all have to get our numbers up. This debility is what has become of academic knowledge production. Nakedly, it’s a world of careerist climbing that loves only ascent and increase. Implicitly, this means that it loathes plateaus and abhors declines: although we are all inclined to decline, although entropy is the most powerful force in the universe. But then: when the alternative is ‘sofa king real’.
The cult of ‘growing’, it's avatars – as are we all, if we are on and in – ‘collaborate’, but its fates and furies are rabidly individualist, and it lives and dies alone and lonely. Poster posts lonely. Poster has a successful stack about loneliness. Poster is the number one loneliness stack and can has book contract.
And we continue to power this whole complex by investing in it, financially, temporally, libidinally.
We have taken on the task of getting our numbers up. This defines success for us. We have let it.
In a sense, this is just a pragmatic achievement of a modus vivendi with a planetary capitalist situation way, way beyond our grasp and control. It’s that, or sofa king realness. So: saddle up and ride, post, get those numbers up3. Herein, one rides the content monster, rather than being ridden by it, in the knowledge it rides roughly and will run roughshod over us if we do not if we do not seize and ride and claim it by having our way with it. It’s ride or be ridden. Ride the rip to the break, then ride the wave. There’s no point swimming against the rip or pretending you’re not in one.
Just today, this was presented to me in some podcast not worth linking as the best way to ‘deal’ with AI: better to learn, use, and become skillful in it (sooner, first, before… ), ‘or else’, be overtaken by those others who did. Perhaps I should – hurry, and! – grow an an AI in my indiosyncratic style then get it to grow content on my behalf, then monetise it. This could be a synergy, a big win win. But collectively: what would be the meaning of this for us? What would this grow growing be do doing?
Actually, there is a huge danger in letting an extrinsic value set define one’s tactics and strategy. CT Nguyen has published persuasive content on platforms about this, and has written about it as value capture. And again, as I begin here for this year, I feel myself up against it – while trying to find a way to write ‘freely’ and connect and share resonance with a niche audience whose existence I appreciate.
This danger has become acute at an individual and at a collective level – and its existence, persistence, and above all Subsistence gives me pause in thinking my way into another year of marginal blogging here. Stacksistence: Does it stack up, or should I slack off? We are all opting in to being gamed by the game, gamers thought we may fancy our selves to be. Ball don’t lie, but ball hides game (while baller scores points and likes), and game hides gamed – by programmers and creators, those who set the patterns we then play out compulsively, telling ourself this is an intrinsic impulse, something that arises and grows within us, and that we can ‘grow’.
Happy New Year, my fellow produser!4 Here’s to another year of content co-creation, or a way to blog through this together, somehow.
That was the one great point from Bratton’s over-egged book on this. Perhaps he should have kept it to a post. But if he had, it wouldn’t have been a book out on MIT Press. And maybe that’s the point.
It was a typo but it’s actually a better concept, as it means we are Ubermensch every time we allow ourselves to have our data ripped, just for using a late neoliberal taxi.
You’re horny? Let’s do it; ride it; my pony; your saddles, baby; come in; jump on it.
See Vogl’s productive and interesting elaboration of the produser in Capital and Ressentiment.