In my previous post, about the reasons why people would choose to buy a paid subscription on substack, I mentioned that Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, has influenced my thinking about creativity and community.
The parts of the book that had the greatest impact on me are the ideas that art and commerce sit in an uneasy relationship, that creators often have to personally balance those competing demands, and that that part of what makes art or gifts special is the way in which they exist in relationship to a community.
He notes in the introduction:
The particular form that my elaboration of these ideas has taken may best be introduced through a description of how I came to my topic in the first place. For some years now I myself have tried to make my way as a poet, a translator, and a sort of “scholar without institution.” Inevitably the money question comes up; labors such as mine are notoriously non-remunerative, and the landlord is not interested in your book of translations the day the rent falls due. A necessary corollary seems to follow the proposition that a work of art is a gift: there is nothing in the labor of art itself that will automatically make it pay. Quite the opposite, in fact. . . . I shall not elaborate upon it here except to say that every modern artist who has chosen to labor with a gift must sooner or later wonder how he or she is to survive in a society dominated by market exchange. And if the fruits of a gift are gifts themselves, how is the artist to nourish himself, spiritually as well as materially, in an age whose values are market values and whose commerce consists almost exclusively in the purchase and sale of commodities?
To be clear, I do not object, in any way, to people offering paid subscriptions, to paywalling content, or building their substack as a business. There is absolutely value to having a platform to sell art, value in having a group of people interested in paying for art, and having a community that offers support as people wrestle with the emotional (and practical) challenges of deciding what to charge and how best to encourage paid subscriptions.
I also want to draw attention to the fact that Substack, as a company, often references the values of art but, in practical terms is most focused on supporting the values of commerce. There’s also nothing wrong with that. It is the easiest way for Substack to build value into the platform and it isn’t easy to build, “design, marketing, and accessibility features seamlessly into the creation workflow.” (And, as
notes Substack currently has virtues in terms of both the existing community and the platform, “At the core, it’s what we all want from a platform, right? We want to interact with cool people and actually get our message delivered to those who want to hear it.“)For people interested in seeing Substack as a platform for art, it’s also important to cultivate a sense of and language for the communal and gift aspects of the work. Let us consider his discussion (slightly idealized) of the scientific community:
Scientists who give their ideas to the community receive recognition and status in return (a topic to which I shall return below). But there is little recognition to be earned from writing a textbook for money. As one of the scientists in Hagstrom’s study puts it, if someone “has written nothing at all but texts, they will have a null value or even a negative value.” Because such work brings no group reward, it makes sense that it would earn a different sort of remuneration, cash. “Unlike recognition, cash can be used outside the community of pure science,” Hagstrom points out. Cash is a medium of foreign exchange, as it were, because unlike a gift (and unlike status) it does not lose its value when it moves beyond the boundary of the community. By the same token, as Hagstrom comments elsewhere, “one reason why the publication of texts tends to be a despised form of scientific communication [is that] the textbook author appropriates community property for his personal profit.” As with the Cubans who say, “literary property cannot be private,” when and if we are able to feel the presence of a community, royalties (like usury) seem extractive.
I particularly like the phrasing of money as a “medium of foreign exchange” — a vivid illustration of the idea of money and gift as separate spheres.
We should now face the question of exactly why ideas might be treated as gifts in science. .. [There are] several reasons why ideas might be treated as gifts, the first being that the task of assembling a mass of disparate facts into a coherent whole clearly lies beyond the powers of a single mind or even a single generation. All such broad intellectual undertakings call for a community of scholars, one in which each individual thinker can be awash in the ideas of his comrades so that a sort of “group mind” develops, one that is capable of cognitive tasks beyond the powers of any single person. The commerce of ideas—donated, accepted (or rejected), integrated—constitutes the thinking of such a mind. A Polish theoretical physicist who had once been isolated from science by anti-Semitism testifies to the need to be in the stream of ideas: “Like the Jewish Torah, which was taught from mouth to mouth for generations before being written down, ideas in physics are discussed, presented at meetings, tried out and known to the inner circle of physicists working in the great centers long before they are published in papers and books …” A scientist may conduct his research in solitude, but he cannot do it in isolation. The ends of science require coordination. Each individual’s work must “fit,” and the synthetic nature of gift exchange makes it an appropriate medium for this integration; it is not just people that must be brought together but the ideas themselves.
These remarks on the scientific community are intended finally to i lustrate the general point that a circulation of gifts can produce and maintain a coherent community, or, inversely, that the conversion of gifts to commodities can fragment or destroy such a group. To convert an idea into a commodity means, broadly speaking, to establish a boundary of some sort so that the idea cannot move from person to person without a toll or fee. Its benefit or usefulness must then be reckoned and paid for before it is allowed to cross the boundary. ... The remarkable commercial potential of recombinant DNA technology has recently prompted a debate within the scientific community over precisely the issues of gifts, commodities, and the goals of science. ... As a geneticist at MIT, Dr. Jonathan Kind, remarked: “In the past one of the strengths of American bio-medical science was the free exchange of materials, strains of organisms and information … But now, if you sanction and institutionalize private gain and patenting of microorganisms, then you don’t send out your strains because you don’t want them in the public sector. That’s already happening now. People are no longer sharing their strains of bacteria and their results as freely as they did in the past.”
Here we may revise my remarks on the connection between freedom and the marketplace. … The issue arises because when all ideas carry a price, then all discussion, the cognition of the group mind, must be conducted through the mechanisms of the market which—in this case, at least— is a very inefficient way to hold a discussion. Ideas do not circulate freely when they are treated as commodities. The magazine Science reported on a case in California in which one DNA research group sought to patent a technique that other local researchers had treated as common property, as “under discussion.” An academic scientist who felt his contribution had been exploited commented, “There used to be a good, healthy exchange of ideas and information among [local] researchers … Now we are locking our doors.” In a free market the people are free, the ideas are locked up.
That’s a long block of text, but the first thing to appreciate is just how good-spirited the writing is. He’s making an argument, but also trying to evoke the emotional attachments formed by being in a community which is motivated by a sense of generosity (in specific ways). This is a lovely sentence, “To convert an idea into a commodity means, broadly speaking, to establish a boundary of some sort so that the idea cannot move from person to person without a toll or fee.” It puts us in a very human world, person to person.
I’m interested in sharing this because I have appreciated the spirit of community that I’ve seen on Substack, and I do see people talking about trying to find the balance that is comfortable for them between creative and financial goals (this may be more of a
conversation. I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that most of the larger stacks either feel like they’ve found a comfort zone, or just have enough work to not worry about it).I think it’s important, for people who value that sort of community on Substack to talk about it, and have clear ways of describing it’s value, and so I’m interested in sharing Lewis Hyde who has been a key reference point for me.
The specific examples:
One of the striking parts of my own experience on substack, is that I hadn’t intended to start a blog. My goal was to read and comment — and look for comment sections with interesting conversations. I’ve enjoyed writing here, and it’s been a good motivation to pay attention to things I want to share, but the original reason was simply that I didn’t feel like commenting was a good way to seek community1. I had interesting conversations but it wasn’t clear how many people were reading comments and, more importantly, it was difficult to find my own comments if I wanted to refer back to them later and I had the experience of commenting on posts which were originally public and later paywalled, making my comments also inaccessible. Writing on my own substack made it much easier to save things for future reference (and I’m very glad for the people who have found it interesting and commented here), and it still felt like something that I was pushed towards by the nature of the platform.
I recently saw a note about, “MISGUIDED EXPECTATIONS ON SUBSTACK” complaining that someone had subscribed hoping that the substack author would feel motivated or obligated to read her writing. I am sympathetic to the complaint; it is rude to presume on other people’s time it is also counter to the ideas about gift economy that I am referencing to think that you can buy access (and, not incidentally, there is a sense that the fastest way to grow a substack is to get mentioned by someone with a large subscriber base). It is appropriate to want to shut down that expectation quickly. But I also think it’s overstated to ask, incredulously, “How does this stealth, quid pro quo mistake form in the minds of some citizens of stackland?” It is entirely reasonable to want substack to be a place to seek support and feedback for one’s writing (which doesn’t mean that anyone is obligated2 to read it) but the impulse to want to offer one’s writing to the community is a positive one, and hopefully there are good pieces about how to do it politely (I’ve seen some good comments on notes, which I can’t find at the moment)3.
The passages from Lewis Hyde help explain why I’m uncomfortable with the language of "sovereign creators” I think I understand the idea — that Substack writers aren’t working for an editor or employer and are free to make what they want. But I do want to hold onto the idea that people are giving their work to a shared culture4 and not just working in walled gardens. It is good that authors have the tools to sell their work, and protect it as they see fit, but that language implies that shared creation is, in some way, a loss of sovereignty, and I don’t want that to be the only way that we talk or think about it.
Finally, I’ll close with a song. Thinking about the richness of drawing upon, and contributing to a collective culture, this may be my favorite version of “Wayfaring Stranger”
I have no doubt that many substacks have interesting and vibrant comment sections, but the circle that I
Ref these lyrics, “I'm not obligated to listen to shit that you're telling me”
This discussion about how one should approach giving feedback on Substack is worth reading and a good example of sharing information and perspectives on, “what does it mean to do this well?”
Obviously there are many different cultures present on Substack; I don’t imply a unitary culture.