substack's place in the Fourth Industrial Revolution
A big foot in the past, one in the present and a big nod to the values of 4IR?
Proponents of the Fourth Industrial Revolution would have us believe that a technology-led contraction in the labour force is inevitable, partially thanks to the declining cost of and increasing access to information (at the corporate level).
Although humanity has been in a constant economic evolution wherein human labour and technology both factor, the 4IR broadly argues that data, processing power and advancements in manufacturing, production processes and more are becoming such that there is less need for traditional human labour, possibly at an exponential rate in some sectors.
This isn’t a new concept or phenomenon by any means. Rather it is superficially the rate and the specific means of change that is somewhat more but still not entirely novel.
The Romanian dictator, Ceausescu, and his wife openly believed that economic output/GDP was a function of population size. This belief gave rise to their policies governing minimum family size, which was effectively forced breeding. This increasing birth rate eventually coincided with economic failure and the result, in part, was the Romanian orphanage phenomenon. Ceausescu was out of power before many of the children he forced into existence became economically productive. The economic burden of these children within the socioeconomic context of Romania and the wider world triggered abandonment of those children and other unsavoury phenomena. People might say now and in the recent past that Ceausescu was wrong but human history wouldn’t necessarily agree. The output and wealth of a nation, expressed crudely as GDP, has often been a function of the size of its population coupled with how those people were being put to work, how the internal and external wealth/cashflow was being managed and by whom.
The production line was an advancement of Taylorist principles of labour efficiency, where it was a human who performed industrial production actions so anything that one could do to increase the efficiency of those actions would increase the overall economic output of the business. The production line therefore sought to optimise the order, effort and rate of the micro and macro production process within existing constraints, to increase the efficiency of the underpinning human labour force as it engaged with that production system design.
What the production line also sought to do was to further mechanise and specialise generally capable human labour itself. Move forwards 50+ years and some of those workers were replaced by fixed, specialised robots doing exactly the same jobs at higher rate and accuracy for longer duration. In some sense, the production line was one human’s way of making other humans into automatons, before robotics and automation improved and took the human out of parts of the production line. Now, we are at the cusp of creating generalised automatons who can do many things well enough.
Technology is taking more jobs out of the system for society to deal with a growing burden of “redeployment or unemployment”.
Part of the problem is that society lags behind technology and people’s visions of the future, and so society gets dragged, kicking and screaming, somewhere over a long enough timeline, rather than agreeing where to go first then developing the tech plan to get there in a managed way.
Living in the 4IR
Consider these words from a self-professed proponent of the 4IR:
And the nature of the new technologies is that the changes we are experiencing today, are probably the slowest changes we will see over the rest of our lifetimes. If you don’t much like change, I’m afraid I don’t have so much good news.
Our task, in this building and around the world, is to make this technology, this change, work for humanity. And I’m profoundly confident we can. Because this technology is made by man, so it can be hewn to build a better future for mankind.
Just try, for a second, to accept these words at face value as being superficially right. According to Hancock, the rate of change humans will experience is going to continue to increase; this change comes from human technologies exerting forces or having effects on humanity; because we made the tech, we can make sure its effects are net good.
Hancock said these words in 2017 while Minister for Digital, in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. Note, the words “citizen”, “culture” and “society” do not exist in the speech.
If the rate of change is guaranteed to increase, what is the known maximum rate of change in what aspects of life, that most people can comfortably handle? How is change being managed , by whom and for what?
What is the human race’s track record on making sure its tech is net good for humanity? Who does that and how?
Hancock is acknowledging that jobs are going to be lost:
The 4th Industrial Revolution will change the kinds of jobs needed in industry. Our strong view is that as a nation we must create the jobs of the future. Digital revolution brings with it disruption. And as the RSA so powerfully set out last month, the risk is not that we adopt new technologies that destroy jobs. The risk to jobs comes from not adopting new technologies. Our task is to support redeployment not unemployment.
Our goal must be to automate work, but humanise jobs. Allow machines to do the dangerous, boring, and repetitive, and ensure we humans have the capacity to do the creative, empathetic and interactive.
substack - forward moving innovation?
Rogan recently interviewed substack CEO, Chris Best. Much of what was discussed was extremely telling on a macro and micro scale.
Best was asked what his vision for the future of substack is. His answer revealed something incredibly straightforward. Paraphrasing, this is roughly what Best said:
substack is an attention and content and format alternative to social media and existing content providers/platforms;
it provides an alternative choice in expression platforms to users who want to pick something else and effectively exercise some free will over the way they interact with and share human ideas and engage in discourse;
while it is not necessarily bad or good to watch cat videos, use Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, there is room and value in providing other expression and communication platforms;
substack is a form of self-development platform as well as a means by which to express a different form of self-discipline over what information one consumes and how.
In this context, think about what substack actually is.
substack is, superficially, an online word processor with multimedia elements that the author is in direct control and ownership of, in significant part. The author owns the content and the mailing list at any given moment in time, and can choose to charge for their content and leave the platform, which claims to have no intent to curtail what is said on the platform (for the time being). If an author charges, substack takes 10% and payment processors also take a cut, but at today’s rates the author takes most of the gross income.
At a more fundamental level, substack is three things:
for an author, it is the granularisation of books or the personal equivalent of a semi self-published column.
for the reader, it is an addendum to existing libraries, devoid of formalised “quality control” methods inherent in the writing and publishing paradigms to date.
for substack, it is a slight modification to the long standing publishing model. substack has deliberately stripped most layers of the publishing system out, including practically all the commissioning, production, editing, review, quality control, marketing and physical media costs.
Even more succinctly put, substack is an extremely lean multimedia self-publishing platform that, on an all cost basis, undercuts the publishing industry.
In historical context, all substack is is an amalgamation of the blogs that existed originally on the internet, bolstered now by video and audio with a payment engine bolted on.
Here is the deep irony of substack: it’s just books and the library and internet blogs, rebranded and granularised and centralised.
Is this innovation or actually just a reversion to a long-standing mean as a reaction to recent technological developments that dragged society away from the mean (social media and soundbite/short form information consumption), that in its own way, potentially lowers quality and leaves only the consumer to be the sole arbiter of what publishing quality is?
substack is a double-edged 4IR sword
substack in some ways fits with aspects of the 4IR. It’s just removed every publishing position between the head of the publishing house and the writer. Anyone can write anything and there’s no one performing any quality control on the platform’s content other than the end consumer, who could be anyone with any level of knowledge, understanding or discernment. There is no peer review occurring before publication.
If end users like an author’s work enough to pay for it, they are showing appreciation for what has already been published without knowledge of what is to come. Should they ultimately be disappointed by future output, they can withdraw their payment and their subscription, so subjecting the author to direct market forces via their money and their attention. That leaves the author to ponder why they lost money and readership and what quality, interest and integrity issues may have been at play. In more conventional and formal publishing models, there would be training, review, support, guidance, quality control and forms of buffer (a retainer or upfront payment; salary associated with the writing position, not the direct and immediate number of readers). If you write a column for a newspaper, you are not directly responsible for the total number of readers of the whole paper. Online publishing can determine a specific column’s readership via granular metrics but there will be a greater lead time between a writer becoming sufficiently unpopular to then lose the position, compared with the rolling month model of a substack subscription.
substack has one foot in the past and one foot in the present, while nodding towards the 4IR future and starting to play an active part in it.
Decentralisation doesn’t figure in the substack model
substack is a centralised model. Take down the platform and the content disappears save for your downloaded personal backups. There is a central platform, not a decentralised one. Nominally, I can take my content and republish it elsewhere. I can even just set up a wordpress website of my own and publish there, as has always been possible. I can then use other networks and platforms to promote my own work, as I do with the substack platform now.
There is a very, very basic mechanism in substack that is essentially common to all platforms - the centralised control of the promotion of material.
substack is using its own means (algorithmic or otherwise) to promote and show to substack users other content that they might be interested in. This is a lot of power. The potential for all the things that the big platforms do is inherent: shadow banning; suppression; outright bans; implicit and explicit penalties.
Chris Best argues that substack only makes money if authors make money, and this is a symbiotic control mechanism that mutually aligns the interests of substack with that of its authors. That is exactly what YouTube could and can still superficially argue. This means that substack is only where YouTube used to be, in some senses. Presently, absence of ad content on substack eradicates advertiser power over editorial, which is a dominant force in all forms of Digital, Cultural, Media and Sport output (see what I did there?).
Rogan makes an astute observation that runs counter to Best’s argument when he cites Mr. Beast, a “positive YouTuber” who produces content that is deliberately curated to be as widely seen as possible, which serves to illustrate publishing paradigm and power shift.
Shrewd populism can undermine diversity
Nominally, YouTube will tolerate most videos. It overlays ads on each video, sharing that ad revenue with content makers. It makes its money from the ad revenue which is drawn by the size, diversity and total viewing time of the user base. If content and viewership reduced, over time ad income would reduce. This model is still a balance between advertiser revenue and content providers, where the platform’s dominance and opaque mechanisms muddies our understanding of exactly what is going on and how content is promoted and ultimately gets seen.
substack looks different in that no one makes any money unless a reader thinks an author’s content is worth paying something for, should the author choose to charge for their content, which requires the user to have the self-belief to charge or ask for donations. Notionally, this puts the onus and (most of) the control in the author’s hands. It also compels substack to have the lowest possible operating costs and highest level of simplicity as possible, in order to maximise its margin and accessibility for both authors and readers.
YouTubers and substackers can promote their respective content where and how they want, but both platforms also internally promote their platform’s content and content providers on both platforms don’t know how that’s done. That makes both platforms gatekeepers and the masters of their content providers’ destinies, to an extent that only the platform understands.
As a substacker, I have no idea how to feature in substack’s recommendations, short of writing something that then happens to get seen a lot through marketing luck. According to the stats I can see, it looks like the majority of my subscription growth is now coming from the “substack network”.
This means that substack is just as vulnerable to populism as YouTube, even before advertisers get involved. Fast forward ten years. What is stopping substack becoming a predominance of populist content that is curated or censored by the platform for similar reasons to YouTube?
Shrewd commercial writers just need to create populist, targeted and digestible audio, video and written content on substack to pull in money, irrespective of any centralised or shared standard of “quality” or “value”, both of which are now judged solely by the individual consumer/subscriber. Magnify this phenomenon until substack’s revenues grow and an IPO looms on the horizon. Advertising revenue will not be needed to exert similar forces over internal content promotion and platform wide content “curation”. How long will it take before the dominant content make up of substack looks like this list, and every substack user is looking at a preponderance of “recommendations” of the highest revenue generating content on the platform, before they see other recommendations?
Check your version of substack’s discover pages and look at the number of recommendations that have paid subscriptions in those lists. Consider the tactics in play at the author level to generate income and balance paid for and free content as a marketing and revenue generation scheme (tips found easily online).
One mechanism that substack is using in its promotional method is herd mentalilty. If these top recommendations have tens of thousands of paid subscribers, they must be good, right? What if all those subscribers are tasteless, undiscerning individuals? Their mass subscriptions are in many ways an arbitrary measure. However, is this any different to any other “book list”?
substack’s future?
In the last five minutes, now that I have turned by thoughts to the above, I have just had a bunch of ideas about how substack could evolve within its sphere. It’s not rocket science and could utilise a custom blockchain for the regulation of the relationship between the author, the reader and the platform. I won’t say more than that as what I am thinking of has genuine commercial value in the medium term and the power to disrupt, so perhaps I should keep it to myself.
Suffice to say, what substack is is not new. What it does isn’t new either. What it could do is simply a re-run of the same publishing business development cycle that we have just been through, set within an consumer emotional backlash against mainstream media’s open corruption and social media’s open cesspit.
In some ways, substack is a return to the notion of reading, but without the costly layers of process and quality control that used to exist in the publishing business. It’s reading of material that hasn’t been subject to third party oversight or influence. How’s that necessarily different in quality terms from reading the Sunday Sport? Only you can decide, and you have to at least spend time reading in order to begin to judge because there’s no other quality assurance provided. Caveat Emptor.
In many ways, this has the ability to run counter to Best’s notion of personal discernment and quality in the pursuit of one’s best self, as without quality control there remains the possibility for readers to just be swamped with masses of choice of a net lower quality than might be found in a conventional bookstore or library.
Just because I can write this blog doesn’t make any of it good. And just because you are choosing to read it doesn’t make it any better, does it?
A lot of scientists and doctors have taken to publishing on substack, absent of peer review. Is this improving or degrading scientific publishing? If you lack the skills, how do you know if what Jessica Rose or Igor Chudov or el gato malo or John Dee is publishing is correct, accurate or any good? Who’s checking their work, other than you and I who don’t have the skills or knowledge to check?
What is happening, to some extent, is the atomisation of the notion of quality and value in the publishing and content space, that is happening in all platforms. How is substack vetting, ensuring or improving quality? Should it be? Or should you just be left to browse and gravitate towards things you like reading, which by default will become another form of echo chamber unless you make hard choices to find challenge rather than comfort, and burdens you and the author with all the burden of quality control and peer review.
substack doesn’t appear to give a toss about quality, because it doesn’t do any quality control or have minimum standards.
Let’s revisit Hancock’s words about jobs, in the context of the present substack model.
The 4th Industrial Revolution will change the kinds of jobs needed in industry. Our strong view is that as a nation we must create the jobs of the future. Digital revolution brings with it disruption. And as the RSA so powerfully set out last month, the risk is not that we adopt new technologies that destroy jobs.
substack is a self-publishing platform that removes the commissioning, editorial, review, quality control and many marketing functions from the platform. It doesn’t invest anything in its writers. It only takes something from the back end reader-author transaction. This means the writer is taking all the labour/time risk from the beginning. Until substack included audio and video streaming, it was operating a very low bandwidth model (text only, no ad content).
It increases the burden of promotion on the author themselves while concerning itself with its own agenda of internal promotion that the author doesn’t necessarily understand.
The risk to jobs comes from not adopting new technologies. Our task is to support redeployment not unemployment.
substack demonstrates that the first statement is not true. The government is not involved in supporting the redeployment of jobs threatened by substack’s disruption of jobs in the present, non-substack publishing model, at all.
Our goal must be to automate work, but humanise jobs. Allow machines to do the dangerous, boring, and repetitive, and ensure we humans have the capacity to do the creative, empathetic and interactive.
Hancock believes work must be automated, but no one was invited to discuss that objective. Most jobs have aspects of the boring and repetitive, and many can confer danger. If you are a YouTuber, there is a danger of deplatforming and the total loss of that income. The government will not help you redeploy.
Ensuring “we humans have the capacity to do the creative, empathetic and interactive” is a hollow, meaningless statement that promises absolutely nothing. Most humans already have this capacity. What Hancock is doing is drawing an arbitrary distinction between integrated aspects of work in general, suggesting that they are separate. A care home worker has danger of personal injury and risk in their role, which can be boring, repetitive, empathetic, interactive and even creative. Even without completely capable care work automatons/robots, we are already destroying that industry through political and financial decisions, which is totally counter to Hancock’s statement, thus proving the arbitrary and artificial distinction he is making about work even before he has a means to replace or redeploy the labour lost in that industry.
Back to substack. substack as a platform is growing via writers like me who are willing to generate content on its platform for free, thus drawing in readers/users, just like Facebook and Twitter does. From here, substack’s network effect begins to manifest and grow, in the hope that it comes to dominate, just like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter did. Most of substack’s fundamental workers will never be popular or high quality enough to be able to charge much for their work if anything, and less still will be able to maintain and grow their income to significant levels. Why? Partly because the platform does not improve skills, provide training, quality control or transparent marketing across the board. Thus, competitive advantage in the system lies with the shrewdness and pre-existing skills of the authors, in addition to the ability of any author to self-upskill through the exercising of their own labour at initially zero return.
substack makes zero investment in any of its authors. That is like a corporation who recruits workers for zero cost and never makes an investment in them, only promoting the self starters who have the pre-existing or self-developed capability to meet a monetary/revenue bar (via their charging) that then garners those authors minimum cost support from the platform in the form of dirt cheap internal (and maybe external) promotion from substack.
The substack platform is the writing equivalent of the Ford production line, which has just made it as easy for me to take a seat at the production line by removing recruitment, job specifications, minimum qualifications, training, and all the aforementioned gates and people involved in the traditional publishing model. This platform is one of the most efficient and lean ways for me to publish my “creative, empathetic and interactive” work, while leaving me also burdened with most of the job of promotion, which is a key stage to being able to charge for my services. In the absence of charging, I make do with the “payback” of accessing a potential audience. I could achieve the same thing by setting up a wordpress site, I would just lose access to the potential internal promotion of my work on the substack network, which may not even really be happening, because I don’t see it or understand how its being done.
This model is an exact embodiment of the principles of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Hancock was right. Welcome to the future. I am making it and you are reading it. substack is facilitating it and getting rich in the process.
There is more disruption to come. I’ve already worked out some of what that will be, but for the interests of humanity at large, I’ll be keeping it to myself.
People need to be free to decide for themselves, and learn discernment. All this "quality control" you talk about is actually censorship. You want to control doctors who speak out about covid to be only proven correct doctors? How? By the same consensus that brought us the mess? Smart and discerning people will research Dr. Robert Malone's substack and his credentials and decide for themselves. Readers should be able to equally do for Dr. Bob's substack, who runs a clinic in a small sleepy town and thinks covid vaccines are wonderful. Or, is everything I am writing here "misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theory, hate speech, incitement to violence, terrorism" etc... that you want to censor by quality control measures of a trusted inner communist core that is qualified to delete this comment????