Lies, Damn lies, and Substack Serving the Status Quo

2024 has been mostly a year of "more of the same" - does the same apply to Substack, too?

Dear Substack,

Hi! It’s me, Austin! Shit, that’s not my intro. Hang on..

*Clears throat*

AI makes Austin look so… plasticine..

After a short winter hiatus to respect other hobbies and pastimes, I have reappeared on the beautiful unblemished face of Substack like a bad case of Berlin monkeypox. Don’t worry, I wasn’t totally missing during this period. Though I didn’t publish anything here in full form (Sorry to my one subscriber, I owe you $25 worth of posts today), I did enjoy the Notes platform and continued networking with other writers and readers alike during this time, in the US and abroad. I witnessed horrors unfold. I cracked jokes. I watched people implode. I met the sanest, and the least sane. It was gratifying, and though felt much like a spiritual rebirth of the 2016 Twitter heydays I can only say it was refreshing and new. Completely unique, quintessentially Substack, and most of all organic. 10/10.

That is still largely unchanged, but we’ll get to that. Unbeknown to me however, little else was changing. Substack was, as I had eluded to in 2022 and again pointed to in 2023, gladly showing fealty to the US security state whims, desires, and narratives; singing their praises. One recent rainy evening in Portland, I was shown a Note by Hamish MacKenzie from syndicate host Indie News. It was both hilarious and tragic, and it summed up why I largely took a hiatus from Substack in the first place, though proves why even bumbling idiots like I need to write and be here.

I can’t hide it, let’s cut to the chase. Hamish MacKenzie is a fool and continues to expose his political naivete, putting the brand at risk of being seen as the eminent “Deranged Crank’s Blog” host of choice. In doing so, he reduces the credibility of the other “accredited and visible” authors he wishes to solicit to the platform to become sources of revenue.

Substack as a Platform vs Substack as a Brand

Substack as it stands today is an interesting evolution of a simple concept. Unfettered speech, and the antithesis of an “algorithmic” host. You saw only what you wanted and very little, if any at all, of what you didn’t. It was a great space to whiteboard, create, and meet like-minded people. While this concept remains largely untapped beyond Substack, Substack remains a fantastic space to do one’s thing uninterrupted and with minimal downtime or platform quirks. Still, 10/10. The platform is stable; and as time goes on features continue to be added which overall increase quality of life for all, including creators who couldn’t stop “pivoting to video”. I for one welcome our 2013-approach overlords, actually. Notes, Videos and GIFs on Substack, these are all fantastic and welcome additions. They however come at a cost, and that cost is a revenue model where writers who solicit pay a vig to Substack/Square. All well and good, it’s no App Store 30+% but it’s something to keep the lights on in the Embarcadero. No harm, no foul, it’s not like Substack is getting rich on the back of deranged pro-war pro-imperialist propaganda, right?

Well, sort of. We don’t exactly make any bones about it, but some of the world’s most well-read (or least-read, depending on who you choose) propagandists have found homes on Substack in recent years. I have already made a note of this in prior work, Substack has a “corporate media narrative” problem and so far hasn’t done anything to address it. To the contrary, they seem to have leaned into it, trying to fill the space that a Buzzfeed or a Vice might have held in the last decade. In doing so, they end up hitching their wagon to bizarre posts, finding bedfellows in depths that had only been plumbed previously by the likes of Visegrad24 and the Trump administration. Substack was, essentially, degrading itself and the user base by partnering with and increasing the visibility of such inauthentic or intellectually bankrupt content.

In the past year, Substack has tried to build itself out as a brand, desperately clinging to the notoriety of passing celebrity as it wafts through the platform; a stench of unearned importance. The reason Substack has had little success in such attempts, including “The Substack Election”, is because the quality of celebrity that it continues to promote is frankly not credible. We’ve had the likes of Nate Silver, Mike Cernovich, Dan Rather, and so many more. Dan Rather being the least of the 3, though his own decades of work in the service of corporate/state backed propaganda at CBS speak for themselves.

Substance vs Style

Most things in life boil down to personal preference, and how we understand the world based on prior experiences, and information we take to believe as true. Now, without getting into the weeds of what makes a man tick, nor the interpersonal history of Hamish MacKenzie, I need to start this part off with a 737 MAX sized caveat. I don’t know Hamish. I would love to sit down with him someday and ask him all the interesting and proper questions of what makes him and why he arrives at the points in history that he does. I don’t have such access, and frankly I don’t think anyone would be satisfied with the answers given. Let’s just presume he’s a Mary Sue, an everyman who can do everything and has no flaws, omnipotent and don’t need no man.

So what’s new with Hamish this month? Has anything changed? Is he still pitching hucksters promoting garbage as accepted fact? Well…

Yes. He continues to promote open propagandists as if they are credible journalists or authors. I’m not sure what’s “great” to see someone who writes such incredulous bullshit, but Hamish seems to feel that way. So let’s take a brief look at the man he’s pitching to us.

Tim Mak, Color Revolutionary

Right off the bat, and just one month ago, Tim was singing the praises of a US backed coup in Ukraine in 2014 that lead to the deaths of more than 40 in Odessa and thousands more across the now war-torn country; and a failed attempted one in Taiwan. Shocking nobody, Tim seems to be a proponent of a number of US-supported narratives and “political actions”, including covering Ukraine, Syria, and… Dolphins???

The piece about dolphins is largely taken from Alessandra Hay at Kyiv Independent, a known propaganda rag. No, I am not making this up.

If you read those in chronological order, you get the scene of a very paranoid sleepless man writing whatever inane ramblings came spewing from Budanov’s asshole on a given day - but it isn’t simple sleepless paranoia due to ‘Russia Bad’ and ‘Iskander keep falling on muh head’, no, Tim is clearly dedicated to his craft of becoming a US State Department spokesperson, as shown in other writings:

The juxtaposition of children hidden in underground shelters thanks to Ukrainian war crimes from 2014 to 2022, against claims of Russian war crimes in 2024 with a sprinkling of “Syria Bad, Assad gas own people” for good measure, is just the icing on the fucking cake. When Ukraine used white phosphorus in 2022 and 2023, Russia called attention to this. When Ukraine used cluster munitions in 2022 and 2023, Russia called attention to this. When Ukraine used banned petal mines from 2014-today, Russia called attention to this. Tim Mak never seemed to pick up on any of it. Why is that?

Hamish, what exactly are you promoting here in Tim that I could not find by simply reading deranged posts on Telegram or in US Weekly News from US-supporting apparatchiks? He has 10,000 subscribers? Whoopdee fucking doo. How many of them are authentic?

What substance does Tim Mak offer to Substack beyond incomprehensible lies about military dolphins (which, I should remind our viewers, were supposedly Russian just a few months ago, and because Russia = bad, military dolphins = bad)? Does Tim Mak offer Substack a path to growth long-term, or does his presence and highlighting on the platform alienate users further and drive them away?

Hamish’s Folley

On the surface, I don’t have anything personal against Hamish MacKenzie. To the contrary, I hold him in high regard in most cases. I offer a harsh critique when it comes to his management of the platform because it impugns all of us who use it. When Hamish promotes a deranged propagandist or theorist pushing US state department lines as if they are gospel, he does not show respect to the users who have witnessed the narratives change, unfold, and become rebooted several times over the years. The same tired lines. The same accusations from silence. The same hypocrisies. Over and over and over again.

Hamish seems, at best, oblivious to this. A Homer Simpson of political sausage making. A guy who gets his understanding of the world largely from corporate news headlines and narratives, rather than looking at the actions and trails of blood and money. In that comment is no judgement, just observation - like many, Hamish is a product of his environment, and as much as he (or anyone) wishes to change that environment, he is formed by it (or regularly blocks large parts of it out when inconvenient). We westerners instinctively take the US government’s word, even though it has been shown to be without credibility for the last 80+ years. Decades of wars fought to support US economic and strategic interests as if they are humanitarian inquisitions, on the basis of fabrications and outright lies. Millions of dead people for some sanctimonious idea of American hegemonic supremacy, in reality to support American corporate interests. As we’ve described before, American corporate interests supercede human life at all costs. Any cost. Including basic liberties like speech, or basic concepts like truth.

Hamish’s folley is simple: He’s trying to win over the audience that causes the problems that require a Substack in the first place. Substack is a response to a bad callout - corporate press. The correct response is organic speech, not micro-propaganda. In promoting Tim Mak (and others named above, among myriad others I did not mention in this piece), Hamish shows fealty to the corporate/state (ED: hey, mussolini said that’s fascism!) brotherhood that would gladly see his platform stricken off the internet as a bad case of thought crimes against their feelings.

I wonder if Hamish is even aware that Myrotvorets exists, an official Ukrainian state “kill list” of both Ukrainian and non-Ukrainians that the state would like to see killed. Just sitting out in the open for anyone on Wikipedia to see and cite as a source. I wonder if he understands that things are not as they seem, that hitching his wagon to a brazen propagandist such as Tim actually hitches his wagon to Myrotvorets and the deaths of peaceful activists burned to death in Odessa during Maidan.

I wonder if Hamish even cares. And that makes me not care about Substack. I might not have a TV network or Republican administration on my resume but I can go to bed at night knowing I didn’t openly fraternize with this bullshit. I could easily just go buy web hosting and form a platform, with blackjack, and hookers. Scratch the platform. And the web hosting.

Where do we go from here?

Now, I’ve dealt with good platforms and shit, short-sighted CEOs before. Twitter was great, or at least the concept of it was to me until I interacted more with Jack Dorsey and saw how the US used Twitter as an instrument of color revolution. As a US tool, which then became a tool of partisan censorship, Twitter became useless to society and people left in droves. Bots had to be made to substitute the lack in activity. Elon “Pedo Guy” Musk bought it, and all hell broke loose. The bots changed partisanship, you saw more inauthentic tech-posting rather than political posting, and of course the now famous death throes of “X”, dead on arrival, languishing in the shadows of relevancy that it once held.

Substack is doomed to repeat the same outcome. Hamish will inevitably be caught up in a political quagmire, tugged all different ways until his true allegiances are formed. I expect this to take the form of censorship, as all platforms do - and has already been made clear by me some time ago. This statement by then-Substack Spox Ms. Cheng-Meservey seems less from her own views and more from the point of view of Hamish, on reflection, and I’d like to apologize to her - I know she recently found work at Activision/Blizzard/King and I wish her the best in her endeavors in the “Toxic white male gamer” world.

So, Hamish, my problem isn’t with Substack at all, but with your naivete endangering the rest of us: both on the platform and humans globally (as you seem to be promoting deranged pro-war propagandists). You have a problem and may wish to separate your own preferred political pony riding and the platform/executive fiduciary duty at the very least, if not re-examine your entire belief structure. In an era of Disney eating crow on DEI and people becoming refugees and being unwilling to fight and die for American corporate interests abroad, you may wish to be careful openly politicizing the company in this way. After several years of discoveries about US lies and crimes against humanity in Ukraine, it would be unfortunate to see Substack turned into yet another operative hangout dedicated to supporting those endeavors.

Yours,

RS

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To my beloved readers, thanks for sticking around through the winter. I took some time off of writing long-form to focus on other things, but I’d like to do some more on current events over the next few weeks/months. The hiatus is over, we’re now syndicated with INN if you missed the news, so be sure to check them out as well.

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