Notes from the great heap!
with short subtitles.
“From the margins and the peripheries, what appears as a great making and unmaking of the working world, happening at the same time…” (Ivan Illich, The Right To Useful Unemployment).
So its the last Sunday of the year. Some look back to “recap” the past, while some prefer to gaze (and speculate) at the “coming future”. The rest, are perhaps too busy grappling with or managing the “present”. Regardless, the world we observe virtually through cybernetic windows, are full of highs and lows, breaking waves of shock, despair and anxiety, also rife with affirmations and psychopolitics, memetic propaganda, thriving in terms of magic-thinking and millions of “independent voices” — of citizens, journalists, activists, best selling authors, veterans, messiahs, etc, etc. Dispensing information, expertise, self-help, even conspiracy, morality, geopolitics, science, art, dissent, debate and discourse. Also malignant behavior, group-thinking, perchance and what they call “discovery”. Services or platforms, such as Substack that we are “actively” plugged into, equates to an “economic engine of culture” as monetization of whatever possible — regardless of our particular mission, broader concerns, target-audience and ambitions.
As an experience, in terms of online reading, writing and interaction, Substack is like a great heap. Tens of millions of “particulars”. Ten of millions of “phenomena and cause” based pages. What underpins is the the neoliberal achievement spirit — the landing page declares “tens of millions of people actively watching, listening, and reading on Substack each week” (Substack, About). Or as Chris Best (co-founder, Substack) claimed as “discovery is built into the product”. Yet the “product” is not really Substack, nor is there anything unique about the founders and the space, but the daily users and subscribers — the makers, writers, content creators, influencers, celebrities, experts, ranters, propagandists, including the mass of “generators” situated at the bottom or middle or top of the same heap.
Substack is a perfect mirror universe of Byung-Chul Han’s “Achievement Society, Burnout Society”. “There’s no better low-effort, high-reward way to engage with all my readers.” (Hung Up, Hunter Harris). Such uplifting hogwash aside for now, the real “effort” is based on labor — made of our concerns, activity and imagination and the overall potentiality which makes the present appear “no better”. Yet the “no better” itself is temporal. The bizarre or exclusive binaries of “politics, pop-culture, food, philosophy, tech, travel, pets, and much more” do not equate to anything sustainable as work, nor employment especially in the long-term.
“A few hundred paid subscribers can support a livelihood” (Substack, About). The word “can” being the neoliberal keystone, underpinning the larger scam of achievement viz-a-viz wealth generation. To be clear, less than 5% of Substack users have achieved the above predicament (approximately 20 million monthly active subscribers). Its a neoliberal market like any. Albeit, our zeitgeist is made of stories and the “art of self-exploitation”. Some people are telling the same story again and again, and so be it. And some are expressing, creating or revealing what they may never have earlier. Yet we can concur, that Substack operates as any social media space — centered around maximization of profits and market domination, unlike most of us as individuals. Whatever its worth, the matter is about innovation and not the given platform nor the popular techniques-of-the-day.
So, its the last Sunday of the year. As a closing story for 2025, I would like to present a few insightful and “dedicated” writers and content creators that I have encountered via Substack. By no means is such a presentation about “the best” or a ladder of the “most influential” but based on contrast and contradiction — of the agreeable and disagreeable, of the spirit and the material, and those who speak about the unthinkable, the possibilities, the personal and new “worlding”.
Palestine Will Be Free - About Palestine liberation, struggle and identity.
✴️🇵🇸
Dystopia Unmasked - “…world affairs for the activist who knows that hope without insight is not enough”.
✳️🌍
Vulgar Earth - Forgotten mythologies, philosophical inroads, a ‘return-to-Nature’.
❇️🌵
Liberation Lit - “engaged fiction and criticism” and consequent progressive narratives on art, politics and issues of the day.
✴️🌀
The New Unhinged - Disruption, post-dystopia, thinking the unthinkable?
✳️🧨
Sam Husseini - independent journalist, focusing on Western Imperialism, Justice, Palestine and International Law.
❇️🚧
Biocentric - The climate crisis. Plummeting biodiversity and the 6th mass extinction. Navigating such end-times!
✴️🐛
Outside (Farzada) - Poetry, Ghazal, internal reflections, as the “fermenting, unruly, rank with questions”.
✳️🥀
Uncouth Comics - a human female primate, who also at times “identifies as a plant”. Ink on paper, old-school.
✴️😹
Moonlight Drizzle - the rediscovery of the feminine, elegance, rituals and sacred practices.
❇️🌜
Savage Minds - “a collective of writers from backgrounds ranging from journalists, scholars, politicians, scientists, psychologists, labour unions…”
✳️📣
Antarctic Sapiens - The ongoing biosphere crisis. The incoming predicaments as per science and scientists.
✴️🌐
Collapse Curriculum - Busting myths, divesting from western modernity and techno-superiority.
❇️⚠️
PsychSphere - “individual/mass psychology and psycho-dynamics of cultural, political and global issues”
✳️🍏
Amaterasusolar - Questions based on ethics, values, energy and radical alternatives.
✴️⚡
The Write Of Return -Our world in dissolution, our shared realities. The ‘geopolitique’ and its magnificent dark arts.
❇️🌟
The Lazy Paleo Girl - Comics and illustrated stories about a collapsing society and its uncontested fears.
✳️👩🏽🦱
Stray Thoughts, Bad Poetry - useless to define the creative experience that “certain” artist revel within. Bliss!
✴️💁🏼♀️
Dissent In Bloom - A citizen’s response to a range of ruptures and emerging social crises.
❇️🚩
Ontological Intifada - Revolutionary motivation, emancipatory worlding and working-class unity.
✴️✊🏾
Miral Askar - “This space was born out of anger — and love…Anger at a world that trades truth for power.”
❇️📘
Peter Gelderloos - “against ecocide, gentrification, the police, neoliberalism, prison, patriarchy, militarism”. Breaking down the ways of the world-eating Leviathan.
✳️🔥
The Protean Hydroharvest - “This world needs fixing. And we haven't given up yet... have you?”
✴️🌍
🧒🏻🍄💚 Wish you a resilient 🦔 new year 2026 🧒🏾❤️🐿️
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(yes it helps a lot )
Great analysis of the Substack dynamics - like all successful social media platforms, it is also compulsive, hence even though for most of us it is probably "a waste of time" logically, it keeps drawing us in - frustrating! Thank you for the mention - it's those things that make it worth it! 😉
It's all great therapy, whether the creators are able to monetize their travails or not, Counter. Journaling has been an institution for centuries (fact check with or without AI?). Yet it is only in recent iterations of the industrial revolution (did we forget that AI is at root an instrument of revolution?) that content creators expect to support themselves with their therapy? The media sage Marshall McLuhan famously claimed that every new media eventually gets the content that it deserves. The heap is the virtual Tower of Babel. Only in this case language programs solve the problem of translation but not the problem of meaning.