Substack

I’ve recently started putting some of my more political writing on Substack, partly as an experiment and partly because prolonged exposure to Facebook increasingly feels like living beside a leaking chemical plant.

Most people will probably have heard of Substack without having the faintest clue what it actually is, beyond “that place Dominic Cummings writes long angry essays on”. Which, to be fair, is not entirely inaccurate, but still doesn’t really capture it.

My actual blog readership was never really the problem. Most people who voluntarily end up reading a long Blogger post about energy policy, Brexit, fiscal strategy or constitutional drift have already passed a basic literacy and attention-span threshold. You might get a thoughtful comment, perhaps a disagreement, perhaps silence, but at least there is usually some evidence the person reached the end without suffering neurological collapse.

The real experience was always Facebook beyond your own posts.

The algorithm, having detected both my usual political position and my fatal tendency to engage with nonsense, now steadily drives the feed towards the more surreal end of the anti-woke spectrum. Every time I respond to something especially idiotic, Facebook concludes:

“Excellent. He wants more of this.”

So the feed increasingly fills with posts insisting Britain is collapsing because of migrants, electric cars, low traffic neighbourhoods, oat milk, cyclists or somebody saying “Happy Holidays” in Minneapolis three years ago.

Most of it appears under accounts decorated with Union flags, bulldogs, Spitfires or Churchill quotations. Then you click on the profile and discover the account itself is based in Sri Lanka, was created six weeks ago, and posts twenty hours a day about preserving traditional British culture.

At that point the whole thing starts feeling less like political debate and more like a low-budget psychological operation accidentally outsourced to a call centre in Colombo.

Substack, though, is different.

The certainty is still there, naturally. The internet never lacks certainty. But on Substack the certainty usually arrives attached to footnotes, historical references and somebody politely dismantling your argument using statistics from West German industrial output in 1974.

People actually read things there. Entire things. Sometimes they quote your own paragraphs back at you before disagreeing with them. It is deeply unsettling after Facebook, where many users appear to process written language the way cattle react to sudden movement.

The genuinely fascinating thing is that even the cranks on Substack are generally higher calibre cranks. Instead of “YOU’RE WOKE” followed by fourteen Union flags, you get a 3,000-word essay arguing that fractional reserve banking caused modern architecture.

Oddly, I quite like it.

It feels less like being barked at by a man standing beside a mobility scooter draped in St George’s flags outside Wetherspoons, and more like wandering into a slightly overwrought university seminar where everyone has had too much coffee and very strong opinions about monetary policy.

Which, all things considered, is probably healthier for everyone.

Here's my Substack link.