Exit Enshittification

If all goes well this weekend, this will be the last post you will read on Substack (or that is coming from Substack). Visibly nothing should change other than perhaps the website url and maybe some minor style stuff.

What is happening

Substack is, in many ways, like every other tech company in 2024. It is following the same trajectory described by Cory Doctorow called “enshittification”.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

The subtle difference here is that Substack’s business customers and users are mostly the same, but several features they have added to make themselves more like a social network (Notes, et al) has put them at odds with a significant number of their other users who don’t want their content showing up next to stuff from Nazis, actually. Including me.

I intend to write more on this “enshittification”, but rather than repeat what Doctorow and others have written about (examples), I kinda want to examine how it relates to a broader recent declining rate of profit within tech1 and, maybe more importantly, how we might get off this train.

But! That’s a lot to write about while trying to also dedicate time to moving this blog, so I’ll just give a quick personal update.

I got a haircut in a metro station by a Lebanese lawyer (former)

I’ve mentioned before how downtown Montreal has basically a second whole-ass city underground, filled with shops and restaurants. I’m sorry if you, like me, are too online and have been inundated with a lot of tunnel content recently2, but I can’t help but fully endorse this place. I needed a hair cut, I walk past this place to get to french classes every weekday, so I stopped in. The coiffeur (barber) was a lovely gentleman who immigrated to Quebec 17 years ago3 and gave up law for this, which he expressed was considerably less stressful.

French vocab comes easier if you are an English language simp

Seriously. I’ll just guess some word I would use in English, give my best terrible (fr: also “terrible”) French accent, and lo and behold it’s almost always entirely real and appropriate.

I’m done writing and you are done reading. It’s le weekend (Quebec: fin de semaine) baby!