Tl;dr - If you aren’t more discerning, Substack is Slopstack™, driven by hyper-social primate behaviour in the form of industrialised busybodying and you will be sucked in.
A subscriber recently observed that I was drifting into hot-take territory. I felt terrible because I don’t have many paid subs and now one of them was disappointed and I also felt terrible that they were right. I hate not just being wrong but also being a loser of scant subscription revenue.
Separately, another reader described their own constant urge to “correct” other people’s perspectives. At first I treated these as separate comments, largely because one of them was about me and was therefore harder to talk about than the other one. It’s always easier to talk about other people’s failure modes than mine.
After a while the penny dropped. Both these comments were about the same thing. If any good has come from the Jason Arday affair, it’s that.
The Jason Arday affair made me go mental and then feel exhausted. I am a rational adult with lots of curiosity about things and when there’s a Big Story this unfortunately entails checking for updates every two minutes, except when I don’t have a networked device to hand. During the opening salvos of the Jason Arday affair I lost all agency. I was a slave to this insane story and a slave to my need to show the world how brilliantly I was processing it.
I’m being flippant because this is stupid behaviour and I cannot take those impulses seriously. It’s stupid behaviour because it does not make my life better. Nor does knowing what I think about things make your life better. We’re just primates doing interpersonal grooming. You like that I think something that chimes with your intuitions and I like that you give me attention for thinking those things too.
It’s been a while coming, but I’ve realised that this aspect of Substack is not for me. It used to be interesting and amusing to poke fun at demented Wokies and deranged Rightoids, but it no longer interests or entertains me. The metaphor that pops into mind is of objecting to a glacier, so you take a hammer to it.
Resisting the compulsion to contribute during Britain’s George Floyd moment was hard and then, suddenly, it wasn’t
I noticed myself getting annoyed on the internet again before the ludicrous events of August 2026. This was embarrassing because I pride myself on standing aloof from the things that agitate less brilliant or zen people than me. What I like is to gaze down from the mountain of accumulated nuance, sneering at the simplistic certainties of the valley people. I absentmindedly twiddle my long beard and lean on my ancient oak staff, smiling benignly and wisely, while people go berserk far below my intellectual eyrie.
I first noticed the returning problem of being annoyed on the internet specifically on Reddit. Having unintentionally trained the machine to irritate me, I took the radical step of leaving several subreddits. This worked quite well, as far as it went. I was even somewhat self-congratulatory at having removed a source of irritation.
Then the Jason Arday affair broke, and the levee caved under the pressure. My brain was jacked, mostly by the more deranged forms of leftishist pushback against what I regarded as legitimate fact-finding and reporting, but also by rightoids making the same tired observations day in day out. I said my own piece and I could have left it at that, but the damned story wouldn’t stop evolving.
With 'friends' like this, Jason Arday doesn't need enemies
Jason Arday’s life is in tatters, now that his professional and personal credibility is toast. Spare a thought for what he is going through. No more pixels and ink need be squandered on all the ways he bears respo…
By then I was constantly monitoring for every new development and each fresh deterioration in the quality of public reasoning. And what emerged was an overwhelming compulsion to correct the deterioration in public reasoning, thereby adding to the noise.
The structure of online discourse is impressively efficient for creating negative affect. An event happens. Then comes the reporting of the event, followed by the takes about the event and the reporting of the event, then the reactions to the takes about the event and the reporting of the event and the takes about the reporting of the event and soon it’s all just reactions to the reactions and sometimes people announcing that they refuse to participate in this degrading spectacle and then those announcements forming the next stage of the spectacle.
By that point, the original event has disappeared beneath a vast fatberg of commentary. And the story has morphed into a pointless discussion about what everybody else thinks about it all. This is not what I want to do with my life.
I kept checking Slopstack™ Notes because something new appeared every few minutes, except when the Americans were asleep. ‘New’ is doing significant work, here. New facts did occasionally emerge but the moral shape of this monster remained basically stable. Everyone arrived brandishing the same jeers about victims, villains, hypocrites, cowards, racists, frauds, ghouls, enablers, useful idiots and the occasional hopeless soul arguing that two or more apparently competing perspectives can be true at once.
Desperate for novelty I wanted to be surprised by what people thought. Instead, I just got mad.
If you dislike people reciting their team’s approved talking points, which are then adopted by credulous normies who recognise the socially correct interpretation and display it like a conference lanyard or a yard sign, the internet presents certain challenges. My personal challenge is that I’m psychologically vulnerable to one form of stupidity in particular - the flattening of complex events and attachment to moral certainties by people with partial knowledge, no knowledge, or a screenshot someone else posted that had some rhetorical pizzazz.
I should admit that scant knowledge bothers me partly because I look down on people who possess it, while speaking with enormous confidence, partly because it forces me to feel obliged to know everything, lest I become one of them. This is a difficult standard to maintain because reality continues producing new information without giving me a chance to absorb it.
Seriously, I hate how this happens now that we have endlessly discursive nanosecond-by-nanosecond evolution of news events. Something in my psyche sneers at people who haven’t kept up with ‘the discourse’, so I put pressure on myself to not be one of those people.
The hive mind never rests. At any moment, somebody knows something I do not know. Worse, they may already be discussing it before I’ve found out. If I remain offline for four hours, ‘the culture’ could advance without me, leaving me to return like an elderly relative complimenting someone’s jeans as looking ‘with it’.
So, there I found myself, posting more and more on Slopstack™ Notes. It began to resemble my old Twitter days, except that there I had 27,000 followers amplifying my perspectives, whereas now I was mostly yelling at clouds until perhaps two people pressed ‘like’ on my effort to steer the discourse into a sensible place. Pity likes are the currency of Slopstack™ Notes when you’re bad at getting much attention.
You’ll have noticed here that if I’d been getting more affirmation I wouldn’t be writing this. This is something I hate about myself.
Anyway, no discernible good came from all that posting, but I couldn’t stop because of something in my psycho-physiology. The problem was that each of my interventions produced a brief but tangible sensation of relief. I had seen an incorrect perspective and corrected it. The external record had been repaired. Civilisation still had a chance.
That relief reminds me of when I smoked real cigarettes. I used to imagine that it relaxed me, although much of the relaxation came from temporarily satisfying a need that cigarettes had themselves created. Posting is just lighting up. The pleasure is fleeting and the relief is temporary because nothing actually nourishing is taking place.
I’m laughing about it now (well, smiling wanly) but the constant hysteria and agitation of events like Jason Arday’s absurd fictions and subsequent death creates a feedback loop that I sometimes get stuck in.
I would like to report that a better part of me eventually took over and reminded me of everything I have written about intellectual humility. What actually happened was less dignified.
I thought my takes were Great and Important. But they were receiving nothing like the traction achieved by the takes of Big Names. Every few days, some version of an observation I had fired into the void would be made by somebody else with a large following and it would receive lavish affirmation.
This bruised my ego. I had said the thing first. Admittedly, almost nobody had noticed and the Big Name had probably reached the conclusion independently, but the narcissist in my head was adamant. My right to a reputation as uniquely insightful was being infringed.
The Slopstack™ Notes format and me are a bad mix. Short posts are a pox on my intellectual and spiritual life.
It was a relief to leave Twitter and explore how I process the sociopolitical world in longer form. This was supposed to reflect a more nuanced way of parsing ‘the discourse’ that definitely leaves me happier at steady state. It would provide time for investigation, resistance, qualification and - for goodness sake - some dignity. Slopstack™ Notes, meanwhile, is like a porn channel streaming constantly somewhere in the monastery.
I dislike ‘the discourse’ because it reeks of hyper-social primate behaviour and therefore low autonomy. If - like me - you feel compelled to join in and pay attention to ‘the discourse’ you are necessarily not paying attention elsewhere. What better evidence for low autonomy is that? Other people choosing that to which you invest your finite attention is the definition of non-autonomous being.
But it’s also a sign of egotism. This is because ‘the discourse’ operates not just as gossip but also represents the assumption that personal sentiment has public authority.
Something strikes us as cruel, false, offensive, stupid or morally urgent. That initial perception may be ‘correct’ in some way. But a platform like Slopstack™ Notes encourages a next step by legitimising the idiot belief that because this has struck me, I should now tell everyone about it this very moment.
Among my objections to moralistic people is that they seem unable to encounter the world without inserting themselves into it. An event occurs and they hurry forward to announce its meaning, identify the guilty and explain what decent people are required to say.
I see them doing this and suddenly it’s me stepping up to announce what their intervention means, diagnosing their moral vanity and explaining why thoughtful people should resist them.
The content differs, but the basic move is the same.
It doesn’t matter that I developed my own special niche as the person correcting the people who correct everyone else. I’m still occupying a place in the moral pageant while fooling myself that I am standing outside it, taking anthropological notes.
What unsettled me most about my sudden desperation to weigh into the Arday affair was recognising the underlying impulse, which was to convert my sensibility into public authority. I did not merely want to have a perception. I wanted the perception to count. I wanted other people to recognise that I had seen through the simplification. I wanted credit for identifying the overlooked distinctions and instead I was just infected by the collective fever.
The problem is not that everyone has something to say though. It’s something to do with the medium, rather than the message. It’s to do with the speed of a short post platform, which favours the hot take more than the thoughtful exploration. It’s to do with desire for feedback in real time and incentives to avoid disappearing into the void while others who are extremely good at provoking reaction get all the attention. I used to be good at that and came to see it for what it is; ego bloat and the assumption that your sensibilities have public authority, coupled with addiction to attention.
This is what I mean by Slopstack™ Notes. It is industrialised busybodying by people - like me - who mistake their internal representations of events for an obligation to correct the external record.
I’m not quite sure what all of this means for this blog, but I know what it means for the way I prefer to pay attention. Specifically that I prefer to explore the niche subjects over consuming and contributing to ‘the discourse’.
See you on Slopstack™ Notes.
I can fully relate to this one. The cigarette analogy is spot-on. Of course, smoking is cost-prohibitive. Not so with today's social media. Thanks and sorry for not saying thank you more!