Realized what’s been nagging at me about how I mentally model substack. I’ve had it kinda incoherent, thinking of it as a web 2.5 transitional bridge to the future. That’s not it. There are no hybrid transitions in media. It’s not like hybrid cars between gasoline and EVs. You’re either on the incumbent S-curve or the disruptor S-curve. Which one is substack on?

In 1998 when I first wrote publicly, you were either on janky Perl-cgi pre-blog ezines like me, or you were a staffer/freelancer at old media. I grew up with web media as it both transformed the old (bringing old media kicking and screaming online and hardening blogging and its ecosystem into a real force). Now the two have converged on Substack and it represents the end of an era, not the beginning of one. It corresponds to old media staffers of 1998. You can only really plateau with this medium since it’s an endgame harvesting private equity type medium. Top of an S-curve, not bottom. Harvesting the brands of both old media and blogosphere. The polished smoothness of substack alone is a tell. As is the retreat to email for distribution. My history as a writer has been ~30-50% dealing with emerging media friction. This is preternaturally smooth. It’s a city high rise not a frontier.

It’s nice here and I appreciate the S-curve plateau home, just as I’d probably have appreciated being a magazine staff writer in 1998. I appreciate being here but tbh I’m not actively enjoying it. I’m fundamentally an emerging media guy looking for 2024 equivalent of janky Perl-cgi ezines in the pre-dawn grey of blogging. Plateaued media are for fine spit-and-polish craftspeople. I need the forgiving messiness and unfinished roughness of emerging under-construction media.

To find the frontier, you have to follow the friction and jankiness gradient. But right now for text that doesn’t point in any consistent direction. AI? TikTok (also endgame harvest I suspect)? Protocols? Roam-like notebooks?

Where’s the /cgi-bin?

I don’t know.