substack f***'d up and now we have to talk about it

but also, on voting with your dollar

This is not an astrology newsletter. This is my statement on all things Substack. tl;dr, for those who know what’s been going on: I’m staying. For those who don’t, this involves Substack allowing Nazis on the platform. This essay also gets into broader issues around ethical consumerism; I have a strangely specific work background that means I have a lot to fucking say about the so-called “voting with your dollar.” Which I get into. Anyway. If you want to read it, here it is. Comments are on (for now).

Regularly scheduled programming will resume tomorrow with a newsletter for Pluto’s second ingress into Aquarius.

EDITED TO ADD: well, that didn’t take long. less than 7 hours and we’re on far right substack. locking comments down. thanks to everyone who has engaged in good faith and honest critique.

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This last week, a leading tech journalist, Casey Newton, announced that he would be taking his newsletter Platformer, which has ca. 170k subscribers, off of Substack. His exit alone was covered by The Guardian and Rolling Stone. It was only after Newton announced his exit that Substack made a pitifully obvious move to remove a handful of Nazi-sympathizing newsletters from the platform — nothing anywhere close to substantial, but something. 

In case you didn’t know: there are Nazis on Substack, and Substack’s founders are the kind of libertarian-ethos’d tech executives who use “freedom of speech” as an excuse to not take responsibility for the platform they’ve built. Content moderation is their responsibility, but it’s one they abdicate at every opportunity. There is no reasoning with white men like these. 

This has all come to a head because of writers who are organizing under the banner Substackers Against Nazis; 200+ authors have signed an open letter. (Full disclosure, I have been trying to sign this letter for more than a month. I’ve filled out forms, re-shared on Notes, idk. But it’s a volunteer thing, and these things can slip through the cracks. I’ll keep trying.)

The Atlantic continues to cover Substack’s Nazi problem as well as their terrible history with the aforementioned content moderation. The New York Times, even, has covered it. Closer to home, my “Explore” homepage is full of people debating whether or not to leave. There are notes from people leaving, and why they’re leaving. There are notes from people staying, and why they’re staying. I strongly recommend reading Casey Newton, who is moving off of Substack, as well as Anne Helen Peterson, who is staying. Arabelle Sicardi broke down the pros and cons of other platforms that are reasonable options in a detailed, accessible way, which largely reflects my take on them, as well.

Many of us have witnessed this before. This reminds me — painfully — of 2021, when a load of us got in a Discord and wrote a letter and tried to hold the co-founders accountable for financially supporting far right and transphobic writers on this platform. There was a program back in the day called Substack Pro, you see, which is what got a lot of these enormous writers and platforms going in the first place. A lot of your favorite Substack writers were supported financially by the platform for a year with a generous book advance of a stipend, often with healthcare (Casey Newton, for example!), so that they could devote significant time and energy to their newsletters. And Substack wanted it both ways. The brilliant academic Grace Lavery, who is trans, was a Substack Pro writer. But so were far right transphobes. Free speech, the founders said then — like they’re saying now. 

If sex workers are the canaries in the coal mine, trans folks are not far behind them. Big writers left Substack then, too. Grace Lavery, Jude Doyle, Annalee Newitz, Emily Gould, Malinda Lo. My partner, Meg Jones Wall, who is non-binary, left for Ghost; it was a significant amount of labor for them to move their list, and it cost them a lot both in time and financial repercussions.

This was long before Notes (which only rolled out in 2023). Most of the conversation about what was happening on Substack was still on Twitter (and so is now impossible to find). Writers were communicating in email chains, and in a long since dormant Discord. 

At that time, I was looking to leave. I’m queer; I saw my community being negatively impacted. I was weighing that against the reality of, at the time, new self-employment and the fact that the newsletter paid a lot of my bills — I needed a newsletter host that I could trust and where I could, frankly, continue to make money. But I had a conversation with Ghost (the strongest contender/competitor at the time) that emphatically did not go well. It may have been a new hire I was speaking to; I’m not sure. Benefit of the doubt. Regardless, the conversation was so bad that it turned me off of Ghost permanently. I had used Mailchimp and ConvertKit for years when managing email for work and was not a fan of either. The options were slim. Witnessing difficulties that various friends with substantial lists had with migrating their content was enough to convince me to stay put. 

But I wanted to do something, so I turned off my paid subscriptions for more than a month, refusing to give Substack any money. Of course, this hurt me a lot more than it hurt them. I also started giving free paid subs to trans writers, something I still do, so that trans folks don’t have to give any money to Substack, a platform that does not protect them. I made a (for me) substantial donation to The Okra Project that, at the time, more than matched what Substack was taking from my paid subscriptions. I wrote about the complications of ethical consumerism and the issues at the center of that debate in two detailed newsletters (part one and, the one more thematically related to the current goings-on, part two) in March 2021.

I really should have known it wouldn’t be the last time I’d have to do that. Because the lack of content moderation at the heart of these issues is the root rot of this platform, and so here we are once more. 

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I have had a significant number of folks unsubscribe in recent weeks, citing that they don’t want Substack to get any of their money. I appreciate that. But just so we are all on the same page, I do want to break down exactly how much of your money Substack gets. 

Monthly subscriptions here are $7/month. Substack gets 10%, so, they get 70 cents of your astrology for writers subscription. Stripe, the payment processor, gets 23 cents (and if you have an issue with payment processors taking some of your money, whew, do I have news for you about your groceries, your coffee, your gas, every time you use your credit card to pay for locally made goods at a farmer’s market, and so much more). 

This leaves me with $6.07 of your $7 subscription. As you can see, the vast majority of your subscription dollars go directly to my bank account. Which I deeply appreciate! You literally keep my lights on. That is not an exaggeration. 

I’m not going to bury the lede: until a genuinely comparable competitor emerges, or until there is a similar Twitter-like collapse, I will be here. Moving platforms is prohibitive for a number of reasons: 

• Financially. Unlike Substack, major platforms like ConvertKit and Ghost require an annual or monthly fee from the writer to maintain your list. And of course, the larger your newsletter gets, the more you have to pay. For the size of my list, I would be looking at thousands in up front costs to move my newsletter. Which isn’t financially possible for me, especially with tax season coming up. 

• Discoverability. Twitter is dead, and with it, so is the last true bastion of social media. Instagram and TikTok are the purview of professional content creators. Twitter was where non-professional, everyday people could actually connect and find each other. It used to be the primary top-of-funnel feeder for the newsletter and source of new readers. With Substack’s exponential growth this last year and investment in Notes and in-app discoverability, the vast majority of my newsletter subscribers now come from Substack itself. Leaving the platform would put a major dent in my readership and in the growth of this newsletter. 

The money and discoverability are tied together: as a self-employed writer, this newsletter is my most reliable, stable form of income. As someone who grew up working class and who has no safety net — I’m estranged from my parents, don’t have assets, and have a self-employed partner who is also in a busting-her-ass-every-month-for-rent-money position — I am loath to do anything to fuck with my money. 

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What has been on my heart is an issue very much embroiled in all this, but that also goes beyond Substack itself: the issue of so-called “ethical consumerism.” The knee-jerk reaction of conscientious contemporary American consumers to boycott when we learn things are “bad,” as a way of “voting with our dollar.” I have received several good-hearted, well-meaning notes from folks who very sincerely don’t want to give any of their money to Substack, lest they support Nazis. I simply cannot muster the energy to care that much about where fifty or seventy cents of my wallet goes if the majority is going to an artist I love.

Let me back up: I used to run a small business. Not like I do now, where I am an author and astrologer who also teaches and so I am my own small business. I ran a lingerie store, Bluestockings Boutique, which was accompanied by a very active blog and social media presence, that became well known and well regarded in a small corner of the Internet for its LGBTQIA+ inclusivity and imagery (this was the mid 2010s) as well as its commitment to sustainability and ethical fashion. 

a photo shoot from bluestocking’s collaboration with QWEAR fashion

What the store sold was ethical because the materials were all obtained ethically; they were created by people who were paid a fair wage. But did the designers — one-woman shop small business owners — making the lingerie pay themselves a fair wage? Usually, the answer, I learned over time, was no. Did I, bootstrapping this business, ever take a paycheck from it? No. I also learned that the bits and bobs of plastics that made up a bra, for example, were almost impossible to track in factories beyond a certain point. The fabric might come from a wonderful independently owned shop, sure, and was cut and sewn by a nice woman in England who maybe paid herself enough to pay her rent, but had the bra clasp been made ethically? Probably not. Those few cents sure weren’t ethical! And that’s not even accounting for the pollution and rampant exploitation from the shipping industry that made everything possible — fashion is second only to oil in terms of impacting climate change. 

The claim to ethics and sustainability broke down so, so quickly. I learned just how fraught a claim it was. How complicated, how impossible. No dollar is pure.

We are all compromised, under capitalism. It is a brutal and cruel system that thrives on exploitation, and exploitation alone. And, unless you go into the woods or into a commune, there is no escaping it. 

This is to say. Whether people stay on Substack. Whether they leave. There is no judgment from me, because this is a situation where there are no good choices; digital spaces are disappearing. Now, does this mean I believe that since there are no good choices, the choices we make don’t matter? No. I believe in being conscientious where I can.

But I also am not going to voluntarily devastate my own finances because of what Substack is doing when, quite honestly, I’m putting far more money into the United States military’s budget every year with my tax dollars (and most of that goes to terrible defense contractors). I’m extremely aware that, when it comes to conscious consumerism, consistency is not available to us. We exist in grey, and the greyscale we can choose and/or prioritize varies depending on our specific levels of economic privilege, positionalities, and any number of other factors — perhaps even day by day.

“Voting with our dollar” is an idea that very, very quickly crumbles when applied to many situations. And honestly, it’s a slogan I hate, because it sells people on the idea that there is any significant agency in the limited (often terrible) choices that have been presented to us by the ruling class. Are you, for example, voting with your dollar when you pay for your groceries, or your utility bill? No. You’re just fighting to live in a society.

When you buy a book, or pay for a newsletter, are you “voting” for the artist — or are you voting for their publisher or distributor? 

I would say that if you’re supporting anyone, you’re supporting the artist. Especially the queer artist, the Black artist, the Indigenous artist, the Palestinian artist, the disabled artist, the artist on the margins who had to fight tooth and bloody nail to get into that bookstore, or to garner a newsletter audience, in the first place.

But then, “voting with your dollar” rears its ugly head, and people unironically stop buying books and subscribing to newsletters from those very artists they decry are not supported in the world enough — because the audiences artists rely on have a problem with the distributors we also rely on to make a living.

We are, forever, caught in the middle between our audiences, who have been taught to vote with their dollar, and the ruling class, who own the means of production and the distribution channels, with whom we have to split our dollars.

It is a terrible irony, that when the owners of the distribution channels are boycotted, artists are, too.

This isn’t the Renaissance, and the Medicis aren’t patroning Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Galileo. Nowadays, we have the Big 5 and Amazon and Substack.

a medici pope commissioned michelangelo to paint the sistine chapel; it’s good to be rich

Writers have to sell our work to publishing houses, who tell us what is marketable to readers; given how overwhelmingly white, cis, and straight publishing houses are, this is a famously unfair bargain for writers on the margins. In this, platforms like Substack have been a boon, proof of getting to prove that there is an audience for our weird, witchy, gay, seemingly off-the-beaten-path interests.

But there’s a lid for every pot, and so, of course, the Nazis are here, too. I’m not interested in ceding ground to them. They’re like a fungus; they spread everywhere. But even as much as I believe that capitalism is compromised, I also believe in being a light in a dark space. I don’t think that Substackers Against Nazis are shouting into a void. I think it is important, so very important, to show up and protest where you live, to hold people’s feet to the fire and tell them that this is unacceptable. 

To be so very loud and difficult that they can’t help but be flooded by dissent on their own goddamn homepage. 

I know, as a queer woman, as a writer, and definitely as someone who was raised in far right evangelicalism that I’m best positioned to make a difference when I have a platform to do so.

So, for the foreseeable future, you can find me here.

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I’m sure you have thoughts, and I’ll do my best to respond, but please do keep it respectful, and be kind to each other.