Saying goodbye to Substack

Und sollte mir ein Leid gescheh'n Wer wird bei der Laterne stehen Mit dir, Lili Marleen?

A brief online autobiography, ako stvarno treba

Oh my, when did I start maintaining an outlet for online posts? It must have been 2004 or 2005 or so, when the first East Ethnia appeared on Blogger. Those were early days of blogging. I kept that going until around 2008, then abandoned it. There was just too much other work, and a lot of the side effects of having an online presence were beginning to bother me. For example I had trolls for the first time in my life. I guess it was the first time. There were aggressive creeps in high school, but we didn’t call them trolls then.

But clearly the temptations of semi-fame were strong, because I started up a blog again in 2011, this time at WordPress. It was pretty active for a period, although the format was already going out of fashion, to be eclipsed by the now ubiquitous short-format types of social media. By the time I made the last post in 2021, months would go by without me writing or posting anything. Clearly the speed of the social media format had caught me up in its frenzy as well.

But, well, the social media. I did Facebook for a while, with several periods of absence, but have you seen how that company behaves? The last time I quit in disgust it was final. This was a bit of a shame because my (mostly dormant) network included a lot of cousins, school friends, former colleagues, people with whom that was the only means of contact. But I figured that if anybody really wants to contact me, I am not that difficult to find.

And then Twitter, well, it was kind of fun for a while (not half trolly though). But when a ketamine-addled racist subject to fits of eugenic nostalgia bought the site in 2022, I closed my account the same day. It didn’t take mystical powers to foresee what that would become, and boy howdy it has. This was a pretty easy decision: I don’t let bigots into my house and they are not coming into my virtual home either.

As for the other popular platforms, I just never got into them. A while after leaving Twitter I moved over to Blueski – smaller but better.

In and out of Substack

The Substack site East of Ethnia started up in April 2023 (yes, I added an “of” to the name, can’t remember why). This seemed like a chance to try a new format and make a new beginning. The long-form text posts I had been doing on WordPress were a bit time-consuming, but the miserable experience of teaching during the pandemic had (at least) broken my resistance to video. As long as you are not a perfectionist, the amount of time it takes to record a video is coterminous with the amount of time you feel like talking. And I am definitely not a perfectionist. My Substack videos include my coughing moments, some exquisite videobombing by my dog, and at one point a neighbour knocking on the door because she was making jam and needed some jars. The cinema verité we made here would have done Edgar Morin proud.

But can I observe that Substack was a little troubling from the beginning? They don’t really want creators like me who aren’t willing to pay anybody money for hosting them. And they also don’t want readers like you who aren’t willing to pay to read (or watch) the stuff. And this whole grabby habitus is just confused by people doing things they don’t want to “monetise.” Dudes. I have a job that brings me enough money to stay supplied with wine and cheese. And I have things I want to say that I don’t want to be restricted by anybody’s ability to pay. Not to mention, the market for Balkan sociology probably has kind of a low ceiling.

And then there’s, well, how do we put this gently? Ah yes, we don’t. Substack’s little Nazi problem. This recent article made my decision to leave irreversible, but the site has been just too horstwessely for my taste for a while. Even Margaret Atwood noticed, and that was in 2023. The site owners, meanwhile, seem blissfully unbothered by the question.

I ain’t going to bum on nobody’s bliss. I’ll bolt.

Quitting every habit except quitting

We are all Albert Hirschmann fans, of course, of the “exit” tendency. And these recent years, with the fundies and the nacoši and the white supremacists and pretty much everyone I despise coming to power, well, it’s put the wind in our sails. Nobody in my family has used Amazon to purchase anything for years, at first it was just because of their chronic scabherding but now it’s also the obsequious brownnosing and destruction of the media. Begone. To say nothing of Apple, I loved those products for years with their sleek design. But when it came time to get a new phone they had already begun golden showering Tr*mp with trinkets. It was easy to stop getting Walter’s ćevapi because we all know that Pribojac is nearby.

The only time this habit was sort of difficult was when we had to boycott Barilla pasta. That company had better behave itself from now on, and not for its own sake.

Anyway, those of us who are not wealthy or famous still do have a tiny bit of power. We have got some (incomplete) power over where we spend our money – remember, the Sarajevo restaurant that cheated Hollywood legend Kirk Douglas on his bill went under after Sarajlije steered clear of them in disgust. And we certainly have some power over who gets the products of our creativity for free.

And we have the ability to vote with our feet. This is better than thinking with your feet, or trying to make complicated lace patterns with your feet.

Ipak je teško biti fin

Anyway, it seems as though this impulse to get away from evil is semi-fashionable these days (at least this is what my daughter tells me). People want ways out of the surveillance machine, they want to break the silken chains that tie them to corporate profit automatons, they want to DIY their path to freedom. This is a fine goal for people who are pursuing activities that are commensurate with it (Want to be a savoy cabbage farmer? Chances are you’re covered for everything except marketing). It’s also fine for people who have technical skills.

People have suggested a number of outlets that offer a cognate alternative to Substack. These outlets don’t have the Nazi problem (as far as I know), but otherwise they have the same problem as Substack: either they are not free, or they don’t do video hosting, or they are set up to submonetise the activity of people who want to “monetise.”

The only real offgrid alternative I found is Neocities, which, if you combine it with a non-corp video hosting site like PeerTube, lets you do everything you want online while avoiding the slimy corporate leviathan. There is only one real problem: you have to have some technical skill.

I am about as good with HTML as my dog is at figure skating, but I have some knowledge and could learn more. And the whole business of combining hosts and embedding and updating by the old manual way, well ….. I’m old enough to remember the Lascaux days of computing, when you wandered glassy eyed with your box of floppy discs looking for a terminal nobody else was using. Making things by hand is even a bit of a value in this house, which no microwave has ever entered.

But how likely am I to do all that stuff just to publish my slippery pearls of discourse? Time for a confession: I am a very, very lazy person. I’m as likely to code as I am to shave on a day when I don’t have any meetings.

So the prodigal returns

It turns out that the easiest, and consequently the best, solution is to do what all the anti-immigrant activists have been telling me and my family to do for years: go back to the place I came from. The WordPress site has been dormant since 2021 but I never deleted it (nor did I delete the Blogspot site, dormant since 2008). We are bringing it back from the dead, like Harry Lime in The Third Man. Anything new I post from here on is going to be over there.

A couple of notes:

• This site will be left up and available as an archive, in case anybody wants it for anything.

• If you have a subscription here and want to keep it, sorry. WordPress claims to have a migration tool but it doesn’t work. So if you want to get notifications you will have to subscribe there.

• At one point I turned comments off at that one but now I have turned them on again (but with moderation). We’ll see how it goes, if the nacoši start to bore me then it’s monologue time.

And let’s not part with Substack on a bad note. Eja, eja alalà, thanks for everything, and I hope one day you make peace with your mortal souls.