Social Media and Substack Stepped Into the Building

I’ve been listening to the British drill rappers Pete and Bas. It has me thinking about what’s wrong with written social media and America’s market for ideas.

Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of septuagenarian British drill rappers Pete and Bas. It has me thinking about what’s wrong with written social media, and how that affects America’s market for ideas. It also has me thinking about the potential future of Substack.

If you haven’t heard of Pete and Bas, they’re two working-class drill rappers in their 70s from East London. They’ve been at it since 2017, back when Pete’s granddaughter used to play drill tracks in the car and Pete realized he not only liked it, but he might be good at it. He grabbed his buddy Basil, and they started writing songs and releasing them online. Their reputation has grown steadily since, with their recent song T-Pain bringing them a new height of viral notice.

At first, the duo got attention because of the novelty. Here were two old British guys who looked like they stepped out of a Guy Ritchie movie rapping about drugs and guns and the gangster life. It seemed absurd. Most people assumed it must be some kind of stunt. Clearly, these grandpas were actors lip syncing to two young guys in the studio. Then they kept releasing songs and getting better.

Not only is it no stunt, Pete and Bas are really good. In fact, these two guys in their 70s are better rappers than most young guys in the game.

Their best track I think is Stepped into the Building. Other bangers are Gangster Sh**, Sindu Sesh, Plugged in w/ Fumez the Engineer, Bish, Bash, Bosh, and Mr. Worldwide. Their newest tracks are Action Man and Slap the Stick, just released in advance of their first official album. Enjoy, and fall into the Pete and Bas rabbit hole. Caution, however, to sensitive ears because these old guys do go hard—expect the usual references to drugs, guns, unprintable words, and gangster behavior their genre suggests.

Over the last few months, the popularity of Pete and Bas exploded after they released T-Pain. The track went viral on TikTok and among YouTube reactors, who started going through their back catalogue and reacting to banger after banger. Then T-Pain himself wrote some bars and they released a new version with him in collaboration. Established names in the industry like Krizz Kaliko started to say nice things.

Many newbies to Pete and Bas still insist it must be a stunt. If it is, a lot of hearts will be broken. Not that it really matters, since great entertainment is great entertainment. However, they’ve been touring Europe for a while doing live shows, and everyone there says Pete and Bas are in fact the guys behind the mics. They’ve worked with people in the industry and given interviews. Pete and Bas insist they also write their own lyrics, with help from the grandkids for new slang. British rappers Nine and Dex, who may also be those grandchildren, produce the beats.

What I like about Pete and Bas, however, is that thirty years ago, in a world of music gatekeepers, nobody would have ever heard them but their grandchildren. What radio executive in 1994 would have put two seventy-something Brits on the air doing rap? What music producer would have given them a contract? Who at MTV would have played their stuff?

In the old world, nobody heard your music unless a handful of gatekeepers decided they should. There were a few record companies run by exploitative sharks. Radio was controlled by payola. MTV had a small rotation. You could tour and play bars and hope to build a following, but ultimately someone had to pick you out as special and decide to thrust you upon America. The reasons those gatekeepers chose someone over another didn’t even always have to do with talent, but checkboxes about look, style, and genre that often were pretty arbitrary.

Today we have not only Spotify and TikTok to spread music, but an entire YouTube reaction video community. These self-appointed curators and ushers build audiences among people who trust their taste. They sort through music and find interesting things, making them go viral as they ripple through the community. They play the role DJs and magazines like Rolling Stone and Pitchfork once did, but democratized.  Anyone can set up a reaction channel and build an audience, and anything can catch their fancy. People discover cool things, not because marketers want them to hear it but because they like it.

Artists who break through now have a tougher time monetizing their fame, since nobody is buying CDs and Spotify pays terribly. On the other hand, people who never would have had a chance regularly find audiences and the world is richer for it. For music, the online world of social media has been revolutionary in surfacing and promoting talent.

The collapse of gatekeepers has played a role in music similar to the window between the 1970s and 1990s in between the studio system’s collapse and the rise of corporate film production. That allowed talent like Scorsese, Lucas, Spike Lee, and Tarantino to have careers they never would have had, before the gates closed again. In between decades of managed mediocrity, the world got some amazing films it never would have seen, many of which will make the canon.

Why hasn’t social media done this for the written word?

There was a brief moment it seemed it might. This was the early 2000s during the brief reign of the blogosphere. Back then, the online world seemed a rich place of interesting websites run by bloggers and independent obsessives. There were writers no one anointed who gained national audiences just posting their ideas on their independent blogs. There were quirky websites that collected fascinating things to read and think about. You could wander about and find brilliant things through websites like Digg and StumbledUpon, or by following links or blogrolls.

A few people emerged from that era to become recognized names—Andrew Sullivan, Matt Yglesias, Josh Marshall, Ross Douthat, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. It turned out, however, they would be few and the moment in which they could emerge and flourish wouldn’t last for long. The gates they leaped through are closed again, replaced by the mass corporate internet of social media like Facebook and Twitter/X.

The new world of social media is a black hole for interesting ideas. Modern social media spreads writing and makes stars, but writing and stars of a particular kind. It prefers its writing quick and shallow—bold statements, funny memes, outrageous pronouncements, attention-grabbing tweets, and viral jokes. It makes stars not of thinkers and writers but personalities. It’s looking more for Elvira than Mark Twain and Edmund Burke.

This is because social media writing isn’t really writing but conversation in written form. It’s less magazine or journal than the world passing around notes in class. Real writing and ideas are longer and deeper. They require thought and care, both to write and to read. Reading and writing is about generating, clarifying, and spreading thoughts that linger, bubble up, and change your view of the world. These aren’t ephemeral notes of conversation but creations offered to consider.

Real writing and ideas don’t spread through conversation but recommendation and curation. Someone reads an essay, or a poem, or a book, and it resonates. They sit with it for a while, as it slowly worms into their mind. They grapple with it, and what it means. They include it in their favorites. Then they begin to spread it. They recommend it to friends. They spontaneously bring it up at dinner parties, gushing about it’s brilliance. They send it along with a note to a friend they think might need it.

The mid-century world before the Internet was built around discovering and spreading this kind of writing and ideas. That world was a decentralized cacophony. Armies of little curators found things and spread them. There was a multitude of magazines, big publishers, newsletters, and tiny presses. There was a middlebrow culture in which ordinary people sought out these things and shared them. People like Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal appeared as guests on late night talk shows. Writers like Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Susan Sontag wrote pieces in magazines that people read.

Then that world died.

We still have the fading detritus of that era, but it no longer plays the same role because it’s no longer a great, messy, decentralized mechanism for discovery. It’s a few holdout stodgy judgmental gatekeepers of dying institutions dreaming of influencing and controlling what people think through publications no one still reads. There aren’t enough of them remaining to create a culture of discovery, and even if there were they’re now under the management of the wrong people. Their doors aren’t guided by enthusiastic, curious curators, but guarded by scoldy sentinels. It’s a repeat of the studio system bigwigs that stifled film until the auteurs came along.

What’s crazy is the online world is at heart a written one, but it works for unearthing quality and talent for everything but writing.

The problem is our online infrastructure is built to maximize the wrong metric. It’s all built to maximize engagement instead of discovery. Engagement is a measurement of emotion, which is why it works for spreading music, video, and visual pictures like on Instagram. Real writing and ideas don’t generate engagement but thought and consideration. They spread not through likes or retweets or replies or mindless sharing, but through considered curation. They require mechanisms built around discovery.

To spread quality writing and ideas, you need mechanisms designed to help people find great things. You don’t prioritize things that touch your emotions but your mind. You don’t prioritize things that affect you in this moment, but over time. You spread things that are not popular but good, understanding that good becomes popular with time while popular quickly fades.

But why is social media obsessed over maximizing engagement, when it’s clearly the wrong metric? For one thing, social media companies, like all of Silicon Valley, are mostly run by engineers. Like a man with a hammer who thinks everything is a nail, engineers naturally think they’re running technology platforms instead of people platforms. Social media companies, however, are no longer technology companies any more than Amtrak and United Airlines are still technology companies. They’re companies using some technology in their real business of information, entertainment, education, ideas, and enlightenment. Obviously, it’s insane to put engineers and technologists in charge of running institutions responsible for shaping a nation’s social dynamics and people.

A second problem is Silicon Valley is still mentally stuck in the Google and Facebook era. Google and Facebook made a lot of people very rich by leveraging people’s information. A whole generation of technology folks learned the wrong lesson from this, that the money was in people’s data. It was, for a moment, and now it’s not. These companies today are like Ford executives in the 1980s insisting they knew what people wanted because it was long ago established by Mr. Ford.

Why should you care about any of this?

It’s about more than all of us wanting some better things to read. This matters because the failures of social media to curate and spread ideas plays a large role in how we ended up in this difficult era for America. A flourishing nation runs on its ideas. It requires good thinking and good writing. It needs to find its geniuses, especially where nobody expects to find them. It requires good writing, not just for entertainment, politics, or persuasion. It needs writing and ideas for problem solving, discovering challenges, understanding an ever-shifting world, reflecting on America, considering our place as humans, and grappling with nature of a good life. Without these things, a nation stagnates, fails, collapses, and eventually dies.

We killed our engines for reflecting, thinking, and discovering ideas. Social media broke it. What we replaced it with isn’t fit for purpose. This is not a business problem. It’s a national problem

What about Substack?

I genuinely love Substack. I haven’t been writing here that long, but I already think this is the best social media platform for discovery and ideas anyone has yet created. I find more interesting people and ideas here than anywhere else online. It’s a solid start. What Substack isn’t, however, is an engine for discovery.

Substack is built around hosting ideas, not finding them or spreading them. It’s great at promoting people who already have names and audiences, because that’s its financial incentive. People with big in-built audiences bring more subscriptions, which generate income in big easy piles. Substack isn’t great at finding the hidden gem no one knows. It has almost zero mechanisms for discovering or promoting writers. It doesn’t surface new ideas. It doesn’t rank or rate or promote things that aren’t yet popular but are good. It doesn’t seek to create new stars, preferring instead to harness the stars others created or who created themselves. It embraces the same conventions around maximizing engagement.

It isn’t built to find the next Pete and Bas.

We need a modern version of the mid-century world of letters—a messy ecosystem of competing voices, tastes, and ideas spreading brilliant things. We need a new national ecosystem for ideas. While Substack should be part of it, it’s going to take more than just one site. I worry, however, that nobody will build it for us. The need is obvious to us writers, but it’s far outside the social media Overton Window for the sorts of folks we rely on to build such things. It takes a writer, thinker, philosopher, activist, scientist, or politician to understand what we actually need to do—prioritize discovery and people over engagement, data, and elegant platforms. Technology should serve the writer, the thinker, the reader, and the idea, and not the other way around.

We should talk about that. Maybe some of us can build it.

I’ll be traveling for the week of Thanksgiving so won’t be publishing here over the next week. I look forward to seeing you all again after we stuff ourselves with turkey and get back to work.

What do you think of modern social media? Join the conversation in the comments.