What I like about Substack, despite all the noise around Notes being a Twitter clone and the recommendation algorithm funneling users into establishment shills and ratcheting shadowbanning, forcing users into their walled off ghettos, is that it exists in the liminal space between blog and academia. Writers are often accused of being pseudo-intellectuals and it’s true because it exists in that strange, amorphous liminal space, but at the same time, where is the prestige in academia today? Everyone there is either ignored, focused on a niche no one cares about, or otherwise paid shills for corporate donors. Nothing real comes out of academia and it hasn’t for a very long time, except perhaps in the hard maths - the replication crisis is very real and what used to be actual science, i.e. use of the scientific method and independently assessed/verified by third parties has devolved into scientism, which is “science” by committee consensus (“98% of scientists believe that global warming…”). So prestige has been sucked out of academia because people are not allowed freedom of inquiry or freedom of expression. But nature abhors a vacuum, so where do you find such free expression and free inquiry today? Here, for now, anyway.

Chris Best