michael-dean-k/

An otherwise simple walk to catch a train into the city had a dimension that I guess I’ll describe as “apocalyptic wonder.” I don’t mean that in the “end of the world” sense, but in the “unraveling” sense of the word. It was like every phenomenon—a passerby’s limp, a tasteless building, Broadway advertisements—came with a decision: I could see it with my usual categories, almost like through a foggy glass of analysis, or, I can imagine and wholeheartedly believe the most generous and profound interpretation possible. And when you inherit that 2nd option as a lens, it’s like one thing builds off another until there’s a cascade and you just have chills over extremely ordinary things. A grumpy commuter is not someone to judge, but someone deserving of parental love, and you imagine you and them as if you’ve been very close for a lifetime, and just for a second you infer some emotional dimension you would’ve never otherwise known. It very much feels Scroogish, like you’re a deadman with just one evening to remember life from its most charitable angle. I don’t know why I’m feeling this lucidity: could be a new surge of dad hormones, or the frigid weather, or the tie around my neck is too tight, or maybe this new frenzy of spawning new software to wrap around my problems is priming me to believe that I can just spin up my own mental frames to see anything anew, as I please, whenever. 

My friend Andrew, I imagine, would read this and joke that it’s a low-grade form of Claude psychosis. Maybe, but maybe the good kind? I’ve always thought there was something slightly off about seeing normal life with ecstatic wholeness, and that the line between psychosis and mysticism is thin. When LSD was first invented, it took them a decade or so to shift the framing from psychosis—they called it “psycho-mimetic,” a madness simulator—to psychedelic (“mind-manifesting), and eventually mystical, transcendental, entheogenic, etc.

I don’t know what it was, but now that I write this on the train, I’m right back in my regular head. And obviously I love writing, but it makes me think I really need to make sure I have chunks of boredom each day, non-linguistic moments in between things. Infant care sort of produces this feeling too, but it’s different because that is about fusing attention with another being; what I just experienced before was something like full immersion in a chaotic environment. Pure Horus. I guess I’ve found it hard to make time for this because, since time is so limited, there’s a pressure to prioritize and converge in the little time you have: I have a book to launch! (I will be announcing the essay prize winners in early March.)

Anyway I think I’ll post this to Notes. Usually I’d just post a riff like this to a secret corner of my website, but in January I stopped logging, and said I’d try to just use Notes as my public note-taker. So if I want to really remember anything, I have to share it. I think the idea of sabotaging the thing I love—capturing fleeting thoughts in prose—and forcing it through a habit of the thing I’m scared of—public judgment of my every idea through metrics—is a good principle to do more often. It’s weird to take something that really is more like a journal entry and open it up to strangers. I’d basically be okay sharing this with anyone I know, but it make me anxious to think a stranger could find this, and this would be 100% of what they know about me, and they’d have no idea about Essay Architecture or whatever, but I think that kind of disregard is exactly what I’m trying to go for on Notes. If my email essays are on topic and polished and narrative building, then each Note should be its own thing, out of context, unrelated to the last one. And so I’m glad to share something like this after a shipost about snakepit.

The other night, a cohort of drunk teenagers were screaming the lyrics to "Champagne Supernova" on a quiet train, trying to get a sober passengry to sing along at 10:45pm. At first, this looks belligerent. It was belligerent, but I tried not to judge, and instead imagined them as supremely wise beings, uniting in song and joy, with an inner knowing that this moment won't matter to anyone else (and might not even register to the majority, scrolling with headphones). Outside of this log, everyone will forget their judgment in a few weeks, and we'll flatten them into a caricature of youth. But to them? Maybe they'll remember this on their deathbed. Two of them could get married. I wondered how my life might change, for the better, if I were as careless and inconsiderate as them. I started singing along the lyrics in my head, because I liked Oasis once twenty years ago, and even imagined myself standing up and singing, being the bold #2 that gives the rest of the train permission to join. If that somehow erupted, no one would forget it. But they quickly changed to another song, and then another, and I didn't recognize any of them. Realistically, I would never do it. I'm too conscientious, mired in etiquette. Even though this just might be a band of idiots—possibly the same kids I caught running on the tracks a few weeks ago,¹ filming it, probably trying to go viral—I sort of envy their disinhibition. It's not that I yearn to be a menace, more like, I can't quite conceive how much I limit my life by deferring to the feeble opinions of others. Across the aisle, I saw a woman in distress, kind of over-dramatic, saying to the stranger next to her, "I'm going to complain to the conductor! This is horrible!"

Waiting for my wife, I am sitting in the lobby of a firm I quit 4 years ago—though I haven’t entered the building in 5, since COVID—and I see Westler slip out the elevator bay; out walks Westler into the barrel-vaulted lobby, out through those gold revolving doors that started and ended many days of my years. Westler. He’s still here! Alive! I remember him like I do an old dream. His placid demeanor and dry humor, a goatee, his subtle mischief and possible creepiness. I don’t know if I ever really knew him behind that caricature. He designed multi-story basements for megapolic airports… I think (a kind of endless machine work, the coordination of billions of lines, cognitive sterilization, a tectonic death in service of a suitcase city, a labirynth of conveyor belts). Is he doing that same thing? Did they find some new VR guy to render his city of luggage? Of course I know absolutely nothing of Westler’s life—for all I know, he has a pearl of a daughter that makes sacrificing his peak hours worth it, forever—but in my assumption, that the company we both worked for is something of a life-sucker, a hunter and skinner of the young and ambitious, a building broker that drools steel angled towers across the East, across Dubai and Korea and Singapore, an entity in Bryant Park that overworks and underpays but leaks enormous partner bonuses that enables the CEO to buy luxury pets and park penthouses while speaking at Venetian conferences on the virtues of design, I imagine Westler as a sleepwalker. I imagine every day of the last five years, as he wisps out those gold-trimmed revolving doors, he finds relief in his break, but doesn’t stop to question the sacrifice, and knows not the basic mystery, “time flies.”

Now that I’ve retrieved my wife from the grips of her Tower, we are back in Penn Station—because no more trains run out of Grand Central this late—and we see a familiar figure, a man on fentanyl hunched over at 90 degrees. “Is that the same guy from this morning?” My wife said sadly; but I said, given he spent his entire day in the same spot, same position and same trance, he looks to me a whole lot like Westler.

This is an extreme comparison—to compare the default path to a lethal addiction—but it tracks to how I feel, an anger over a design firm kidnapping my very pregnant wife.

This morning I finally visualized the whole chain of command, the reason she works until 4am, and why 1 AM is considered a “good night”: somewhere in Dubai is a very rich man, and he’s decided to cure the anxiety over his massive pile of money but funding a Tower that, most likely, no one will live in. So he hires a team of henchman, the “client reps,” and it’s their job to dangle glamorous limitless design work to very hungry architects that fear the market could evaporate at any moment. So naturally, the firm accepts the work at half the rate, and I assume half of that is just cut off the top to reward and keep the partners fat (the 80%, the staff—they don’t matter, they are burnt and churnt over, with eager beardless faces eternally sending resumes, because where else in America can you build DUBAI). And so the client, being entitled and aware of our desperation, will throw a screaming fit if my wife and her 2 juniors can’t pull off the labor of 10 people, every single night. Staffing can’t be honest because it’s trying to survive, and business development can’t be selective because it knows it’s runway, and so what emerges is a kind of caste system where office workers are expected to work 80 hour weeks without overtime or questions.

Four Santas at the edge of Bryant park, each with a bike carriage and $60 glow light speaker, each blaring a different holiday song, co-constructing a wall of cheer, a terrible cacophony that blends with traffic and engines on 42nd, and for some unreasonable price, you can take selfies for $100 as they lap the Christmas market. People must do this. Otherwise they wouldn’t come back. If I were an out-of-towner, and in a festive mood, I guess I could see the appeal of a postcard moment like this, of being ushered around the center of the world by the boss himself, it just feels a lot funnier and weirder when you know the same place on a cold January morning commute. I am not a Christmas cynic, I’m just struck by the novelty of the sight, and in lieu of a picture, this is what comes out.

I’m at the Rose Reading Room in the New York Public Library. It’s old, almost like a church, and when someone slides their wood chair on the tile floor to get up, it lets out a horrendous screech that echoes through the whole hall. Surely, NYPL knows about this? I wonder, why do they not have felt tips on the bottom of the chairs? Have they tried this? Are they opposed? Would they stop me if, one by one, I personally installed felt tips on the bottom of each chair?

I’ve lived in New York my whole life, but I have nothing to say about it. Meaning, in Manhattan at least, I have no recommended pizza spots, no bagel stores, no upscale restauraunts. Almost every out of towner I meet seems to know the city better than me. I am willfully and unwillingly, an idiot in my own home. I stumbled in and just gawk at the mystery, still, every time. I mean of course I know some trivial facts (like how the skyline mirrors the bedrock), and I show them off when I can so my national and international friends don't get suspicious. 

Really, New York is a metropolis, a city of cities of cities. Austin is equivalent to Astoria, just one of several downtowns in Queens, one of five Burroughs. And so you’ll find whatever you need here, meaning, aside from the obvious places, you can surrender to the city and get swept into some odd and novel experience each time (alternatively, you can get caught in identical loops, only going to the same places). When I was in the psychedelic society I found myself in Gowanus, Brooklyn in the apartment of a 70-year philosopher with cancer as he took LSD and hallucinated St. Teresa Avila. When I was trying to start a virtual reality company, I was in Zillow’s headquarters putting headsets on executives, telling them we’d “put Manhattan in a briefcase.” When I needed money, I walked the same path every morning through Bryant Park, to the same corporate job. Now, as I start a family, I’m in a suburb at the edge, moving a little farther east every 3 years, and now I take the LIRR in to meet traveling writers. After many years, you realize New York isn’t one thing. Your take on New York is a reflection of yourself at that phase in life, and the city changes a lot less than you do.

When someone tells me New York is this particular thing or that, they're telling me who they are.

I don’t know the New York they write about in classic essays, because all of those are from the perspective of an out-of-state romantic, an Oklahomer, who moves into the fast lane of Manhattan and thinks it’s the only speed to live in the city. But actually the best way to exist in New York is at the edges. For one, you can see the skyline, but really, you get the perks of a normal life with the convenience of being a train ride away from the center of the world. I just got a last-minute invite to an event at Substack’s NYC office and so now I’m going. 

The guest list was full when I last checked it, but I must have been on the waitlist and some spots just opened up. It’s 4:30 PM and I have to make it to 25th Street by 6 PM (so again, nice to be able to get to the center of the world with almost no notice). I live in Queens, so I shifted a meeting, made plans for my mother-in-law to pick up my pregnant wife, took a shower, and headed out. En route, I reread the invite:

“Hear directly from our product and partnerships teams with a behind-the-scenes look at the Feed: what’s working, what’s next [emphasis mine], and how to grow and connect through Notes. There’ll be live demos, insider tips, and plenty of time for Q&A.”

My hope was to learn the future of Notes, the “feed product” that Substack is nudging everyone into, the place where many longform writers loathe. For the record, I have a history of being a Substack evangelist, and as recently as last week, I went hard on a friend: “Notes isn’t the problem; you’re the problem.” What I meant was that, a social media feed will always be imperfect, but it’s the best way to write in public, and since Note is the best option around, it’s each of our responsibilities to set a productive mental frame so we can show up as “citizens of the Internet.” It’s up to us to make Notes a place that’s worth spending time on. Personally, too, now that my career effectively depends on me talking about Essay Architecture in public, I feel the need to trick myself into loving Notes.

I was led to believe we would have a glimpse at the roadmap, some new vision, but mostly, this event confirmed a sinking suspicion: although Substack describes its own algorithm as a noble alternative, it’s just as optimized for revenue as the enshittified feeds it claims to be above, and could have a similar cultural conclusion.

The first thing I noticed when walking out onto the 12th (?) floor was that everyone was loud, beautiful, and extroverted. These people write? I would’ve guessed it to be an Instagram crowd. I recognized three people: I saw Hamish McKenzie, the CEO being mobbed by a crowd of schmoozers—who I would have loved to talk to—, I saw … Jamie? … a writer who recognized me last meetup, but I’ve forgotten her name, and I saw Daniel Pinchbeck of Liminal News (which I pay for) who writes about politics, psychedelics, and the occult, and who I imagined to be similarly uncomfortable with the vibe (I don’t know what he thought, but he did leave early).

At 6:10 PM, before Hamish gave his traditional pitch, he thanked us for baptising the new NYC office, and acknowledged it was his first time here too (this got me to believe, out of the gate, that the purpose of this get-together was to welcome the boss). I assume this office is possible because of the Series A round from a16z. We got the stats, good stats: 32 million free subscribers, half a million paid, and you’re 7x more likely to be shared within the app. He comforted us, told us they won’t follow the same fate as X or Facebook. “As you can tell, our culture is different.”

Soon, after the “head of social media” presented, but as if the room had never heard of Notes before. We got tips, but mostly, we were shown the different archetypes. We could be a “Tumblr Girl” or a “Reply Guy” or one of several other pre-packaged attitudes, and she showed memes and everyone laughed. She said she knows that writers hate to market their own work, and then showed an image of a writer’s Note showing their audience growth graph. We saw Viv Chen’s self-help note, proof that one note can get you 32,000 likes and $5,000 in paid subscribers. Paul Staples was in there too. I didn’t get the sense that Notes was about promoting our own work at all; I got the sense that Notes was about being snarky and ironic, campy and performative. There wasn’t one note with a paragraph. She closed with “so if you didn’t find those notes (her examples) funny, you’re boring and need to rethink your attitude.” The room roared.” (The room roared a lot, especially at tip #5, which was “visualize success and manifest it.”)

She almost forgot to show us new features. One: if you’re a publication with multiple writers, you can now add @ to write a note from a specific editorial staffer. Two: there’s a new embed format to crosspost to LinkedIn. Reminder: this is the roadmap update I rearranged my night for.

Finally we heard from Mike Cohen, “head of AI/ML,” the guy in charge of the feed. His goal is to turn people and content into numerical representations: it’s his job to figure out who you are, what you like, what’s out there that you’ll like, what will get you to subscribe, and ultimately what will get you to pay. This is the reward function. How do you get paid? Because that’s how they get paid too. This is noble, sort of. He made a point that the world “algorithm” has soured, but you can build good ones, it just depends what you optimize for. “Yeah, if you don’t like writers getting paid, then you’ll complain about this.” He said it sarcastically, as in, who would question the good intention of getting writers paid? Of course, I like writers getting paid. I’m a writer and I like getting paid! But when you slant the algorithm towards monetization, you pollute the culture, you elevate the growth-hackers, marketing businesses, and media companies, and you drown out the artists, the weirdos, and the free press.

His last question was what the roadmap is for the next 2 years, and we got, “we’re always trying new things … always tweaking the core retrieval engine … we keep iterating if what you see is relevant at all times … until what you see is perfect, which will never be.”

I feel like this would be a wasted trip if I didn’t personally talk to Mike Cohen and try to confirm my conspiracy theories on how the feed works. After my terrible warm open (“look my name is Mike too,” pointing at my name tag) I asked him to confirm it. I said that in November 2024 I hosted a workshop that brought in $10,000 founding tier subscriptions in a day or two, and unexpectedly, an old post of mine (from Nov 2023) started going mega-viral. It went viral for months. I asked him if the algorithm resurfaces posts from writers who are generating revenue. He said yes, but not revenue, subscribers. I clarified, paid subscribers? “All subscribers, but yes, even more so paid.” So it seems like paid subscribers are the strongest boost you can get.

Selfishlessly, this doesn’t bother me. I know what I need to do. By doubling down on paid subscriptions, I’ll be able to grow my audience faster on the platform. This validated my decision to host my book on Substack and not my own website. If I were mercenary and bold enough to hack the system, I’d set up some discount codes for 90% off, and set up 100 fake accounts through different VPNs, so for $100/month, I could be top of the Rising charts and hack the algorithm. I would bet this is exactly what lots of these AI-generated growth accounts are doing. I wonder if this is detected and manually banned though? Probably not worth the risk, especially because I already have a solid paid content strategy, but I imagine once people realize this, it will be rampant.

But, if I think outside of my selfish needs—and my confidence to crack Notes, eventually, somehow—, I think it’s a bad algorithm for culture. Yes, it’s framed as “for creators,” and it is, but there are side effects if money is the main attractor. It means that hucksters, partisan politics, slop, and smut will thrive. Effectively, it means that even though Substack says they care about culture, its algorithm doesn’t actually. Substack has an underbelly of amazing writers who simply can’t and won’t monetize their prose, and for that they will be lapped by salesmen. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was unable to articulate the source of a low-grade depression for the last few hours, possibly because the illusion popped; there really isn’t a place on the Internet that is unreasonable enough to defy economics and do something for culture’s sake. 

Before leaving, I asked Mike if they try to measure quality—I mentioned that I do this, and got a vague, “oh, cool”—and he said, “you know, I wonder if writers stopped writing and just used AI to generate their posts … if that got more readers to pay for their work, is that really so bad? Who are we to decide what’s good?”