[Vow]

I recently started properly setting up Substack, no paid subscriptions yet, but I have actually got an account set up and subscribed to a load of writers who I would occasionally seek out. I think it's a revolutionary platform at the moment because it's so hands off in terms of moderation - pretty much every major 'cancelled' or de-platformed figure has a home on there now, but it's also got absolutely loads of otherwise normie and even mainstream writers on there, covering all aspects of culture, entertainment, politics, so has achieved the kind of big tent non-partisanship that probably only twitter can really rival (despite what you think of twitter, everyone is there - unless they've been de-platformed, in which case.. Substack) - and this means there's a large audience and the platform has already reached escape velocity from being a partisan ghetto (like Gab, Gettr, Truth Social, etc.).

It's caused something of a freakout among the narrative controllers because of this.

Why We’re Freaking Out About Substack (Published 2021)

A company that makes it easy to charge for newsletters has captivated an anxious industry because it embodies larger forces and contradictions.

www.nytimes.com

Opinion | Is the Rise of the Substack Economy Bad for Democracy? (Published 2021)

Facebook is entering the subscription newsletter industry. Should we be concerned?

www.nytimes.com

I really like the feed of long form articles it provides me in my dedicated inbox (pretty much like any other social media feed, I rarely read them in my actual email account). It feels more cerebral and considered than twitter, and slows down my thinking to a pleasant tempo.

Anyway, as I've now set up a load of subscriptions, I wanted to see what other people are reading on there. Can be about anything, so long as it's interesting.

To try to balance out being specific with massive overwhelming subscription lists, please share any individual substack, based on the one who most tempts you to pay some money to get full access to all the articles, quote its about page or foundational article, and then say a little about why you like reading it.

My favourite at the moment at least, has to be the author Paul Kingsnorth's Abbey of Misrule. He's a brilliant, unique writer, and really excels at making sense of the insane world we live in. Re-vivifying, intelligent , he's a lodestone thinker of our time I think - it's not just a stream of news stuff. Brilliant essays.

The Abbey of Misrule

Welcome to the Abbey​

'Instead of thought there is a vast, inhuman void, full of words, formulas, slogans, declarations, echoes, ideologies ... If we do not think, we cannot act freely; we are at the mercy of forces which we never understand, forces that are arbitrary, destructive, blind, fatal to us and our world.'
- Thomas Merton

Everything is changing, and there is no going back.

The 2020s have seen us us staggering, masked and muted, into a new time. We can all sense the craziness in the air, the feeling of our moorings being cut one by one. It feels hard sometimes just to stay upright as we live through a threefold earthquake: a global ecological breakdown; the cultural disintegration of the West; and the rise of networked technologies of control and surveillance which daily have us tighter in their grip.

The powers of the world are merging: corporate power, state power, institutional power, ideological power, the power of the oligarchs who built and control the Internet, the power of the network itself. Call it the Great Acceleration, the Great Reset, the coming of Technocracy: whatever you call it, it has been long planned and long feared, and now it is upon us.

Welcome to the age of the Machine.

The Machine makes us - is designed to make us - homeless. It rips up our roots in nature, in real cultures connected to time and place, in our connection to the divine centre. In their stead we are offered an anti-culture, an endless consumer present: planned, monitored, controlled, Smart, borderless, profitable and soul-dead, increasingly detached from messy reality, directed by who-even-knows, mediated through monitored screens.

Now, as old certainties fall away, the culture crumbles, the climate changes and hearts harden, it becomes hard to speak without being forced to take sides; hard even to know what we are permitted to say, as our language is remade and the range of acceptable opinions is seemingly narrowed daily.

These are not questions of economics, or politics; it's bigger than that. I believe that our society is spiritually wounded, and it barely even knows it. We have to identify the site of the wound, and the cause, before we can imagine what health might look like on the other side.

But be of good cheer. The storm is here and an age is ending, but new and old hearts stay steadfast on the margins. God is not mocked, and reality bats last. In an age of Big Everything, small remains beautiful and shall, in the end, inherit the Earth. Here, I plan to use my small words to try and work out what is going on and why, and what can be done about it by those of us who see things this way.

What is this place?​

'No one is obliged to take part in the spiritual crises of a society; on the contrary, everyone is obliged to avoid the folly and live his life in order.'
— Eric Voegelin

Abbeys of Misrule arose in late medieval France, set up by irreverent locals to mock the powers of the day. They were places of chaos, in which the world was turned upside down. Black was white and wrong was right. Perhaps this sounds familiar.

Misrule is all around. These days, we need a few Abbeys in which we can re-establish some semblance of sanity instead: in which we can look to bigger truths, cherish them, and think about how to re-seed them in a strange new world.

I write as a refusenik: a poet in an age of algorithms, a traditionalist by instinct and a radical at heart, a man from the suburbs with a love of the forests, an Orthodox Christian with a pagan soul. For inspiration I look to localists, agrarians, the indigenous, the peasants, the rooted, the holy, the marginal and the meek. I don't offer 'solutions', because I don't have any. I only have my instincts, and a battered keyboard.

'The only successful way to attack these features of modern civilization', wrote the great critic of technocracy Jacques Ellul, 'is to give them the slip.' I have slipped away to this edge of the Internet to examine the Machine, its roots and its meaning, and what secession from its dominance might look like.

Should you subscribe?​

'All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.'
— C. S. Lewis

Subscribe to this newsletter, and you will receive fortnightly essays from me on these themes. You'll be able to join in the conversation here, and I hope that often you will educate me. You'll also be supporting my work, by providing me with an income from my writing so that I can support my family, and retain my independence as a writer and thinker in a time when that is increasingly necessary. If it goes well, and enough people subscribe, who knows what this might turn into?

Every new essay will go directly to your inbox, and you'll also be able to read them all in perpetuity here. If you can't afford a subscription, or don't want one, you can sign up for free to receive some of the public essays.

To find out more about me and my work, you can visit my website.

The rest of my subscriptions, pasted from my profile page, is here.


Angela Nagle's Newsletter


Aristophanes Athenaeum


Arkmedic's blog


Astral Codex Ten


bad cattitude


A Better Way to Health with Dr Tess Lawrie


CJ Hopkins


The Corbett Report


Dominic Cummings substack


Edward Slavsquat


The Ethical Skeptic


Freddie deBoer


Glenn Greenwald


Gray Mirror


ICENI Bulletins


Igor's Newsletter


James Delingpole


John Waters Unchained


Kanekoa's Newsletter


Laura Dodsworth


Michael Tracey


Morgoth's Review


The New Normal


News from Underground by Mark Crispin Miller


Outspoken with Dr Naomi Wolf


Paul VanderKlay


Prometheus Shrugged


Radical - by Maajid Nawaz


Rod Dreher's Diary


Sonia Elijah investigates!


Steve Kirsch's newsletter


Tessa Fights Robots


TK News by Matt Taibbi


Unacceptable Jessica


Unreported Truths


Who is Robert Malone


WMC Research

 

[Mickmrly]

How did you find out about substack @Vow ? I don't think I've come across it before. I use stackoverflow a bit, but not substack.

 

[Vow]

How did you find out about substack @Vow ? I don't think I've come across it before. I use stackoverflow a bit, but not substack.

I discovered it via people linking articles on twitter and telegram, noted the subdomain and then grew aware that people who were getting kicked off other platforms were surving on Substack. Main person I guess was Alex Berenson, who writes Unreported Truths - he famously got booted off twitter, took them to court, won and got reinstated, all the while surviving on Substack.

The only thing it has in common with stack overflow is the word 'stack'. Sub stack is a portmanteau of Subscription Stack, i.e. a place where you manage a bunch of newsletter subscriptions.

Quite surprised you haven't heard of it, I assumed it had reached general cultural awareness saturation point by now.

 

[CAB_Life]

Substack is fantastic. I've transitioned most of my opining there and prefer it to any other media format. From a writer's perspective, the backend is feature-rich and functional for creating quick content.

They've been exemplary at remaining free of polarization, as you've suggested, though you can still find extreme rhetoric there given the platform's stance on free speech. But if you don't like what you see/ read, don't subscribe! Move on, read something else. It's not a difficult concept, unless you've been weaned on the dopamine poison and self-curated gardens of social media. In that instance, and for those folks, Substack is a dangerous, dangerous place.

 

[Vow]

Substack is fantastic. I've transitioned most of my opining there and prefer it to any other media format. From a writer's perspective, the backend is feature-rich and functional for creating quick content.

They've been exemplary at remaining free of polarization, as you've suggested, though you can still find extreme rhetoric there given the platform's stance on free speech. But if you don't like what you see/ read, don't subscribe! Move on, read something else. It's not a difficult concept, unless you've been weaned on the dopamine poison and self-curated gardens of social media. In that instance, and for those folks, Substack is a dangerous, dangerous place.

Cool, was beginning to feel like the only Substack reader in the village.

Please share some subs, am curious about what other people are reading on there.

 

[CAB_Life]

Cool, was beginning to feel like the only Substack reader in the village.

Please share some subs, am curious about what other people are reading on there.

Tara Henley; disgraced CBC journalist who left the Woke cult.

Lean Out with Tara Henley | Substack

A current affairs newsletter, focusing on heterodox writers and thinkers from around the world. Click to read Lean Out with Tara Henley, a Substack publication.

tarahenley.substack.com

Bari Weiss. I don't quite agree with her or even like her. However, she has interesting content and guests. Furthermore, you don't grow or learn by only subjecting yourself to ideas with which you agree.

The Free Press

A new media company built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of American journalism.

www.commonsense.news

Glen Greenwald. Amazing journalist all around.

Glenn Greenwald | Substack

Independent, unencumbered analysis and investigative reporting, captive to no dogma or faction. Click to read Glenn Greenwald, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

greenwald.substack.com

And my own, of course:

Fantasy & Things Stranger Than That | Christian A. Brown | Substack

Fiction, Writing, Thought Policing, Gender Critical Opining. Click to read Fantasy & Things Stranger Than That, by Christian A. Brown, a Substack publication. Launched 4 years ago.

christianabrown.substack.com

 

[Nicktendo]

And my own, of course:

Fantasy & Things Stranger Than That | Christian A. Brown | Substack

Fiction, Writing, Thought Policing, Gender Critical Opining. Click to read Fantasy & Things Stranger Than That, by Christian A. Brown, a Substack publication. Launched 4 years ago.

christianabrown.substack.com

Nice, I remember reading your one about the counterculture a while ago. Can't remember if it was linked on here or if I stumbled upon it elsewhere. It was a great piece!

 

[Vow]

Tara Henley; disgraced CBC journalist who left the Woke cult.

Lean Out with Tara Henley | Substack

A current affairs newsletter, focusing on heterodox writers and thinkers from around the world. Click to read Lean Out with Tara Henley, a Substack publication.

tarahenley.substack.com

Bari Weiss. I don't quite agree with her or even like her. However, she has interesting content and guests. Furthermore, you don't grow or learn by only subjecting yourself to ideas with which you agree.

The Free Press

A new media company built on the ideals that were once the bedrock of American journalism.

www.commonsense.news

Glen Greenwald. Amazing journalist all around.

Glenn Greenwald | Substack

Independent, unencumbered analysis and investigative reporting, captive to no dogma or faction. Click to read Glenn Greenwald, a Substack publication with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

greenwald.substack.com

And my own, of course:

Fantasy & Things Stranger Than That | Christian A. Brown | Substack

Fiction, Writing, Thought Policing, Gender Critical Opining. Click to read Fantasy & Things Stranger Than That, by Christian A. Brown, a Substack publication. Launched 4 years ago.

christianabrown.substack.com

Have been aware of Bari Weiss as one of the better known ones, have subscribed now. Never heard of Tara Henley, have subscribed, and subscribed to you too - just read your counterculture piece, you write well.

How do you pick your subjects? Is it anything that comes to mind or is there a deliberation process?

 

[CAB_Life]

Have been aware of Bari Weiss as one of the better known ones, have subscribed now. Never heard of Tara Henley, have subscribed, and subscribed to you too - just read your counterculture piece, you write well.

How do you pick your subjects? Is it anything that comes to mind or is there a deliberation process?

I'm a professional writer. I do a bi-monthly column, ghostwriting as well as separate published works under my name. Having so many career obligations—each of which has its own constraints—leaves one with little time to do the "fun" creative stuff. I used to keep a blog, but fell out of practice with it. Same with my YT channel; it just takes too much time to effectively create video essays.

Conversely, I find Substack almost effortless to use and with minimal demands on my time. You log in, jot down a few thoughts, then flesh them out as a longer form piece. It's really just a scratch pad for ideas or concepts I find engaging, though my consistency in using the platform has become habitual and I can't imagine a better outlet for opining.

I'd actually recommend it to any bloggers in general.

 

[Vow]

I'm a professional writer. I do a bi-monthly column, ghostwriting as well as separate published works under my name. Having so many career obligations—each of which has its own constraints—leaves one with little time to do the "fun" creative stuff. I used to keep a blog, but fell out of practice with it. Same with my YT channel; it just takes too much time to effectively create video essays.

Conversely, I find Substack almost effortless to use and with minimal demands on my time. You log in, jot down a few thoughts, then flesh them out as a longer form piece. It's really just a scratch pad for ideas or concepts I find engaging, though my consistency in using the platform has become habitual and I can't imagine a better outlet for opining.

I'd actually recommend it to any bloggers in general.

I'm trying to get into a writing groove, currently writing a novel, but am very ill disciplined. Am slowly getting compelled to do it though, rather than forcing myself, which is good. Am aiming for dedicating a minimum hour a day to writing.