Substack will not save us. But also, hello
The other day I came across the kind of site I didn't think still existed on the internet.
A blog, over 15-years-old, carefully maintained although with infrequent posts in recent years. A nice mix of personal but still very anonymous. It wasn't trying to sell me anything, it wasn't building a brand, it wasn't monetized, it was imperfect. It was a stranger creating a warm, interesting space for other strangers on the internet.
I sat and polished off the entire site in a few hours and emerged, content. It was a reminder of a version of the internet that once was. What Jia Tollentino in Trick Mirror refers to as "good spaces" constructed on the lines of affinity. It gave me the same feeling I get when I walk into a library in Colombo.
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I can't pinpoint with certainty how old I was when I arrived at the internet.
I remember dial-up connections and the distorted sound the phone line would make as it sighed and hummed and connected a young Sri Lankan girl to the world. I remember the connection would get disconnected when someone picked up the phone to make a call (it did, right? Memory is such an unreliable thing). I remember that only two of my friends were allowed internet access. I would use my father's email ID – I wasn't allowed one initially – to exchange emails with them. We would see each other at school but still send each other newsy missives from the day. We would very seriously forward each other chain mails, some of which still stubbornly endure today and pop up on my WhatsApp from older relatives.
I was allowed my own email ID later. Inexplicably, I chose wildchild545. I was neither wild nor a child. I also unironically used my later email ID adilahrocks well into my early twenties. Please don't judge me based on my email IDs. And then there was the heady world of MSN messenger, chatrooms and Hi5 and early Facebook and then twitter and it was all very exciting and new and looking back, I think I was lucky to have navigated these spaces relatively unscathed with my naivete intact.
I started blogging when I was 17-years-old. A friend introduced me to a Sri Lankan blog aggregator called Kottu and nudged me to start writing. I had always been writing. I drew stories, wrote what I thought was profound poetry, journaled. My extra-curricular activities outside school mostly centred around writing. While other hobbies were abandoned, writing stuck.
Writing on the internet felt like writing into a void. Gradually the void spoke back. People began visiting the blog and commenting on it. Checking in to see if I was ok when there were silences. I was an awkward, introverted schoolgirl who didn't quite fit in the spaces I navigated. This was different. It was exciting to have this alternative life online. And God, what a community. There was a Lankan dad who played the drums in London and made dad blog posts which feel like the precursor of dad jokes. There was a thinly veiled sex diary. This was the golden age of groundviews which was a hotbed of commentary because this was the war years and everyone had an opinion about the war years. Troll blogs spoofing us. Some very good writing. A lot of poetry.
I blogged under a pseudonym and didn't tell friends and family about this new life online but Colombo being Colombo, word got out and gradually my online and offline lives converged. I am grateful for the friendships that blogging spurred. A lot of us migrated to twitter and other social media platforms and still converse long after our blogs became silent.
One day, during my early blogging years, someone emailed with a job offer on the strength of what was on the blog. I was still in school and remember grappling with the thrill that someone out there thought my writing was good enough to pay me money for. My writing (!!?) I took up the job offer soon after my A/Ls and then went on to write for the newspapers just before my undergrad. After my undergrad studies, I began writing some more, gradually making a (precarious) career out of it, balancing freelance communications work and feature-writing.
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Every now and then Silicon Valley rolls around with a shiny, monetized iteration of an old idea that they swear will save the world.
Substack posits itself as an alternative for an alarmingly broken media, connecting reader and writer through a subscription model. It claims it "can solve the structural issues between publishers/writers and readers in a way that aligns the incentives between all of them".
Fixing these structural issues will take decades to undo the damage the Substack's Silicon Valley counterparts have wrought. It would require rethinking the entire business scaffolding, circulation and funding models that prop the media up. It would need investments in newsrooms, fighting state and corporate censure and convincing readers that journalism is valuable. I imagine we would also need to lock up media and Silicon Valley execs and lovingly whisper chunks of McLuhan, Lippman and Chomsky & Herrman with Tibetan singing bowls humming in the background.
A good media product (I loathe how the language of commodification has inched its way into everything but this is the only word I can think of right now) is the result of many layers and many people. The writer is only one layer. To hold up substack as a panacea for a fractured media feels like boldly stepping out into a thunderstorm with a banana leaf to protect your head.
What I like about Substack is the attempt to shed our over-reliance on social media platforms (Google reader, I miss you so much. I always join the melancholy twitter chorus of wails bemoaning how something in the fabric of the internet fundamentally shifted when Google killed reader). Admittedly though, newsletters will have to jostle for attention in inbox clutter while sandwiched between LinkedIn notifications and bank statements. But what excites me, personally – and I have zero evidence-led reasons for this – is that it gives me the same fissure of anticipation that I had when I started blogging twelve years ago. And I haven't had this in a while.
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Even when I'm not writing, I am thinking about writing. I can't step away from it now even if I tried.
But I have also been struggling with my writing – the writing I do outside of my communications and corporate work. Features, essays, nonfiction, fiction, that kind of thing. I thought it was a phase and valiantly tried to write, read, exercise and meditate my way out of this but it's been a few years now. I show up every day but a combination of self-doubt, hyper-critique and imposter syndrome have crystallized to a point where writing feels painful and where an odd sense of shame shadows my work.
I started this newsletter in August 2019 and then paused. There is a part of me that is deeply uncomfortable about mining my life for my writing and I know I already do this with social media. I worried if I would put too much of myself out into an unforgiving and judgemental internet that is bloated with content. When you live in a small city, where one person's business is everyone else's drinking conversation fodder there is an added apprehension. I had also become fond of the old blog and was reluctant to part with it. Then I wondered if endeavours like this are procrastination projects which take you away from the work or enhance the work and after a lot of overthinking, here we are.
Writing involves a balancing act between vulnerability and self-confidence. This is an exercise in getting comfortable with discomfort. I'm trying to take ownership of my writing. I am trying to be ok with vulnerability and imperfection. I am trying, I am trying. This is an exercise in trying.
I used to enjoy writing letters and notes from Colombo on the old blog and this will be continued here. You can expect letters, lists and essays on life, culture, food, books, media, Colombo and Sri Lanka.
Emails will be once a week. This feels a lot like ushering people into a front-row seat to all my future existential crises but I'm glad you're here. Welcome.
Adilah