Launching a Newsletter, A Little Reluctantly

2023 December 4

I’ve really enjoyed getting back into trying to write regularly, so I’m going to take the next step and, yes, launch a newsletter. By this I mean something very narrow: now you can sign up to get brief emailed notices when I post something new on this website. I’ve actually been quite tempted to just say that I’m adding email notifications to my blog, but in today’s discourse everyone talks about newslettering, so I’ll bow to convention.

On the other hand, I want to be extremely clear that I have no aspirations to become any kind of Monetizing Influencer Person — but given today’s internet landscape (RSS is dead, as demonstrated by all of the people who feel the need to argue that actually RSS is not dead), it seems like a useful step despite the sour taste it leaves in my mouth.

Why the sour taste? Thanks for asking! Here’s a lengthy essay you didn’t ask for.

As you have probably noticed, the internet is terrible right now. Never Hungover put it well: “to scroll the internet in 2023 is to feel, more often than not, like you are the last person alive.” Wikipedia summarizes the Dead Internet Theory by stating that it “asserts that the Internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity,” which is, like, obviously true. The chief way in which Dead Internet is incorrect is the insistence that this has to be a coordinated psyop — the emotional need for tragedy to be imbued with meaning. Search is bad. Q&A sites are bad. Recipes are bad. Social media is terrible. Journalism is a disaster. A firehose of AI-generated garbage is going to make every aspect of everything even worse, probably for the rest of all time.

One of the many dispiriting things about the 2023 internet is the shadow cast by the influencer industry. I don’t have a problem with anyone trying to make a living by influencer-ing — we all need to put food on the table, and it seems like a hell of a lot more appealing job than many — but the inescapable striving for eyeballs and clout takes what should or at least could be human interactions, makes them transactional, and then the Remorseless Logic of Capitalism™ kicks in to optimize them into paste. Unfortunately, that paste is generally the antithesis of good writing. Never Hungover again: “the overwhelming majority of human-generated internet posts hew to a set of codes, memes, and take-formats that render their speech something like an imitation of AI, rather than the other way around.” Writing becomes “content.” The recipe must start with a long personal anecdote, even though neither the reader nor the writer wants it. And so, although I’m not inclined to believe that small children actually learn that “don’t forget to subscribe” means “goodbye”, the signifiers of SEO thralldom become deeply depressing. They indicate that whatever you’re about to read is likely junk: “What’s your favorite methods to remove tarnish from brass? Let us know in the comments!” “This post contains affiliate links.” And, yes, “Please subscribe to my newsletter.”

That being said, if you can look past all of the engagement maximization and paid product placements, there’s a basis to the influenceosphere that feels very much like what the internet was “supposed” to be. Sometimes, it is genuinely wonderful to connect with a person that you may never meet, who may not even know that you exist. Now, anyone paying attention has seen that these connections aren’t always positive: online forums can bring together isolated queer kids, and also Nazis. But I’d like to believe that it’s at least possible have a world where the good ones far outweigh the bad. And if the magical power of near-instantaneous global telecommunications is largely used to form parasocial bonds over funny pet antics and not, I dunno, lectures on climate change, I honestly have trouble being very bothered by that.

Another thing that strikes me is that this feeling of connection across space and time is one that academics have experienced for a long time. I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the true joys of scholarship. I’m never going to meet Hannah Arendt or Edwin Jaynes but I still feel like I’ve gotten to know them, and I’m glad that I have. There’s a bit of tension here because what academics do is supposed to be about ideas and not people, but after all, people are the ones that expose us to new ideas — influence us, if you will — and there’s a pleasure in observing someone skilled at work. (Note that this has no relation to how “hard” or “soft” one’s field may be — the output may be more or less technical, but either way, there’s a person creating it. That’s one reason that I believe that physical-science researchers should reserve some mental space to include “scholar” as part of our professional identities, even if it can feel a bit pretentious.)

This gets at why I’m making a concerted effort to write more here. I harbor no fantasies about rocketing to late-blooming academic stardom or securing a place in history through a blog — and just the word “blog” feels pretty cringey in the year 2023 — but if your job is to generate and spread new knowledge, it seems like you ought to be writing things down! And for the academically inclined, the blog format seems like a pretty good one. Some scholarly writing should happen in refereed journal articles, but does everything need to reach that level of formality? Surely not. Conversely, if you publishing something outside of a traditional journal, is it necessarily low-quality? Of course not.

I take a lot of inspiration from the blog of David Bordwell, a professor of film studies at UW-Madison. He seems to have launched it (back in 2006) with what you might call Air Bud Mentality: “Well, ain’t no rule says a blog can’t be a venue for serious academic writing”. The scholarly posts are presumably not as refined as formal articles would be, but many are remarkably polished, with framegrabs to illustrate his points and references at the end.

Bordwell’s blog is also clearly an artifact of the pre-influencer internet. No chasing virality, no SEO tics, no newsletter. Besides the timing, this is partially a consequence of privilege in action: Bordwell writes from the comfort of his tenured professorship, not while scrapping to make his name. Be that as it may, stylistically, wow is it a breath of fresh air. Not that I’d argue that he’s an exceptional prose stylist — but he writes well enough and is obviously pursuing his interests, not whatever’s trending. It’s a satisfying combination, and one that feels depressingly rare on today’s internet. (And it seems likely to become yet rarer — sadly, Bordwell’s health appears to be failing.)

(Update: at virtually the same time as I posted this, the Bordwell blog was updated with a re-post of a classic discussion of Die Hard that perfectly demonstrates the polish I mentioned above. Unfortunately it also confirms that David’s health situation is poor.)

All of this is to try to convey why I feel a bit icky about becoming a Newsletter Guy. But I have to admit that I would actually like for people to read the things that I write! And, especially given the inexhaustible torrent of “content” flung in our faces every day, maybe some potential readers would appreciate automated notifications about when I’ve posted something new. And probably a lot of those people would prefer email-based alerts to the RSS feed or reading the Toots. So, I’m aiming to adopt my own Air Bud Mentality: ain’t no rule says that if you call it a newsletter you can’t write plainly about your intellectual interests. That's the hope, at least.

In particular, the plan is just to email out links to posts on this site with ultra-brief descriptions — one of the many ways in which I would make a terrible influencer is that I hate spreading my virtual presence across dozens of communication platforms. If it turns out that my future legions of adoring fans want fulltext in the emails, I should be able to make that happen, but links-only is easier for me right now.

I’m using a service called ButtonDown, which appears to be a one-person operation with pleasantly Small Web vibes. (Much of what I’ve written above is right out of the Small Web playbook — something I may return to in the future.) I found ButtonDown by Googling for “privacy oriented newsletter service”, but you’ll notice that the emails do have click-trackers in them. I don’t anticipate becoming obsessed with engagement metrics, but I’d like to at least be able to get a sense of how many people are reading what.