Thread by @SethAbramson

I research and teach digital culture, and track "signals" in this area. When I saw Tim Marchman's POPPING TINS 2-3 months ago—a substack *solely* about canned fish—I said to my wife, "That'll be as big as he wants it to be."

Months later, it's in the NYT. nytimes.com/2021/07/19/din…

I mention this because it's become clear that, among much else, Substack is a great place for passionate experts on any subject—doesn't matter which one—to turn their obsession into an antenna for everyone worldwide who's into that thing.

And you name a thing, it has a fan base.

When I teach creative concept development—whether in the form of creative writing or app development—one of the first things I do is find out what students are expert in.

I emphasize that it doesn't matter what it is—making the perfect PB&J will do—as long as they truly love it.

This is why I get frustrated at journos who pretend not to know the difference between creators and influencers. The former is an inductive creative, the latter a deductive service-industry worker. Are there hybrids? Sure. But you're born by/into one camp. newyorker.com/culture/infini…

Translate this to Substack and you see that Substack isn't a good fit for influencers; it's designed for creators. A Substack creator could become an influencer, but it's not baked into the project. Just so, a TikTok influencer creates content—but to fill a niche they identified.

So no one would say, "The people demand a site about canned fish!" and then launch a substack called POPPING TINS. You have to love that subject and have some expertise in it to conceive of that project. Those who aim to be *influencers* are going to see little value in Substack.

I know Substack scouts potential Substack creators by their online engagement, and that's fine, but I'd tell Hamish today that if you find someone with high engagement who isn't uniquely passionate and knowledgeable about a subject, there is a cap to how far their project can go.

With influencers, it's a different calculus: a prospective boss judges their likely success by whether they robotically—but with a patina of authenticity—give people what it's already clear those people want. They're not creators but Sisyphean hole-fillers—until people get bored.

That's why so many influencers are young and do vapid s***. They have what Americans want—youth, beauty, energy, athleticism, &c—but aren't yet old enough to have developed a highly specific area they're both passionate about *and* expert in. But they can fill a hole. For a time.

So when THE NEW YORKER questions the longevity of Substack by talking about influencer culture, it telegraphs that the author of such a piece has no idea what they're talking about. Every aspect of those worlds—in time and space and everything in-between—at least begins distinct.

Having said that, certain rare events can make the creator/influencer dichotomy tricky. For instance, Glenn Greenwald was once an inductive, principled, unique creator. Then he saw that Trump had built a cult of mindless automatons, so he jumped ship and became an influencer.

Glenn Greenwald now writes deductively—determining what his audience wants, and then spoon-feeding it to them. Not coincidentally, that's *exactly* what he accuses *others* of doing, as he knows that no one wants to feel like they're the focus on an influencer's sad calculations.

This is also one of the reasons I relish being a "nerd" and being called a nerd and doing what I naturally do—prove myself a nerd over and over. If I write about something, it's because I'm obsessed with it. Period. I don't write about anything I'm not obsessed about. Never have.

So consider how *powerful* the "push-pull" of the word "influencer" is. America is obsessed with influencers, and yet the absolute worst insult to have directed at you—and I've repeatedly faced it, falsely—is that you do what influencers do: find a niche, then fill it soullessly.

This, then, is what's really at stake when we talk about the "creator economy" as being an evolution away from the "influencer economy" rather than in any sense whatsoever—as THE NEW YORKER, a place for "critics" rather than either creators or influencers—a synonymous phenomenon.

A thinker I've often taught at UNH is Matthew Arnold, whose "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864) built a foundational metaphor for the interplay of "critics" and creators.

But that was before celebrity culture. Now a third group is in the metaphor: influencers.

So it's no surprise critics are bad at distinguishing between creators and influencers—as they aim to execute the same function on both—that influencers are both more "successful" than creators on average but also long to be called "creators," and that creators are a group apart.

All this is why I saw Marchman writing on something no one else was with passion and expertise—in a networked world where you can *always* find aficionados of any obscure passion—and knew he'd find an audience if he wanted to. Those judging him as an "influencer" wouldn't see it.

So why subscribe to a person's Substack? Not because they're an "influencer"; not because you want them to be a delivery system for anything you crave. There's a real shelf-life on that impulse. You, me—all of us—what we're called upon to do is find those who share our passions.

That's also why, when Trumpists call me crazy, it means nothing to me. We live in different spacetime continua—me on Earth Prime, them on Earth-2—so of *course* I seem crazy to them. But if a leftist calls me a fraud, those are *fighting words*. Because I'm a huge—*earnest*—nerd.