Here is a story about the public sphere. Hundreds of years ago, a class of newly wealthy people used a burgeoning print culture to bolster their anti-monarchical claims to a larger role in public affairs. The capitalism that generated their wealth immiserated many more, who formed a variety of proletarianized counter-publics. Not seeing their interests represented in the bourgeois public sphere, these people attacked its protocols of reason and decorum. In the twentieth century, mass media turned angry workers into pacified consumers of entertainment and packaged news. The new millennium’s internet, despite the appearance of multidirectional communication, is more pernicious still: an engine for targeted manipulation and illiberal emotionalism. The plebeian counter-public is now little more than a confederacy of haters making social media all but unusable, and deliberative democracy is a fading dream.

Enter Substack. According to its founders, Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi, the core issue with social media companies stems from the fact that they “make their money from advertising, which means they compete to dominate your attention.” These platforms thrive on conflict and sensation and are conduits to thoughtless, addictive use patterns. Substack is supposedly different: an open platform welcoming a broad range of views. Instead of hosting advertising, Substack takes ten percent of the subscription revenue of each individual newsletter. Money flows from what McKenzie calls “meaningful connection — not shallow attention.”

Some of Substack’s marquee accounts have been keen to announce their renegade role in reviving the public sphere outside the mainstream media. Take Yascha Mounk’s “Persuasion,” which calls itself a “magazine and community dedicated to defending liberal values and democracy wherever they are threatened,” or Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, which started on Substack under the name “Common Sense,” after Thomas Paine’s pamphlet. Mounk has written that he understands Substack as an escape from the pressure of “the herd,” where writers are “empowered to produce writing that is more forthright, more innovative, and more idiosyncratic than what they could have published in traditional outlets.” The Free Press makes a similar case: according to its About page, writers for the publication are encouraged to think for themselves and need not cleave to whatever “ideological narrative” the “legacy press” sees fit to impose. “Persuasion” has over 120,000 subscribers; by October 2021, ten months after its founding, “Common Sense” had over one hundred thousand (which grew to 1.5 million by the time The Free Press was acquired by Paramount in 2025). 

Mounk and Weiss are beneficiaries of extensive mainstream media connections, which helped them develop Substack empires that command armies of contributors. Mounk is a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins and a former contributing writer at The Atlantic (which cut ties with him after a rape allegation) who has also penned pieces for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Foreign Affairs. His widely reviewed books on identity politics and democracy are published by Penguin; Farrar, Straus and Giroux; and Harvard University Press. Weiss was likewise already famous as a New York Times defector when she came to Substack, and The Free Press now operates under the same umbrella as CBS News, where Weiss is editor-in-chief. In fact, many of the most popular writers on Substack already had sizable reputations outside the platform. Some of them were lured to Substack with large advances, which the company can afford thanks to funding from investors including Marc Andreessen’s and Ben Horowitz’s a16z, which led the company’s Series A and Series B funding rounds. 

Like public spheres of the past, Substack has created its own proletarianized counter-public: under-employed writers. Substack is keen to emphasize that it is not a publisher, but a platform that is not legally or editorially responsible for the writing on its site. Its aim is to facilitate a marketplace of ideas, where users decide which writers deserve backing: a strategic stance for a company that thrives on the widest possible uptake, that takes only minimal responsibility for content moderation, and that does not want to have a real employment relation with the people whose creative work it hosts. Substack describes its newsletters as solid “independent businesses” in their own right. The counter-public responds: we are gig workers excluded from most legacy media work and cobbling together some income however we can.

The platform advises them to at once optimize new subscriptions and continue to reward existing readers for their loyalty. This means a consistent publishing schedule, sustained engagement with other Substackers, and cross-posting to the places Substack has hastened to differentiate itself from: X, Bluesky, Instagram. The writer’s desire for “connection,” let alone healthy, rational discourse, must be combined with a quest for attention that requires a high rate of production to satisfy customers who are paying for services. Substack wants to be a conduit to a meaningful life spent in thoughtful conversation — but don’t forget to prioritize your value proposition. The counter-public responds: this is a lot of work to add to the writing we want to be doing.

You have no other choice is not a sexy sales pitch. But in the aftermath of the February layoffs of close to half the staff of The Washington Post, it is the reason several of the newly unemployed, including Ron Charles, Washington Post book critic for twenty years, gave for turning to Substack. “Born out of emergency,” music journalist Chris Richards wrote in his inaugural Substack post on February 4. He’d been working at The Washington Post since 2009. 

The counter-public’s members know it will be no mean feat, and will involve considerable digital strategizing, to achieve “meaningful connection.” It’s not faith that Substack is reviving deliberative democracy that is compelling them to try, nor the notion that the platform is providing refuge from the polarizing tendencies of other social media. It is the dire reality of intellectual work today, from which Substack profits and which Substack cannot pretend to remedy.