9/3/21, 10:40 AM It's All Just Displacement - by Freddie deBoer - Freddie deBoer

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It's All Just Displacement

Blue checkmarks are mourning bad careers in a broken industry

Freddie deBoer
Mar 22 117 6

Displacement - Displacement is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person redirects a

negative emotion from its original source to a less threatening recipient. A classic example of the
defense is displaced aggression.If a person is angry but cannot direct their anger toward the source
without consequences, they might "take out" their anger on a person or thing that poses less of a risk.

Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s pretending to be a platform when it’s a
publisher; they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys; they don’t hate it
because of harassment or any such thing. I don’t think they really hate it at all. Substack is a
small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it

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but it’s not important enough for them to hate it. What do they hate? They hate where their
industry is and they hate where they are within their industry. But that’s a big problem that
they don’t feel like they can solve. If you feel you can’t get mad at the industry that’s
impoverishing you, it’s much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are unjustly
succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes
the media harshly? Trying to tarnish Substack’s reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types
leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they can maybe do. Confronting their
industry’s future with open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see
success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly
dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due.

Things are bad, folks:

here

Noah Rothman
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@NoahCRothman

Double yikes, if advertising $$ is your thing.

March 12th 2021

113 Retweets 387 Likes

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here

Life in the “content” industry already sucks. A small handful of people make bank while the
vast majority hustle relentlessly just to hold on to the meager pay they already receive. There
are staff writers at big-name publications who produce thousands of words every week and
who make less than $40,000 a year for their trouble. There are permanent employees of highly
prestigious newspapers and magazines who don’t receive health insurance. Venues close all
the time. Mourning another huge round of layoffs is a regular bonding experience for people
in the industry. Writers have to constantly job hop just to try and grind out an extra $1,500 a
year, making their whole lives permanent job interviews where they can’t risk offending their
potential bosses and peers. Many of them dream of selling that book to save themselves
financially, not seeming to understand that book advances have fallen 40% in 10 years - median
figure now $6,080 - and that the odds of actually making back even that meager advance are
slim, meaning most authors are making less than minimum wage from their books when you

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do the math. They have to tweet constantly for the good of their careers, or so they believe,
which amounts to hundreds of hours of unpaid work a year. Their publications increasingly
strong arm them into churning out pathetic pop-culture ephemera like listicles about the
outfits on Wandavision. They live in fear of being the one to lose out when the next layoffs
come and the game of media musical chairs spins up once again. They have to pretend to like
ghouls like Ezra Klein and Jonah Peretti and make believe that there’s such a thing as “the
Daily Beast reputation for excellence.”

I have always felt bad for them, despite our differences, because of these conditions. And they
have a right to be angry. But they don’t have much in the way of self-awareness about where
their anger really lies. A newsletter company hosting Bari Weiss is why you can’t pay your
student loans? You sure?

They’ll tell you about the terrible conditions in their industry themselves, when they’re feeling
honest. So what are they really mad about? That I’m making a really-just-decent guaranteed
wage for just one year? Or that this decent wage is the kind of money many of them dream of
making despite the fact that, in their minds, they’ve done everything right and played by all
the rules? Is their anger really about a half-dozen guys whose writing you have to actively seek
out to see? (If you click the button and put in your email address, you’ll get these newsletters.
If you don’t, you won’t. So if you’re a media type who hates my writing, consider just… not
clicking that button.) Or do they need someplace to put the rage and resentment that grows
inside them as they realize, no, it’s not getting better, this is all I get?

It’s true that I have, in a very limited way, achieved the new American dream: getting a little
bit of VC cash. I’m sorry. But it’s much much less than one half of what Felix Salmon was
making in 2017 and again, it’s only for one year.

You think the writers complaining in that piece I linked to at the top wanted to be here, at this
place in their career, after all those years of hustling? You think decades into their media
career, the writers who decamped to Substack said to themselves “you know, I’d really like to
be in my 40s and having to hope that enough people will pitch in $5 a month so I can pay my
mortgage”? No. But the industry didn’t give them what they felt they deserved either. So they
displace and project. They can hate Jesse Singal, but Jesse Singal isn’t where this burning
anger is coming from. Neither am I. They’re so angry because they bought into a notoriously
savage industry at the nadir of its labor conditions and were surprised to find that they’re
drifting into middle age without anything resembling financial security. I feel for them as I
feel for all people living economically precarious lives, but getting rid of Substack or any of its

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writers will not do anything to fix their industry or their jobs. They wanted more and they got
less and it hurts. This isn’t what they dreamed. That’s what this is really about.

What makes this niche platform worthy of a week-long media meltdown? They’ll suggest that
this is about the political impact of Substack. What political impact? The combined influence
of the writers they’re attacking is small. The combined audience of the writers they’re
attacking is small. The combined wages of the writers they’re attacking is small. Substack is a
tiny company that 99% of Americans have never heard of. The conservative media is immense
and well-funded and more equipped to survive economic downturns than the progressive
media. And that world is filled with people who actually, openly believe the terrible things
we’re falsely accused of believing. They’re the ones endangering vulnerable groups. They come
into the homes of a huge swath of the country and spread hateful propaganda. Why on earth
would you invest 5 minutes of your anger on me, when Breitbart exists? What rational sense
does that make?

My own deal here is not mysterious. It’s just based on a fact that the blue checks on Twitter
have never wanted to accept. I got offered money to write here for the same reason I got
offered to write for The New York Times and Harper’s and The Washington Post and The LA Times,
the same reason I’ve gotten a half-dozen invitations to pitch since I started here a few weeks
ago, the same reason a literary agent sought me out and asked me to write a book, the same
reason I sold that book for a decent advance: because I pull traffic. Though I am a social
outcast from professional opinion writing, I have a better freelance publishing history than
many, many of my critics who are paid-up, obedient members of the media social scene. Why?
Because the editors who hired me thought I was a great guy? No. Because I pull traffic. I
always have. That’s why you’re reading this on Substack right now.

I’ve been given opportunities because I’ve proved profitable to media businesses and like all
businesses media businesses only care about profit. The important question for my critics
should thus be why I’ve been successful in the ideas market when I represent the rejection of
many of their values. Since the line between professional and personal relationships has
completely collapsed in the industry, media people think that any professional success must
represent an endorsement of the writer as a person. (The question they ask about me is often
“how did a guy nobody likes get published everywhere,” betraying the assumption that being
well-liked should be the only criterion for getting published.) But popularity has nothing to do
with me consistently getting work in the industry. I turn writing into clicks and clicks into
cash. That’s not complicated.

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Eric Newcomer
@EricNewcomer

At what point is the Substack conflict just kayfabe. It feels like the
cancellers and the cancelled both benefit from firing up their supporters.
It is grist for their substacks and podcasts.

Matt Taibbi @mtaibbi

Singal on the current fear of controversy: “If you were a 25-year-old journalist,
why would you possibly touch one of these hot-button issues, when it could
overnight ruin your reputation? I’m much more worried about those people than
myself.” https://t.co/SnyACSY1iu

March 20th 2021

7 Retweets 62 Likes

Nor is it complicated how I’ve generated a public reputation. It never seems to occur to them
that constantly having Twitter meltdowns about me raised my profile in ways I never could
have accomplished without their help. You think Substack would have even heard of me if I
only did what I spend most of my writing time doing, producing long ruminative essays about
education policy or obscure books or the psychic wounds of 21st century culture? If you’re
mad that I’m getting economic opportunity now, why did you play my game over and over
again for the past 12 years1?

I have no idea if I’ll stay at Substack after this year. If the money is still good, I probably will. If
it’s not, I probably won’t. If the Twitter hive succeeds in getting a purge going that gets me
kicked off the platform, that’s cool too. I’ll just do other things. Whether I am allowed to serve
out the length of my contract with Substack will have absolutely no impact on the integrity of
the news industry or its finances. So, again: who are you really mad at? Me? What do I have to
do with your broken industry? Why are you constantly tweeting about Substack and not the
private equity creeps who are destroying your livelihood?

A really important lesson to learn, in life, is this: your enemies are more honest about you than
your friends ever will be. I’ve been telling the blue checks for over a decade that their industry
was existentially fucked, that the all-advertising model was broken, that Google and Facebook
would inevitably hoover up all the profit, that there are too many affluent kids fresh out of
college just looking for a foothold in New York who’ll work for next to nothing and in doing so
driving down the wages of everyone else, that their mockery of early subscription programs
like Times Select was creating a disastrous industry expectation that asking your readers
directly for money was embarrassing. Trump is gone and the news business is cratering.

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Michael Tracey didn’t make that happen. None of this anger will heal what’s wrong. If you get
all of the people you don’t like fired from Substack tomorrow, what will change? How will your
life improve? Greenwald will spend more time with his hottie husband and his beloved kids
and his 6,000 dogs in his beautiful home in Rio. Glenn will be fine. How do we do the real
work of getting you job security and a decent wage?

Who’s your real enemy? Me? Matt Taibbi? Or your boss, your employer, your industry, your
economy, your country? Think it over, really. I have much, much more sympathy for the
average writer or journalist than people would think. It’s an important profession and many of
them individually, when you peel them off from the pack, are lovely people. I hope all of them
get financial stability, including the ones who constantly scream about me online. (Even Noah
Blatarsky.) I want media to be healthier than it is, financially and otherwise. I want media
workers to have higher pay and better benefits and more job security and powerful unions. In
part because if they did they’d be more independent and media desperately needs more
independence.

But how do things get better in that way? Only through real self-criticism (which Twitter
makes impossible) and by asking hard questions. Questions like one that has not been credibly
confronted a single time in this entire media meltdown: why are so many people subscribing
to Substacks? What is the traditional media not providing that they’re seeking elsewhere?
Why have half a million people signed up as paying subscribers of various Substack
newsletters, if the establishment media is providing the diversity of viewpoints that is an
absolute market requirement in a country with a vast diversity of opinions? You can try to
make an adult determination about that question, to better understand what media is missing,
or you can read this and write some shitty joke tweet while your industry burns to the ground
around you. It’s your call.

Substack might fold tomorrow, but someone would else sell independent media; there’s a
market. Substack might kick me and the rest of the unclean off of their platforms tomorrow,
but other critics of social justice politics would pop up here; there’s a market. Establishment
media’s takeover by this strange brand of academic identity politics might grow even more
powerful, if that’s even possible, but dissenters will find a place to sell alternative opinion;
there’s a market. What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you - college
educated, urban, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling
that wokeness and that irony as your only product. Because you flooded the market. Everyone
in your entire industry is selling the exact same thing, tired sarcastic jokes and bleating
righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves, and it’s not good in basic

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economic terms if you’re selling the same thing as everyone else. You add that on to structural
problems within your business model and your utter subservience to a Silicon Valley that
increasingly hates you, well…. I get why you’re mad. And I get that you don’t like me. But I’m
not what you’re mad about. Not really.

In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as
conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities
departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social
media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme,
they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are
very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the
vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire
media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that
nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable
conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?

And the bizarre assumption of almost everyone in media seems to have been that they could
adopt this brand of extreme niche politics, in mass, as an industry, and treat those politics as a
crusade that trumps every other journalistic value, with no professional or economic
consequences. They seem to have thought that Americans were just going to swallow it; they
seem to have thought they could paint most of the country as vicious bigots and that their
audiences would just come along for the ride. They haven’t. In fact Republicans are making
great hay of the collapse of the media into pure unapologetic advocacy journalism. Some
people are turning to alternative media to find options that are neither reactionary ideologues
or self-righteous woke yelling. Can you blame them? Substack didn’t create this dynamic, and
neither did I. The exact same media people who are so angry about Substack did, when they
abandoned any pretense to serving the entire country and decided that their only job was to
advance a political cause that most ordinary people, of any gender or race, find alienating and
wrong. So maybe try and look at where your problems actually come from. They’re not going
away.

Now steel yourselves, media people, take a shot of something strong, look yourself in the eye
in the mirror, summon you most honest self, and tell me: am I wrong?

1 This is an aside, but here’s the stats from the median post on this blog so far in terms of total views:

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And here’s the post I wrote to deliberately enflame the anger of media Twitter, prompting a lot of
people to say “there goes Freddie again, he’s crazy, he’s embarrassing himself,” etc:

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I suspect the people who keep doing me this favor have understood this dynamic for a long time, but
ignoring me (which hurts my interests) gets you 0 likes and retweets from peers and having a fit
about me (which helps my interests) gets you many.

117 6

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TD Mar 29
I just subscribed to you after reading this post, thanks to Greenwald via Twitter. Grateful as I am to
have discovered you there, I’m starting to back away slowly from social media platforms, in part

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because they reward limited thinking and sadistic behavior (also, my intense somatic response to
the chaos and contempt leads to physical illness). That’s also why I’m increasingly interested in
Substack and the thoughtful long form articles I find here.

This is the best take I’ve read, by a country mile, on the tiresome Substack controversy. I’m happy to
support your continued success. Long live the Oregon Trail generation.
36 Reply

KW Mar 25
"Some people are turning to alternative media to find options that are neither reactionary
ideologues or self-righteous woke yelling. Can you blame them?"

Nope. Definitely cannot blame them. It's why I'm here.

29 Reply

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