If you’ve been looking for a blog about anything, whether philosophy or Philadelphia, AI or angels, you’ve probably encountered the blogging platform Substack. Even Substack has a Substack page. The platform markets itself as a “subscription network for independent writers and creators”—a centralized platform for which writers, bloggers, and journalists can publish their ideas. Yet for many popular creators and writers, Substack is their livelihood. 

For a simple blogging platform, the company has encountered unprecedented success. It’s valued at $1.1 billion. How has the platform become so popular? This article looks at the rise of Substack, touching on the short-form sinkhole, the fall of Twitter, and the increasing necessity to monetize the Internet.

How did we get here?

The rise of Substack can be understood by a three-part shift in the way people consume, think about and share social media content.

In the last five to seven years, social media has shifted from photo-sharing and Twitter threads to an emphasis on short-form content. The rise of TikTok as a popular platform prompted rivals Instagram and Facebook (both owned by Meta) to launch their own short-form offerings with Reels. YouTube followed suit with YouTube Shorts. While short-form content made these platforms significant amounts of money, some users disliked the forcing of short-form content (several popular social media platforms limited their users to 140 280 characters).

The algorithms of social media platforms have changed the way people speak. Adam Aleksic (better known as @etymologynerd on various social media platforms) told Reuters that in efforts to avoid certain sensitive words that would get flagged by algorithms, users have used other words to convey the same meaning. If you’ve ever heard someone use the word “unalive” (a word I absolutely despise, although that’s probably an article for the Opinion section), you’ve witnessed the way algorithms affect language.

Those who disliked short-form content didn’t have many places to go; those who created long-form content had even fewer places to go. A downturn in traditional journalism meant that the standard instant-news website was Twitter (when it was still known by that moniker). Elon Musk’s takeover and rebrand to X has driven many users away from the platform, opening the doors for companies such as Mastodon and BlueSky. Furthermore, built-in X features such as xAI’s Grok began generating other problems for users and advertisers.

With short-form content on the rise and traditional platforms no longer available, long-form writers and academics jumped at the opportunity to use a long-form content platform. One scientist who made the move cited “[having] a whole lot more ownership” over the content they produce and not being tied to a schedule. 

Since moving from social media to Substack requires forgoing platform advertising revenue, authors have begun monetizing paid Substacks similar to news subscriptions. Top creators exceed $500,000 in annual revenue, with most revenue earned from subscriptions going directly to creators. (Substack takes a 10% cut of subscription revenue to cover its overhead costs; its payment provider, Square, takes an additional 3%.)

While the platform’s lax moderation policy has occasionally caused issues, Substack has risen to become a feasible alternative for long-form content creation. For those looking to create blogs, discover new voices, or consume information, Substack may be a platform worth considering.

SpaceX launched a crew of four astronauts to the International Space Station on April 23. The astronauts originated from three countries: the United States, France and Japan. Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur work for NASA; Akihiko Hoshide is a member of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA); and Thomas Pesquet is a member of the European Space Agency. 

The team arrived at their destination on the morning of April 24 – 23 hours after takeoff. All four of the crew members had previous experience in space travel and living in space. The crew will spend six months in space carrying out a scientific mission.

“We couldn’t have asked for anything better,” McArthur, the pilot for the spacecraft, said.

“I asked them what they look forward to most in the mission, and they said launching and getting up on the station and getting to work,” NASA’s Acting Administrator, Steve Jurczyk, said.

The expedition marks the second flight for two SpaceX spacecraft. Falcon 9, the rocket, was recycled from a November mission, and the Crew Dragon spacecraft –the actual vessel for transportation –was originally used in May 2020 for SpaceX’s first-ever manned flight in space.

Reusing components, such as rockets and the vessel itself, may allow space travel to occur with more ease and affordability, potentially important factors in SpaceX’s goals of commercial space travel and to make humanity “multi-planetary.” Though such an accomplishment is still a long way away, the events of last week’s successful mission reaffirmed its plausibility for many. 

Elon Musk, co-founder and owner of SpaceX, Tesla and Neuralink, said he believes that human missions to Mars are closer than most think. The science-orientated entrepreneur claimed to be “highly confident”  that SpaceX will put humans on Mars by 2026. However, Musk acknowledges that such a goal would require a spacecraft that is closer to a commercial airplane. If all goes well, SpaceX’s Starship rocket –which is still in development – would only need maintenance instead of a complete rebuild each time it is launched – a development with the potential to save SpaceX millions of dollars. 

Interest in space travel has occupied human imagination as far back as the 1960s – if not before then. Earlier in the week, President Joe Biden called to congratulate another team on their success in their attempt to launch a helicopter on Mars in early April. During his speech, President Biden mentioned that his grandson wanted to know when he could go to Mars. This quip characterizes the purpose of SpaceX and their mission to eventually colonize Mars, which is much closer now than ever before.

In addition to long hours of labor, employee injuries are a common occurrence. Such large reports of injuries have constructed a stigma around reporting work-related injuries. This father refrains from reporting his own injuries for fear of being a labeled a bad worker or a complainer by management.

In addition to that when you report an injury you are moved to “light work” – a position in which your pay is decreased. The man’s friend has injured his back twice on the job at Tesla and went from earning 22 to 10 dollars an hour when shifted to light work.

The tenuous ethical positioning of the means of Tesla’s production is incentivized in a neoliberal global economy that rewards competition and the upwards flow of wealth. An inherent flaw in neoliberal economics, however, is the presupposition of neo-slave conditions in the labor class.

This is observable in Nike’s longstanding problems with it’s labor conditions, Amazon’s continued mistreatment of employees in production plants and even the charitable organization of Goodwill’s rampant employee mistreatment in distribution factories. All the evidence points to Elon Musk as the next capitalist kingpin to wage war on the labor class.

The world often tries to paint Musk as the preeminent 21st century futurist who will lead the Earth into the fourth industrial revolution. Unfortunately a prior concern to the advancements that Musk could bring about are the ethics of his capitalist practices.

Neoliberalism embraces shady business practices for the sake of economic practicality; thus, the simple standard of determining the objective goodness of an executive is by analyzing the lengths to which they capitalize off the harmful potential of neoliberalism.

Musk has failed to posit himself as a saint – by any means of the word – in the face of the potential for economic gain, meaning we need not idolize a man that is setting a precedent of unethicality in business.

It is fair to make the claim that Musk intends to do good for the world through his businesses of Tesla and SpaceX. Tesla is explicitly aimed at decreasing fossil fuel emissions by producing the first affordable and mass-produced electric vehicles that function better than vehicles that run on fuel. SpaceX seeks to colonize Mars and create a solution to the pressing issue of population growth. Yet despite all of Musk’s goodwill, his image is still rife with holes.

In early September, Musk created a bit of controversy by smoking weed on the Joe Rogan podcast while hypocritically maintaining extremely strict provisions on workers concerning drug use. This caused Musk’s companies to significantly drop in stock value and made many of the companies’ largest shareholders question Musk’s decision making skills.

Shareholders’ concerns are eerily valid. In response to complaints about poor working conditions by Tesla employees Musk reportedly visited the Fremont plant and spent the night on the floor of the plant to represent that he feels the pain of his employees.

This attempt at a display of solidarity with plant employees is one of the most belittling representations Musk could have engaged in. The belief that sleeping on the floor reconciles or even recognizes the true pain and toil that workers go through reveals how Musk truly views his employees. As a means to the production of wealth and only subject to the minor inconvenience of a poor sleeping situation.

This revelation blatantly ignores the true reality of worker conditions at Tesla. Workers don’t have a poor sleeping situation, they have a poor living situation because of Tesla and sleeping on the floor does nothing but dismiss the workers reality and permit continued mistreatment of employees.

When Musk is allowed to get away with holding up a norm of unethical business conduct while still being largely idolized in the public eye, he begins to gain the power to set societal precedents. Musk will be imitated, mimicked and regarded as a trailblazer while the trail that he is blazing is down a path that props up neoliberal violence.

Neoliberal violence like laborer mistreatment creates the conditions for structural violences of poverty, discrimination and elitism.

When there are repressive deviations in the quality of life amongst various levels of a business model, neoliberalism is essentially weaponized to attack the low and middle class. If the precedent for violence of this sort is established, fears of future dystopian scenarios  will come closer to fruition.

Musk is by no means a demon. His ethical infractions and flawed assumptions do not make him an evil person. I believe Musk to have genuinely good interests at heart but this does not exclude him from criticism.

Musk’s business conduct thus far has not been a strength of his chief executive duties and he has opened the door to perpetuating unethical business practices and because of that he should not be the businessman that is idolized in the public eye.

While Musk’s heroism sparks occasionally in his purity of interests, his heroism overall falls victim to the villainous products of business oversight.

Photos courtesy of standard.co.uk.

Born 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk is the son of a model and dietitian, and electromechanical engineer. By 12 years old, Musk used self-taught computer programming skills to design a video game he called “Blastar”, which he then sold to the magazine “PC and Office Technology” for $500.

Musk attended Queen’s University in Canada for two years before transferring to Penn State where he studied physics and economics. In true entrepreneurial spirit, he ran a successful unofficial nightclub out of a huge frat house. On some occasions, parties attracted upwards of 1,000 students.

After leaving Penn in 1995 Musk entered the Stanford Ph.D. program to study energy physics. Just two days later, he dropped out to pursue internet-based business ventures. In the same year, after partnering with his brother, Musk created a web software company, Zip2 which sold in 1999 for 307 million dollars.

With some of the money from his seven percent stake in Zip2, Musk cofounded X.com, a user-friendly online financial service known today as PayPal. When eBay acquired this company in 2002, Musk’s shares netted him 165 million dollars. Now with substantial capital in the bank, he formed two companies devoted to fighting global climate change: SolarCity and Tesla Motors.

SolarCity, a partner with Tesla Motors, provides state-of-the-art solar panels to produce clean energy and an affordable bill. Inspired by General Motors’ electric car, EV1, Tesla Motors began production in 2008 with a sleek, all-electric roadster. The company’s most recent vehicles include a much-improved roadster that boasts a 0-60 time of 1.9 seconds – faster than any production car – and semi truck that beats all others in safety and is capable of substantial fuel savings.

By supplying desirable, practical and affordable vehicles, Tesla’s purpose is to “accelerate the world’s transition into sustainable energy.”

From a young age, Musk has been concerned with improving the world. One author he read as a child, Isaac Asimov, helped foster such a sentiment.

“Asimov certainly was influential…The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,” Musk explained.

Another venture that demands attention is SpaceX, a company Musk founded in 2002 with 100 million dollars of his own capital. This organization holds records for the first private rocket to launch, orbit and land, first private spacecraft to visit the International Space Station and the first private company to launch an object into orbit around the sun.

In 2018, as a publicity stunt and challenge, Musk blasted a Tesla Roadster into the atmosphere with David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” playing on repeat.

“Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring. Of course, anything boring is terrible, especially companies, so we decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel,” Musk said when asked about the bizarre payload.

Future aspirations for SpaceX are to reduce the cost of travel by a rate of ten, create reliable and safe space transportation between countries and travel to Mars. Musk hopes to have two unmanned rockets visit the red planet by 2022 and by 2024 have four manned ships visit to establish a colony.

Musk believes that a third world war is inevitable and hopes Mars colonization could be a way to protect the human race from devastation in the event of nuclear war.

“We want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of civilization somewhere else to bring civilization back and perhaps shorten the length of the dark ages,” said Musk. “I think that’s why it’s important to get a self-sustaining base, ideally on Mars, because it’s more likely to survive than a moon base.”

When Musk isn’t launching sports cars into outer space or planning to colonize other planets, he is working on the HyperLoop, a high-speed mode of transportation that carries passengers in pods through a low-pressure tube.  It is expected to far surpass the speed of bullet trains and aims to move riders from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than one hour – a six-and-a-half hour commute by car.

To accomplish such a feat, Musk created The Boring Company after tweeting, “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am [sic] going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging…” Along with the HyperLoop, The Boring Company also plans to form a series of underground highways for quick travel within cities.

In addition to leading the industry in the future of expeditious, affordable space travel, private space exploration, electric cars, solar panels and Mars colonization, Musk is not lacking in his philanthropic efforts. He has recently donated 15 million dollars to a Global Learning, a program that aims to empower children to take control of their learning and bring together innovative ideas for technological development.

During Puerto Rico’s power outage, Musk donated hundreds of high-capacity battery packs to hurricane victims. Furthermore, he has added himself to The Giving Pledge, a community of wealthy individuals who promise to donate most of their wealth to charities upon death rather than giving it to a family.

Like a real-life Tony Stark, Musk certainly lives up to his eccentric reputation of wild ambition and drive. His work has contributed many great goods and services to humanity, only time will reveal what other breathtaking enterprises he will accomplish. As a man who shows exemplary qualities like vision, discipline, intelligence and charity, Musk is nothing short of remarkable.

Photos courtesy of standard.co.uk.