Substack still seems perfectly comfortable making money off Nazis. People still seem perfectly comfortable making excuses for Nazis. Platformer has left Substack, and yet nothing seems to (or potentially will) happen. I’d love it if y’all could join me over on Patreon, but I know that might not be a guarantee. I’d love to be able to be able to take an appropriately ethical stance here — see: Neil Young and Joni Mitchell leaving Spotify in protest over Joe Rogan — but I’m neither Neil nor Joni, and it’s not like their leaving Spotify has impacted Spotify’s bottom line at all.
I also seem to be always thinking through what it means to engage in an online narrative space (or any sort of expected narrative space) at all, as the way we do currently engage with narrative often does seem to be an updated version of this —
"The noise of the game shows' shrieks and laughter injects the home with the needed adrenaline for getting up in the morning and doing the heavy chores," she explains, while the "heartbreak, confusion, restrained passion, and romance of families in the soaps provides the anesthesia to fill out the hollows of long afternoons when children are napping and there is ironing or nothing at all to be done." Throughout the day, commercial breaks provide predictable opportunities to turn on the vacuum, take out the trash, move the laundry between machines, and so on. The particular function of serialization in afternoon soap operas is an important aspect of Lopate's study of housework. In contrast to the morning game shows, but also to evening serials, which "speeded up to collapse the dull moments of everyday life," soap opera time "expanded . . . everyday life, which often induces boredom and restlessness when taken in its own time, becomes filled with poignancy when the moment can be languished upon." In so many ways, it would seem, this programming provided a form of compensation for work otherwise unwaged or low-waged, work that often is not described as work, but called other things instead: responsibility, care, or love.
And if I go into a narrative space knowing that the person on the other end will be distracted in a certain, uniquely ‘modern’ way, then how does that impact me? Yes, it would be fine — perhaps even normal — if I found one, catchy thing for this newsletter to do and simply stuck with it. I could even try and find a writerly way of adopting the TikTok/Twitter cliche of, “Stop scrolling! This is important!” (Though how is that any different from the television cliche of ‘Don’t touch that dial?’)
Point being: nazis bad. Private club on Patreon = … good? Contemporary narrative structures are what they are, but — as a kind of rallying cry, as a sign of hope amongst all this, as Greta Gerwig once said in an interview with The Off Camera Show — “Story structure is our birthright.”