Shes A Celebrity... Get Her Outta Here!
Why, oh why is she doing this?
Well, the popular kids found our treehouse. Instead of ignoring it, calling us nerds, and moving on with their lives, they’ve decided to climb up and join the fun. But now that they’re here, we’re all really self-conscious about it ☹. Before you know it, the dumb jocks will be up here too, breaking my toys and passive-aggressively ignoring me in my own space, one that I specifically created to get away from them. ☹
This is what my Notes feed looked like on Monday after Jameela Jamil announced that she’s starting her own Substack1. I had to admit, for about five minutes, I had the above reaction. But it dissipated quickly, and I immediately knew why. That’s what I’d like to focus on today.
The reason people are in a tizzy after Jamil’s announcement is because they (and for a short period, I) felt like she’s about to take up a lot of air on the site. “Air” is attention, and attention is everything on Substack for people who joined this site with the express intention of growing a readership on this platform. It’s very reminiscent of the celebrity podcast boom and, before that, the celebrity book club boom. It’s frustrating for normal people who are attempting to make their own way. Growing up, we hear the expression, “Do what you love, and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.” As we get older, we try to make inroads to do what we love, but no one told us that we’d be competing with the likes of Reese Witherspoon, Dax Sheppard, and the ensemble cast of every sitcom that aired in the mid to late 2000s.
You scrape together money for a microphone, a Microsoft Office subscription, or editing software and spend hours on your passion project. You’re putting yourself out there, exposing raw nerves, hoping someone will connect with you, that you’re not doing this for no reason, and that you don’t look stupid. Sometimes you sacrifice sleep, money, and free time because you want this to work. But then here comes some bored celebrity barreling full speed toward your project, holding something bigger and shinier, sashaying right through your stuff like it never existed.
And then there’s the audience they bring to the platform. Because celebrities have so much exposure, the people who follow their work will vary. The people who migrate over to Substack will see…well, Substack. Some may only stop in to read Jamil’s blog, but others will start getting ideas. Ideas like, “Maybe I should start my own blog! What will I write? Hmmm, maybe some unrefined personal essays and arbitrary listicles. I will also monetize this valuable information even though no one knows who I am and I don’t have any qualifications to be giving any advice to anyone. I have no intention of building community or bettering my craft. Just money please! 😊” Others will get on Notes and accelerate the growing social media-ification of Substack, which is what Substack has been selling its soul for (more on that later). Some will do both, and if I’m being radically and snobbishly honest, I shudder at the thought.
But like I said, I had these thoughts and quickly moved on because I realized two important things:
Other celebrities are already on here.
The first Substack I ever read before I even joined the site or subscribed to a newsletter was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s. He linked to an interesting op-ed on his Twitter, and it popped up on my timeline. Patti Smith is on here. Jeff Tweedy is on here. Jacob Rees-Mogg is on here2. Stephen Fry is on here, and I know some people complaining about Jamil have shared his pieces on Notes! Rich! No one has this reaction when a popular journalist joins this site, seeking refuge from mainstream media. Taylor Lorenz just launched her independent publication, User Mag, and from what I saw, it was all celebration (as it should be! I love following Taylor’s work). It’s interesting that Lorenz and Jamil have both stated that they started their new ventures specifically so they can share their thoughts and opinions without being anchored down by overly cautious media institutions. But I think the anxious reaction to Jamil comes from the context in which we already know her, which is as an actress and for those a little too online, someone who makes scenes on Twitter—and, if you believe some people, lies a lot.
This summer, I ruminated a lot on Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter (stick with me, this won’t devolve into me stanning, I swear) and the reactions to it. Quite a few critics were calling her pivot to country a cash grab, saying the album wasn’t thought through or was shallow in its execution. Beyoncé has gotten this specific critique for over a decade, the catalyst being her self-titled album. First, she was a feminist, then a Black revolutionary, then someone longing to connect with her African roots, then a queer ally, and now a proud country girl, unashamed of her humble beginnings. Is Beyoncé taking the cultural temperature and selling our thoughts and dreams back to us? Or is she working through the same discourse we’re all working through? In essence: what is her motivation, and is it singular? It’s common and sometimes essential to ask this question about the people who make the media you consume. Humans have an innate desire to connect with each other, but when we detect a possible air of inauthenticity, we naturally want to shield ourselves from emotional snake oil. When it comes to any Substack publication, public figure or not, we have to read them and adjudicate for ourselves or ignore them and keep doing our own things.
The larger point and the one that strangely comforted me is that we don’t need to worry about Jamil taking up all the air on here because
Substack is already deflated and has been for quite some time.
Well, at least Substack as we want it to be. Cydney Hayes makes this point in her piece on The elite capture of Substack:
When the It Girls leave the platform they once dominated because they have more prestigious and lucrative opportunities to attend to offline, you can safely assume that you are not an early adopter, and that your odds of striking gold are much, much slimmer than they were when the soon-to-be-It Girls were first setting up their tents near Sutter’s Mill.
She’s speaking about Rayne Fisher-Quann’s trajectory in the above. While Quann doesn’t post on the site as much as she used to, there are many writers on this site with followings of various sizes who are writing amazing, thoughtful, and rich works. If you’re on here to read and write, to expand your critical thinking skills and connect with other people doing the same, then it’s not hard. But if you’re on here with the express goal of girlbossing your way through the site and gaming the platform, or if you’re looking for a site just obscure enough where you can fulfill your fantasy of building a cult following and landing a book deal with a cool indie publisher3, you are far, far too late. The site you are looking for doesn’t exist (it probably does, but just like Substack three years ago or Tumblr 15 years ago, you don’t know about it yet).
But the site Jamil4 thinks she’s on doesn’t exist either. Well, it may exist for her (again, this is the essence of elite capture) but not for most of us. Substack has…issues—which are issues for native users, women, people of color, and small publications—not for the content creators whom the founders have been rearranging the furniture for so they’ll be comfortable upon arrival. On the one hand, we have the bubbling issue of “free speech” on the platform, which the founders see as something that should be completely unfettered. This means there are virulent bigots and plagiarists publishing work on here. On the other hand, the founders are accelerating the social media elements of the site, including Notes (Twitter for Substack because Twitter is in a feud with Substack), video content, and wonky algorithms. It’s unclear how these wonky algorithms are working, but their wonkiness means that said bigots and plagiarists are finding and harassing other writers, calling them racial slurs, spewing vile nonsense without any repercussion whatsoever and with the founders giving no indication that this will change anytime soon. Sorry, Jameela, your former editor who assured you that we’re “a kind bunch” either didn’t know about these issues5 or thinks you’re so famous that it won’t bother you.
Maybe Jamil will even be working directly with Substack, as some writers on the site have done recently. Writers I follow, Hunter Harris and Taylor Lorenz, have gone live on the site, and Harris has even held an in-person event for Substack. But the instance that most interested me came from Ken Klippenstein, a journalist who published the Trump campaign’s vet report on U.S. vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. Conservative shill and Twitter overlord Elon Musk suspended Klippenstein’s Twitter account in retaliation, at which point Klippenstein published this Note:
During this time, I watched two conversations happening parallel to each other. On one side, I saw Note after Note from women on the site complaining that there had been a sudden uptick of creepy men and bigots commenting on their content, leaving sexually inappropriate remarks and hurling slurs at them. On the other, Klippenstein, Chris Best, and Hamish Mackenzie were championing the need for free speech and freedom of the press. It is in the founders’ best interest that these two conversations never directly converge. Instead, they invite you to focus on the “magic dust” generated by the creator economy, which they plan on fully leaning into. Substack the Business, will continue to engage with people who have a pre-existing platform to promote Substack the Website we all publish our work on. The Business will continue promoting their relationships with those writers to attract new people who will project whatever fantasy they have of the site, whether that’s Tumblr 2.0, a refuge from institutional media, or a haven for people who are obsessed with finding new ways to exhibit anti-social behavior by exacerbating their First Amendment rights.
What I’m really trying to say with all of this is that Substack is a nice place to host your writing; as it stands, I like using it for my writing, and I like using it to find other incredible writers. But this isn’t the land of milk and honey. Substack will continue to coax celebrities to join the site, they will oblige, bringing new traffic onto this site, and it will get worse. Not ✨different✨—worse. But it doesn’t matter because that was going to happen anyway. “[Bored celebrity that left Twitter] launches their newsletter in early Q3” is a sentence that’s probably sitting in a Substack exec’s strategy deck from five months ago. By all indication, at the time of writing this, the social media and algorithm will get more like Twitter or Instagram or TikTok, and Substack will turn into all of the platforms Substack says it wants to differentiate itself from6. Jameela Jamil or any other celebrity jumping on board isn’t hurting your experience more than anyone at Substack HQ7.
But this site isn’t all dried up yet. We are some time away from that, so maximize that time. Throw your scarcity mindset in the trash and build something real on here while you still can! Leave a nice comment on someone’s post, purposefully seek out smaller publications, like and restack more pieces that resonate with you, or even just made you go “hmmmm.” Substack will continue the corporate tech overlord doublespeak of telling you they’re not like other platforms while becoming just like other platforms, and you can choose whether or not you want to engage with that. If you don’t want to experience this site as a social media platform, then limit your time on Notes and stop writing Notes about how you wish Notes didn’t exist for cheap likes!!!!!
I don’t really have an ending for this piece, if you’d like a nice tidy conclusion then scroll to the bottom of this post. If you’re looking for a more important issue to gripe about On Here, consider giving the below a read. I’m going back to writing my next piece on parasocial relationships and Black kinship, see you soon!
no, I’m not providing any links to the Substack of a main cast member on an Emmy-winning sitcom. Google her. Or just look in the Culture section of Substack, where her announcement is #1
😕
These two people are one and the same.
doubtful, seeing as she works for Substack UK
This is already happening! Today I saw Substack added a “related notes” feature, which encourages users to continue “exploring” the site. If we cut the bullshit it really encourages users to log more hours using the site. It’s similar to the “discover more” feature on Twitter.
Who, according to Jamil’s announcement post, seem to be the very reason Jamil joined the site in the first place
Great read ❤️
I loved reading this. I kick myself every time I remember that I"gave up" certain ventures (cough, Vine, etc) early, and now, I feel like I'm in constant competition. But you're right in what you wrote. It's important to keep on keeping on despite being "late to the party."