It isn’t that I’m exiting other social media, even though I agree with many who think Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is, at a minimum, not a good thing. In general, I do want to pull away from the festival of glibness that has been the last 16 years or so of social media.
Think about the definition of glib in the screengrab above from Merriam-Webster. “Little forethought or preparation.” “Lacking depth and substance.”
Y’all, that’s social media. It’s the vast majority of Facebook posts and easily most of Twitter. Glib culture snuck up on us, and we dived right into it because, let’s face it, in Twitter’s case, it’s been fun. But if you really stop to think about it, most of the time, no one is saying much of anything.
I don’t even reject that. I’m the guy who nearly blew a scholarship or two in college because I realized hanging out in various campus cafes with friends was way more fun than going to class. I like hanging out and shooting the shit. Social media is great for that, and I don’t want it to go away.
I have encountered in my writing career a serious and growing feeling that, well, I’m not doing much. And that what I do is often too glib. Easily disposable as sites get sold and servers blow up.
There’s no doubt that Substack might even one day meet such a fate, but I’ve decided that I’ll feel dumb about having these three separate sites if I don’t start putting them to use.
In kind of rebooting my presence here, I’ve also decided to make much of the content free at first in order to encourage subscriptions both free and paid. I want whatever does get paywalled to have clear value (reporting, media you can’t find elsewhere, etc).
That’s about all I have at the moment, other than noting that the purposes of the newsletters are clear in my mind and hopefully in their names. One is just me. So particularly personal writing might go there. This one is about the way my mind works — it’s full of obsessions and digressions. The other, of course, is true crime, all the time. (It might overlap with this one sometimes.)
I’ll also start making use of some Substack tools, like threading and podcasts.
It’s time to get off the stick.