SUBSTACKED

 Dick Pountain /Idealog 376/ 6th November 2025 : 10:10am 

This column has been running for thirty years now, and has never ever felt like a chore. I garner ideas from tech problems with my own computers, from films, websites, books, papers, and I remember them using some software tool that has changed repeatedly over the years, from Idealist to Google Keep, from saved HTML to Pocket (and now Instapaper). But however they’re recorded I expand on them, write then send a file by email to a publisher who prints onto paper using heat-set web-offset lithography, sells the result to you (and to advertisers) and pays me for writing it. That’s just how the world worked, but in recent months it’s begun to feel like a rare privilege, and that’s because I started using Substack.

I opened my Substack account back in 2018 when it was a different beast altogether, intended for online self-publishing of lengthy works like books with a built-in payment mechanism. I tried it with little success, eventually used Kindle instead and then forgot about it until quite recently. In the meantime Substack expanded its features to include blogs, podcasts, and Twitter-alike short notes, and then in 2025 it took off like a rocket. I discovered this when Facebook, which I’d been using for years to keep in touch with friends and post photographs, became a swampy mess of AI-generated guff (mostly about space travel, pseudo-science and historic artefacts in my case) which even tools like Fluff Busting Purity failed to control. I resolved to try-out both Substack and the newly launched BlueSky as possible alternatives, and discovered that Substack was filling up at an astonishing rate with high-quality content about politics, economics, AI, science, literature and more and then realised why that was happening. MAGA. 

Much of the serious material now appearing on Substack is there because it’s written by American academic and other writers who got displaced from jobs, consultancies and other positions in the extraordinary rampage that Elon Musk’s DOGE army perpetrated on American academia and media in the first half of 2025. And having lost valuable sources of income, they look to Substack to garner paid subscriptions and stay afloat. Not all of this new blood was DOGEd-out but their traffic enhances the perception of Substack to such an extent that people who still have jobs feel a need to be there too. And it’s not only in the USA because media shenanigans in the UK at the BBC, Observer and elsewhere have sent stars like Carol Cadwalladr there too. All of this creates a remarkable new ecosystem which I’m only just coming to terms with, and which often threatens to Sub-merge me (see what I did there?) 

There are several downsides. The first is that Substack’s user interface is a nightmare, even compared to Facebook. Its history of shifting focus 

by bolting on new subsystems makes finding things a pain – I never know whether something I post will appear in the app or emails (and ditto with replies). The second is that when everyone is trying to make a living, almost all articles have paywalls of varying height and permeability. A few (me included) leave everything free; some make a few important pieces free; some make everything paid; but most offer you a teaser, perhaps half the article, perhaps three-quarters, at which point the [Subscribe] button pops up to read the rest. 

A third problem is that if I do subscribe by choosing a free option (not always available), that automatically enrolls me into their mailing list for new posts. Now a lot of the political and economic material is very useful to me with my other, book-reviewer’s, hat on, and so I end up subscribing to the likes of John Ganz, Tim Snyder, Noah Smith, Gary Marcus, Brian Merchant, Carol Cadwalladr and several dozen more, all of whom send email notification of new posts, some daily. Found out how to list all my (free) subscriptions from that demonic UI – though have now forgotten again how I achieved it – then totted up how much it would cost to upgrade them all to paid, which took me a couple of hours and turned out to be £335 per month! I actually pay for just two (not saying which), put up with studium interruptum for the rest and regularly weed the notification emails that keep refilling my inbox like Ground Elder. 

This is not a sensible business model and the seekers of subs must eventually get culled either by Darwinian selection or by monopolistic consolidation. I notice that it’s 17 years since I last wrote here about a sensible solution, namely micropayments collected by internet providers and distributed via the tax system, but nowadays that would sound far too much like China’s social credit system. 

[Dick Pountain wouldn’t mind if you paid him £8/month on the side to read his column, but doesn’t want to push his luck]