Substack profits from white nationalists. So I'm quitting Substack.
More and more horrendous behavior by the company has finally chased me off for good. Today, where and how to sign up for my new newsletter, now controlled directly by me.
Originally published at the Jason Pettus newsletter through Substack on December 30, 2023, and republished here at this website on January 20, 2024.
Did you hear? The CEO of Substack recently participated in a particularly horrific public interview, where he proudly admitted that the company profits by taking a share of ad revenue from the newsletters of white supremacists and other violent fascists, calling it a “free speech” issue. I’ve been growing more and more tired of Substack over the last year anyway, as the catastrophe at the Social Network Formerly Known As Twitter has made Substack decide to go chasing after all those angry ex-Twitterers by introducing a bunch of Twitter-like social media elements.
That goes directly against the original message Substack sold when they first convinced “content creators” like me to join; that they were entirely unlike social media, and that this mattered, that the long-form pieces delivered directly to intimate destinations like phones is what leads to thoughtful reading and true engaging in a way little short blasts of dopamine simply can’t. To see the company immediately abandon this concept just the exact first moment they realize they can have a “footprint” in the “social media realm” themselves has been disappointing; but what’s made it intolerable is the executive staff proudly defending the monetization of their company partly through hate speech and calls for systemic violence, which is why I’ve decided it’s time for me to leave.
Thankfully, I just so happen to have recently finished an alternative way to subscribe to my newsletter! That’s because I finally, finally finished my first-ever professional freelancing editor website, located at the hopefully easy to remember Pettus.rocks, where on top of the newsletter you can also find all the details about hiring me, a guide to the self-publishing process for those completely new to it, more about the small press I ran for a decade in the ‘00s and ‘10s, a complete list of all of my services and their prices in advance, and more.
This newsletter you’ve been reading at Substack for the last two years will be moving to that website for good in another four issues, and you can subscribe to the new one anytime by visiting Pettus.rocks/newsletter. (Please note that international law prohibits me from automatically adding your name there myself; you will need to manually add your own name, then afterwards respond to an email and verify that you really do want to join.) After literally decades of letting third-party services host my various mailing lists, going all the way back to Mailchimp at the turn of the millennium, I’m finally taking the advice of an acquaintance of mine, Ernie Smith of journalism newsletter Tedium.co, and taking complete ownership of my mailing list myself, using various outside tech options for verifying addresses, making sure I don’t get marked as spam, and actually composing and sending the individual emails, but otherwise keeping the master list of my subscribers just directly on my own home hard drive.
I’m done handing all this stuff off to faceless corporations who get rich off my efforts, and who can decide to do any ol’ silly stupid fascist Libertarian Tech-Bro thing they want to whenever they want. That’s why I quit all my older “Web 2.0” social networks a year ago too, and have been exclusively on the decentralized open-source Mastodon ever since (warning: my Mastodon account is much dirtier and more smartass than my newsletter). I’m currently hosting my freelancing website at Squarespace, and they maintain the engine that also sends out the emails of my newsletter; but the content of the site, and the master list of recipients, are kept on my hard drive at home, its backup, and the backup’s backup, not at the cloud database of the latest convert to the “Let’s Build One-Percenter Drivable Islands To Get Away From The Poors” club. If Squarespace’s executives ever turn out to be those latest converts, then I can easily walk away from them too, and we’ll just start all over again somewhere else, but now with my master list of recipients and all my newsletter archives with me.
So for now, please stop by Pettus.rocks to join the newsletter before this one shuts down in another four issues, and of course to actually hire me for a job if you feel like it. I’ve spent an entire year saying, “Yeah, one day I should get around to building out my freelancer website,” so I’m grateful to my friends at Antihustle.ca, who recently threw a free eight-hour one-day workshop for their friends in which we all agreed to get one more big thing off our list before the year was through. The newsletter itself will be going through a change in 2024 as well; instead of hugely long issues that I put off for sometimes months at a time, it’ll be just one short item per issue (most of them interviews with recently published clients of mine — drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com if you’ve had a book come out in the last year and would like to talk about it for a future issue), done consistently every Friday afternoon. I look forward to re-engaging with everyone in the new year again, and getting off to a big new foot at a big new online location, with a whole new infrastructure and hopefully some fascinating new developments at that new location still to come (hint — maybe the ability soon to accept credit cards, maybe the ability soon to create Ethereum “smart contracts” …or maybe not!).
