I get the sense that in the ‘old days’ of writing, a writer might let his piece get hacked up by heavy-handed editors at large publications for the privilege of getting published.

With Substack, the traditional writer-editor dynamic goes out the window. Here, there’s no editor polishing or manicuring my work; there’s no agent acting as a gatekeeper into a prestigious world of publishing. I write directly to the reader, and inasmuch as that works for me — I answer to no one else.

If this site keeps on trucking well into the future, it’s liable to dramatically shift the culture around the written word for decades to come. A whole new crop of writers will come up for whom this state of affairs is the norm.

For such people, when editors ask for drafts and proceed to hack them up — they’ll think “I don’t have to do this” with an ease that was seldom known in previous eras of writing.