Back to the Andes, Deep in Admiration, and the Substack Problem

Genius Loci readers:

As you read this month’s note, I’m on a plane going back to the Andes where I will continue my research on a syncretic mountain pilgrimage. I’ll have more to share about my work in the Andes in September’s newsletter. For now, I’ll leave you with links to my work I published in July, a note about Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “Deep in Admiration”, and a half-baked rant about growth narratives on social media platforms and how they harm the culture of the platforms they celebrate.

Back to the Andes

I’m heading back to the Cochabamba Valley to do more research on and around the Festival of the Virgin of Urkupiña. I plan to write more about the events in future On Mountains posts.

Unlike my previous 30 days in the Andes, I will not send out a pop-up newsletter. Having a pop-up newsletter — a newsletter that is bound within a short period of time — is a good way to generate a lot of material because of the expectation and pressure to produce it. But I’m packing light, leaving my computer at home, and don’t need the pressure to produce given my objectives.

As I wrote in last month’s newsletter, my main objective is to interview more people about the pilgrimage and the mountain. I also have a side quest to record a lot of video, with the intention of publishing a few YouTube videos. This means my still photography will take a back seat in this year’s trip.

My Work

Despite the summer semester ending, which comes with grading and administrative overhead, I had a productive July. Notably, I published four On Mountains posts discussing mountains in the Books of Exodus (part 1 and part 2, Leviticus, and Numbers. I’ll finish out the Pentateuch when I get back from the Andes. Then I’ll take a short break from Judeo-Christian ideas to explore mountains in an epic poem written by ancient India’s greatest poet: Kalidasa.

I also published two podcasts episodes: one with Ed Bernbaum on his book Sacred Mountains of the World for the On Mountains podcast, and the other with Aatish Taseer on his book A Return to Self for the Creative Journeys podcast.

Lastly, I blogged about Byung-Chul Han’s book Vita Contemplativa.

Deep in Admiration

I’ve recently come upon Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “Deep in Admiration,” which is the Foreword of her 2016 collection of poems Late in the Day. It is a beauty. In the short essay, Le Guin says that the our culture is a throwaway culture, in part propelled by (or portrayed by) what she calls our modern “technofix.” To be better stewards of our planet, and our relationship with it, “we need to relearn our being in it.” This involves relearning our biological kinship with life on the planet, and our symbiotic relationship with the Earth. In describing our relationship with other beings and the plant, Le Guin uses a metaphor we are familiar with: we are “nodes of relation in an infinite network of connections.” That to subjectify (rather than objectify) the world is “a great reach outward of the mind and imagination.” It is to recognize the subjective agency, to acknowledge our kinship, of and with the natural world. Our use of language and poetry is a particularly strong way we can subjectify the world.

The Substack Problem

Thesis statement: Growth narratives on social networks like Substack harm the platforms they celebrate by encouraging others to replicate their success. By “harm,” I don’t mean to suggest harming the platform’s growth or profits. Rather, I mean this in the sense of culture, creativity, and form. Growth narratives help turn platforms into memes of themselves.

I’ve been thinking about the culture of social networks lately. There’s a pattern I keep noticing, and it’s becoming hard to ignore.

Sign up to any social network and you’re likely to get bombarded with what I call growth narratives: content about success and succeeding on the platform. Your feed gets flooded with posts that lionize the platform itself. I suspect the platforms push these types of narratives because they show users the value of using the platform.

The problem is that using the platform becomes equated with growing on these platforms, building audiences on these platforms, and making money on these platforms. Income takes precedence over ideas, metrics and money over meaning, subscriptions over self-expression. It becomes about the game, not about “the good.”

Sign up to Substack or YouTube and you’ll see what I mean.

Substack is essentially a glorified blogging platform that syndicates content via RSS, email, and its walled garden. I suspect many of its users weren’t writing or blogging before joining the platform, which means that many of its users are writing in order to make money and capture audiences. Even writers who were writing and blogging on their own sites have switched over to Substack explicitly for its audience/growth implications.

We all want to be heard. We all want to be validated. But Schopenhauer warned us about writers who write to live instead of living to write. The whole writer-reader relationship on Substack is predicated on the idea of the writer generating cash or cachet from the reader.

Many users now arriving on Substack aren’t riding the wave. They’re getting sucked into its undertow, where they are sure to get beaten and battered. They’re essentially propelling the momentum of others. Why? Because they’re copying the playbook, thereby validating the genius of the original play. I tend to disagree with Walter Benjamin here, who believed reproduction destroys the “aura” of works of art. I reckon it does the opposite.

Growth narratives being irresistible, they compel new users to copy and mimic these success narratives. This creates a mimetic culture, a platform-specific form and tone, on the social network itself. The platform “has a voice,” one might say charitably. Maybe it is better to say “it has an accent.” Which is just another way to say people are copying content of others in order to game the algorithm and in pursuit of a similar success. From language (“smash like”) to form (reaction videos, jump cuts, Mr. Beast Face), a platform eventually becomes a meme of itself. Without a doubt, AI is making this worse.

At around 1,000 words, that’s it for this month.

Thanks for reading and farewell,

JB