Don't Go Away

We'll Be Back—Right After This Important Message

A note to my readers: Substack is now offering their bestselling writers sponsorships and brand partnerships “to add value for your subscribers.” (I think we all know that, whomever value is being added for here, it is not you.) This, in my view, bodes ill. Participation is totally optional, of course—it just feels like, you know, the camel’s nose. Hopefully it goes without saying that I will be declining this opportunity.

Let me pile a couple of disclaimers up front here: not every writer has written a bestseller or sold movie rights or got a teaching gig or inherited money, and so they all have to do things they would, in a perfect world, rather not do to support their vocation. So I pass no judgement on my colleagues who may have to start unobtrusively slipping references to the great financing offered by Chevy on their new 2027 Silverado into their work. Though I gotta confess that whenever I hear, e.g., podcasters use their authoritative/ earnest/ funny podcaster voice to shill for their sponsor I can’t help but wince in embarrassment for them. Once you’ve heard them use the same voice that’s meant to earn your trust to push some product, how are you supposed to believe that they’re for real now when they go back to talking about their ostensible subject? I don’t even like defacing my essays with that little “subscribe now” button, but I do have to make some feeble halfhearted gesture in the direction of self-promotion.

And so far I have to say I’ve had no gripes whatever about substack as a platform: the one human being I’ve ever interacted with there seemed like a good guy; I get to write whatever I want and you get to read it, without editorial interference or intrusive ads; and I’m making a big enough chunk of income from it that I’d get in trouble if I didn’t report it. (And I’d doubtless be making more if I posted on some regular schedule or ever promoted myself in any way.) A sweet deal all around—everybody happy!¹ I understand that the introduction of sponsorships is all part of the natural evolutionary processes of capitalism: specifically enshitification, by virtue of which all things are constantly made both more expensive and worse. Which is why I’ve declined to update my phone or computer for years now, even as it’s meant losing access to things like the New York Times crossword; any time I’ve ever acquiesced to updating anything it’s made it more user-unfriendly. (Remember when you could program in your own alert sounds and ringtones? As the cartoon says: “That thing you liked?—they don’t make it anymore.”) I fear that Enshitification comes for all good things in the end.

The thing is, I have kind of a bee in my bonnet about advertising. It’s the one thing (well, one of the things) I can get a little fanatical about. As a child in the 1970s, I had well over one million ads crammed into my brain before I’d formed any critical defenses against them,² so that, e.g., I now awaken like a sleeper agent and bawl, “SEVEN-ELEVEN’S GOT SLURPEE ROCK CUPS!” or whatever other jingle or slogan was programmed deep into my long-term memory half a century ago if it’s triggered by some random association. So I consider myself a victim of child exploitation³ and entitled to reparations in the form of never having to pay for any good or service by watching or hearing another ad ever again in my entire life. I’ve done my time. And then it didn’t help any that one of my more influential college professors was Mark Crispin Miller, author of Boxed In, which David Foster Wallace called “far and away the best things ever written about television.” Dr. Miller taught great courses on Hitchcock and Kubrick, but his real focus was advertising and propaganda—and so, per conservatives’ paranoid fantasies, I was indoctrinated by leftist ideology to despise advertising, the pretty smiling receptionist in the lobby outside the slaughterhouse of capitalism.

What you pay attention to is, in a sense, who you are. So for someone to forcibly hijack your attention, hold your brain hostage for 30 seconds, trick you into paying attention to something trivial and useless in the interest of making you give them your money for some crap you don’t need (because if you needed it, after all, you would’ve gone looking for it yourself) is something akin to brainwashing, or demonic possession. Ads are metastasizing like cancer: ads play in elevators, on gas pumps, over urinals; they make you watch ads in movies you’ve already paid twenty bucks for; the whole point of steaming services used to be that you didn’t have to watch ads, like on low-rent network TV, but now they make you watch ads on channels already paying for unless you pay even more. They never leave you alone, anywhere, not for a second. There’ll be an ad for the funeral home on your fucking casket. It fills me with the sort of snarling loathing that makes me want to mix up a whole tray of Molotov cocktails.

So I always click SKIP AD; I choose to CONTINUE WITHOUT SUPPORTING; I enable Adblock for all websites. If your site immediately blossoms with pop-ups I hit the little X, close the tab, and look elsewhere. And yes I realize that the entire internet and many of the conveniences we enjoy daily without charge depend on ad revenue for their very existence. What I would say to that argument is: that does not sound like my problem. I will gladly let the entire internet go dark (I still remember that life was perfectly fine without it), let every industry go broke, the whole edifice of global capitalism collapse before I willingly sit through another 30-second ad for anything at all. And if an unskippable ad for your product ever does slip past my many filters, your brand goes on my Enemies List and I make a mental note to boycott it ‘til I die.

And so, reader, my promise to you is this: I would almost as soon drown my beloved cat as make you read an ad when you come to me for whatever you come here for—insight or humor or commiseration from a fellow Person in the World or just a little respite from the rest of the dull grinding horror of the Algorithm—and the day that advertisements become unavoidable on this platform is the day I will, with regret, take my little portable typewriter stand elsewhere.

I always hoped for Alice Cooper; twice I got José Feliciano.

1. I am peripherally aware of controversies over the presence of authors espousing Naziism, racism, and other forms of hatred on this platform, about which I have uncomfortably tangled feelings; I came of age in a time when it was easier to be a First Amendment hard-liner, because, frankly, Naziism seemed like a vestigial fringe ideology then, a thing you could make fun of in Mel Brooks movies or The Blues Brothers. Now “freedom of speech,” like the American flag, has been appropriated as cover for fascists and bigots, although they certainly don’t believe in that princip[le for anyone but themselves. That said, I do think there are certain ideas—e.g., slavery, genocide, totalitarianism—that have effectively been taken off the table for debate in this country, because thousands or millions of people forfeited their lives to defeat and discredit them.

But to be honest I’ve mostly been oblivious to the whole thing, because I don’t pay attention to online outrage and controversies and in my personal hierarchy of worries, with climate change at the top and the brain-eating amoeba right around the middle, it’s pretty near the bottom.

2. This is not a figure of speech; some estimates are that people in the 1970s were exposed to 500 ads per day, so my own total was likely a lot closer to two million than one by the time I hit fifth grade. You probably don’t want to know how many ads we see per day now.

3. People use terms like“abuse” and “trauma” ridiculously loosely now, which is insulting to people who actually got beaten up by their parents or raped or were in combat, so let me clarify that I’m being hyperbolic here. I’m still not watching any ads, though.