The Revolution Will Be Substacked

Rebuilding Mythology In The Age of Estrangement

Image created by author without AI.

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Even when you are living a life

you did not mean to live,

who you really are

is always calling.

—Iain Thomas, the truth of you.

There’s a good chance you find this poem relatable. We all hear that calling—the person we’re supposed to be desperately screaming out in the hopes we wake up, dust ourselves off, and take off running to our true north.

But we don’t. We can’t. Fuck, why not?

Our society leaves no room for that, my long lost friend. We live in the age of the great estrangement where it isn’t just our labor that is alienated but our love, our authenticity, our art.

Surveillance Fascism dominates not only the economic and political but also the cultural—leaving us all to cope with the spiritual wound that should’ve been filled by art. Today’s tastemakers are algorithms that don’t bring you closer to your true north, but drag you farther away.

The desperate scream is reduced to a despondent whisper.

Many are waiting for the Great Revolution, the day when the dictatorship of money is brought to heel at last. But this simply cannot happen in one fell swoop. Cut off the beast’s head and it grows another—the guillotine will continue slicing and slicing until the blade dulls out. My dear comrade, find solace instead in the hammer. It can smash, yes, but more importantly, it can build.

If we are to resist this inversion of life, it will be the result of building something better. It will not happen swiftly, but I do have good news: if you’re reading this, you’re already on the front lines.

You are the revolutionary vanguard and here is how you will save the world.

A Dying Culture

“Nothin’ is how it used to be. Everything’s different now.” —my grandfather (RIP Poppy).

Zygmunt Bauman described our world as liquid modernity—the systems & institutions around us are changing faster than we can adapt. Life is already ephemeral, like building sand castles on the beach. But with liquid modernity, lifelong careers are replaced with gig work. Identities are reduced to hashtags. Any solid structure is displaced with a liquid formlessness leaving us all adrift at sea. Now, you’re not just building a sand castle on the beach, you’re building it under water.

The tech broligarchs love to crow, “software is eating the world.” And they’re right, it already has. Every company is now a buggy app with a mission statement written by ChatGPT.

Drive through America’s hollowed-out towns and you’ll see the carnage: dead malls, boarded-up diners, and crumbling Main Streets. These relics weren’t destroyed by some grand conspiracy. They were liquefied, digitized, and sucked up into the cloud through a straw. As Bauman warned, “What has been cut apart cannot be glued back together. Abandon all hope of totality, future as well as past, you who enter the world of fluid modernity.”

This terror of transience hits hardest in the realm of art—the one thing that’s supposed to anchor us to meaning. Instead, we’ve outsourced our taste to algorithms that couldn’t distinguish Picasso from a pizza ad. Scroll any algorithmic social media and you’ll feel it: that gnawing sense that even the most viral post is off.

It’s missing what Walter Benjamin called the aura—the soul of art.¹ He argued that aura has two key ingredients:

1. Authenticity: Genuine human expression.

2. Locale: The work’s unique presence in time and space.

Strip either away, and you’re left with slop—AI generated Ghibli knockoffs, lazy reaction videos, “art” designed to farm engagement, not foster inner growth. The problem isn’t artists, it’s the algorithmic wood chipper with a monopoly on discovery & distribution.

Your art’s locale—how, where, why, and when it’s witnessed by others—is just as important to your art as your unique perspective. When social media is your locale, it is pure liquid, changing from day to day.

Instead of crafting authentic art, you end up playing whack a mole with SEO hacks.

This is the Mona Lisa paradox: her aura depends on being here, in the Louvre, soaked in centuries of wonder and awe. But on Instagram, she’s just another JPEG in the wood chipper—infinitely reproducible, endlessly disposable. As Benjamin wrote, “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: Its presence in time and space.”

But hold up: does this mean all digital art is soulless since it’s infinitely reproducible? Fuck no. Digital art can (and should) have aura. Benjamin’s warning is not about reproduction in and of itself, but commodification.

In order to get real people to see your art, you’re compelled to sloptimize it for the algorithm. Length, format, style and so much more are dictated to you. This would be like a curator at The Louvre telling da Vinci how to tweak the Mona Lisa so it appeals to next season’s flock of tourists.

This is exactly what’s happening on algorithmic social media.

No one forces you to make your art “algorithm friendly.” You’re free to be authentic the same way you’re free to work a job: getting paid means surrendering your agency and absent-mindedly doing what you’re told.

Social media feels different. You look up from your desk, and there’s no mediocre middle manager breathing down your neck. But its only a subtle, more diffuse form of control.

The algorithm is king

and if you want to be an artist

you must kiss the ring.

This is the cruel joke of liquid modernity: we dismantled the old tyrannies, only to erect new ones. The algorithm’s rigid demands—optimize or vanish—are the paradoxical price of our freedom to create without gatekeepers. As Bauman wrote, “Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human agents’ freedom.” We dreamed of liberation from bosses and boardrooms—but got a digital dictator that never sleeps.

The problem is not digital art—it’s the algorithm.

Social media wants vampires. People like MrBeast—a PT Barnum for the digital age. Barnum didn’t create art. He created spectacles, stitching together monkey bones and calling it a mermaid because crowds paid to gawk. MrBeast’s videos follow the same script: engineered virality, zero aura. Both men are vampires, feeding on attention instead of blood.

But here’s the twist: we are complicit. Not because we’re lazy, but because we keep going to a circus filled with blood suckers! As Olivia Rodrigo snarls in her hit Vampire: “Bloodsucker, fame fucker / Bleedin’ me dry like a goddamn vampire.”

Vampires need willing victims and we keep rolling up our sleeves. Speaking of willing victims, sometimes our veins are literally for sale.

Think about blood donations. If you pay people for their blood, they’ll often lie about having blood-related illnesses like hepatitis so they can get paid, inadvertently tainting the blood supply. But if blood is donated as a voluntary act of goodwill, suddenly the supply is safer. Why is that? Psychologists would say you’re undermining the 3 pillars of self-determination:

1. Autonomy: Control over your choices.

2. Competence: Experiencing mastery.

3. Relatedness: Connection with others.

Pay people for blood, and you replace autonomy with economic coercion, competence with criteria, and relatedness with an impersonal business transaction.

Tainting the motivation taints the blood supply. Literally.

This is why hospitals won’t use purchased blood. Instead of getting safe blood that saves lives, you get tainted blood that kills innocent people. Instead of getting art with aura, you get hyper-stimulating slop that hijacks your nervous system, leaving you numb yet craving more.

A subtle but insidious subversion.

This isn’t just an aesthetic crisis. It’s spiritual malpractice. Art has always been how humans process existence—grief, joy, rage, wonder. But when surveillance fascism reduces culture to content, we’re left with a vacuum where meaning should be.

And nature abhors a vacuum.

The Meaning Crisis

There is a hole in the sky where God should be.

Image created by author without AI and big inspiration from this lad.

Nietzsche saw the writing on the wall and warned us, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.”² The problem? We created a spiritual vacuum. A cosmic game of Jenga where we yanked out the divinity block and now the whole tower wobbles, teetering on collapse.

People need mythology to get through life. Life is hard. Traumatic, even. We are born against our will in a world that is completely and utterly fucked. Yet here we are, scrambling to find meaning like an incel trying to get a Tinder match.

This is where the monster creeps in.

"[the conspiracy theory of society] comes from abandoning God and then asking: ‘Who is in his place?’” -Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945).

When God died, we didn’t just lose a deity—we lost our spot as a divine protagonist. Popper knew the void would birth conspiracy theories, casting believers as heroes in a cosmic showdown against shadowy elites.

Two worlds, like audiences, disperse

And leave the soul alone.

—Emily Dickinson, Departed to the Judgment.

Qanon’s foot soldiers, flat-Earthers, and MAGA’s election truthers aren’t just paranoid, they’re starving. They need to feel like the main character in a story where they matter, even if the plot is written by 4chan trolls.

Conspiracy theories are the only mythology they have left.

To them, this isn’t participating in politics, this is idol worship—the same idol Nietzsche warned us about.

“State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies too; and this lie crawls from its mouth: ‘I, the state, am the people.’” —Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Nietzsche’s warning proved prophetic. A generation later, Germany fell for their own conspiracy theory culture, foolishly believing “Jews control the world.” This gave rise to the Nazis and justified their barbaric crimes against humanity.

They called it self defense.

This is the irony: the far right fetishizes Nietzsche’s Übermensch while embodying its antithesis. Instead of “saying yes to life,” they scream “no” to scapegoats: “Immigrants stole your job! Trans people corrupted your kids! Feminism is behind your divorce!”

They’re not Übermenschen, they’re crybullies in red hats, blaming everyone but themselves for their perceived powerlessness. Nietzsche rolls in his grave while his wretched witch of a sister kekles from Hell.

Despite being cringey losers, they’re winning. Why? Because surveillance fascism thrives on the meaning crisis. When people are starved of purpose, they’ll flock to conspiracy theories like sheeple to the slaughter. After all, a horrible something is better than a neutral nothing.

Behold their depravity—the likes of which we’ve not seen since the literal fucking dark ages:

The White House making fun of immigrants being deported—border enforcement is fine. Dunking on them in front of the whole world IS FUCKING NOT.

We’re not just reliving the 20th century, we’re upgrading its horrors for the digital age.

But here’s the unflinching reality of our struggle: opposing Trump (or the next demagogue) isn’t enough. Fascism isn’t a bug—it’s a symptom. The real disease is the meaning crisis. The void where art, community, and mythology once thrived. You can’t fill that hole in the sky with conspiracy theories, and when you try, and inevitably fail, you’ll have a conspiracy theory for that, too.

We must rebuild mythology. Not with gods or flags, but with art that heals, communities that care, and culture that affirms life.

Here’s how we’re going to do that.

The Digital Life Raft

Our culture is drowning. Surveillance fascism liquified everything into a never-ending sewage of slop, while tech broligarchs monetize the wreckage. They know their vaporware makes you misogynistic, lonely, and depressed. But it’s a sacrifice they’re willing to make—so they can become the richest men on Earth and not-so-subtly buy the American government.

Substack is a life raft in this sea of formlessness, giving us the opportunity to build a modern mythology without the subtle subversion of algorithmic manipulation.

As Substack’s founders put it, “Our goal is not merely to offer an alternative to social media, but to create the conditions for culture makers to produce amazing work that would never have been possible under the old systems.”

Substack offers a home for art with aura.

Benjamin’s locale isn’t just physical—it’s the soil where art takes root. Your inbox can be that soil: a solid space where trusted creators help you make sense of this messy little thing called life.

When you own your audience’s inbox, you’re not building on rented land under the ocean, you’re placing a rock on solid ground from which you may build your church.

Look at

The Intrinsic Perspective

’s mind-bending essays,

shit you should care about

’s deliciously crisp reporting,

Kelcey Ervick

’s personal yet profound illustrated essays,

Grant Snider

’s poetry comics,

Elle Griffin

’s innovative utopianism, just to name a few!

This isn’t “content”—it’s art with aura not only surviving but thriving. And yes… making money too!

Substack is a new economic engine of culture that empowers self-determination.³

Critics might sneer, ‘Aren’t creators still chasing money?’ Sure, but unlike algorithmic platforms where every post is a slot-machine payout, subscriptions force a slower, deeper game. You’re not swiping right for a one-night viral hit, you’re proposing to build a life together.

Decades of research show that intrinsic motivation thrives when the 3 pillars of self-determination are met, and they are met perfectly on Substack:

• Autonomy: no algorithmic overlords or legacy gatekeepers.

• Competence: mastering your craft without chasing viral trends or having to pivot to video.

• Relatedness: building trust with your readers.

When rewards are informational and tied to trust they don’t corrupt creativity, they cultivate it.

Social media is a one-night stand. Substack is marriage. One leaves you empty, chasing the next fix. The other whispers sweet nothings like “I trust you” while you grow old and weird together.

Are there cash-grab newsletters? Sure. But they’re outliers, because the model self-corrects. Exploit your readers for a cash grab, and they’ll unsubscribe. Simple as that.

Trust isn’t just the currency here—it’s the whole damn economy.

This model does more than preserve individual authenticity, it fosters a collective ethos. Nietzsche’s Übermensch, realistically speaking, could never be a loner. It’s up to creators, artists, and thinkers to forge values together—a shared, decentralized mythology to fill that hole in the sky with something as warm and radiant as the sun itself.

Am I saying that Substack users are Nietzschean Übermenschen? Yes, yes I am.⁴

Of course, Substack isn’t perfect. What the hell is? The new reels feed makes me want to throw up, and VC funding always gives me the ick. But this isn’t about idealism, but pragmatism.

The meaning crisis won’t be solved by protesting alone. We need institutions that resist liquid modernity. As far as the internet is concerned, Substack is the best chance we’ve got.

This is the difference between building a sandcastle at the bottom of an ocean of AI slop vs grasping for the only life raft in sight. And you know what? If worse came to worse, we could export our email lists and set sail on our own little rowboat.

Sooner or later, AI will displace every artist on algorithmic social media, churning out viral hits faster than you can make a single post. It’s a boring version of the Matrix and they’re doing it in plain sight:

“Mark Zuckerberg has been clear about his intentions: He believes that the future of 'social media' is a bunch of human beings scrolling through and arguing about AI-generated content on his many platforms. In many ways, that future is already here.” 404 Media.

FUCK. THAT. SHIT.

Let us imagine a brighter future.

Substack isn’t the revolution—it’s the workshop. The vampires and the fascists want you demoralized, doomscrolling, defeated. So grab a hammer. Build something they can’t liquify. This is where we create a new culture, and by extension, a new world.

Your true north is waiting for you.

1. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin.

2. The Gay Science by Friedrich Nietzsche.

3. And perhaps, Substack has always been the engine of culture?

4. I don’t remember if I was joking when I wrote this.