Phthursday Musings: Substack: Tic-Tac-Meta

At different points in time over the last few years, people have asked me - okay, really, my dad has asked me - where I get news.

There are a lot of ways such a question can be answered. I could say, from my phone. I could say, from certain daily email newsletters.

But one way I might answer the question is by saying, I get a lot of my news from meta-news, by which I mean, I’m not reading a typical newspaper report or watching local television news, but instead I’m encountering pieces where someone is commenting about something that happened, and through that I learn that something happened, or maybe more precisely, I learn more details than would have come off of a mere headline for a news story, but those details involve some mixture of commentary and richer context.

For a whole lot of reasons, our relationship to news has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. But one of the things that doesn’t tend to get talked about so much is how, for many of us, news was often deeply lacking. It often failed to provide context, and even if it nominally strove for objectivity, it was often implicitly biased in terms of what did and didn’t get attention. (I’m distinguishing between news and reporting as concepts.)

Many of you know that last week Substack has rolled out a feature called Notes. This being META-SPIEL, well, here we go: a Substack writing about Substack as an inside out look at the evolving Internet, until I get to the point where I just wander off into something sillier.

Notes became available for all writers and readers just this week. If you haven’t read about it, here’s Substack explaining it.

As soon as Notes was announced, a certain petulant billionaire essentially blocked Substack from the social media site he owns. Those of us who were relatively early adopters to Substack, and who have multiple subscriptions, have found ourselves sort of on the cutting edge of the latest turmoil. And, yeah, I have a take on that.

But first, here is the Tic-Tac-Dough dragon:

Now, I subscribe to multiple Substacks, and mentioned them back in December:

Two of my subscriptions are to Jonathan Katz’s The Racket and Molly Knight’s The Long Game. On Tuesday, checking in on Substack Notes, I found Molly posing a question to Jonathan. Jonathan’s realm is somewhere in the nexus of politics, history, and current events. Molly’s realm is primarily baseball, but also a little about mental health. These aren’t substantially overlapping newsletters in terms of content, but as it so happens… they overlap here at META-SPIEL!

Look: I loathe Twitter. To me, Twitter is like the community forum, where everybody can interact with everybody else, just if the community forum was a gigantic rest area bathroom on I-55. If you just need to pee and flee, not a big deal. But woe be if you need to upgrade, or if, you know, you have to use the women’s restroom, where more than a trough is required. (Feel free to extend this metaphor however you see fit.)

Nevertheless, I still use Twitter, albeit minimally, because often there’s information I’m looking for which I can only seem to find there, or because it’s the only place I can, ahem, bump into someone else using the same facilities. Some people who I follow, Twitter is still the only place to find what they’re up to.

Well, maybe that’s no longer the case. Because as it turns out, all of these Substack writers, who I have in turn followed on Twitter, can just logically migrate over to Substack Notes, where I suddenly find a lot of interesting content, including things like intelligent people whose work I read interacting with one another. And it occurs to me that between Substack Notes and Mastodon, it might eliminate 85% of my reason to just idly peruse Twitter. If just two particular musicians I follow on Twitter were to just move over to Mastodon, that number might go up to 95%.

So I understand why Elon Musk blew a gasket over Substack Notes.

And look. I know Elon Musk is rich and all. But he didn’t win eight cars on Tic-Tac-Dough like U.S. Navy officer Thom McKee, now did he?

For a long time I’ve had this… not theory really, but maybe more of a framework about discourse. The idea is that there are three levels of interpersonal discourse.

The first level is where you find idle banter, but also where you find work or school talk. It’s superficial. Even if it gets intense, the content is superficial to the interlocutors.

The third level is the deeply personal. The content is anything but superficial. This is people talking to one another about serious matters.

There’s a second level though, the one which is hardest to come by for most people. This is a more free-flowing place where conversation might go anywhere, might involve the incredibly superficial, might involve the deeply personal, might veer off into some kind of abstraction… when I first conceived of this framework decades ago, I didn’t really have a word for this middle layer, but I do now. That word is meta.

The meta is where idle, critical, and abstract thinking meet. People who operate in this realm, I believe, are particular threats to dominant paradigms where you are only supposed to understand things in terms of black and white, good and bad, up and down… and, of course, boy and girl. You want to operate outside the paradigm? Well, then, you are literally illegal.

When I was in high school, during homecoming week, there would be competition between the four grades. Each grade had its own corridor to decorate, and daily there would be a spirit contest based around a theme. Maybe one day would be Orange and Black Day for our school colors; if you were dressed appropriately, then at lunch you’d go up and get your name checked off, and whichever class had the highest percentage of participation would win.

One day I specifically remember was Switch Day. The notional idea of Switch Day, literally, was that boys would wear dresses, and girls would… well, even as of the mid ‘90s, I’m not really sure what this meant for girls, because they were usually dressed in jeans and t-shirts just like boys.

Let’s be super super clear here though: in my all-white, conservative, rural high school, as a matter of showing school spirit, we were supposed to dress in drag.

Now, this wasn’t actually an act of subversion. Quite the contrary: In practice, Switch Day was an act which reinforced the dominant gender paradigm, by subtly reiterating how girls were supposed to behave. I don’t imagine that most of us consciously understood it that way at the time, but in retrospect, of course that’s what it was.

Personally, I thought Switch Day was stupid, so I decided I was going to subvert it my own way. I went through a couple of drawers in the basement, and I went and asked my uncle for a couple of things, and I went and found a needle and thread, and…

I showed up to school with light switches sewed to my shirt.

Oooooooooh, was the Student Council advisor mad over that one.

Switch Day, I imagine, is a thing of the past at most schools. In “woke” places, I would expect Switch Day to be met with protests over how it reinforces gender norms.

And yet I actually wouldn’t be surprised to find that Switch Day is more common in more erstwhile “conservative” places, while in “woke” places.

I’ll bet if we went looking, we’d find a school in Tennessee which still had a Switch Day as recently as this past fall.

That “second layer” of conversation, the meta layer, is in my thinking closely related to meta-news. We’re beyond the “just the facts, ma’am” layer of shared information (which is like first layer conversation), but we’re also not really all the way to the third layer, which in this metaphor might be most aptly understood as propaganda. What I’m getting at here is a spectrum from the driest imaginable rote reporting on one side to a side where the facts aren’t even relevant and it’s all about trying to advance an argument.

In the past, I think what passed for a “middle layer” of news for most people was something like page A7 of the newspaper where the op-eds could be found, or for the people really into it, watching Meet the Press or something like that. You might get viewpoints, you might get context, but just think of how necessarily limited that was.

In the Internet age, I think the first layer of rote reporting has taken quite a beating, and unfortunately the third layer where propaganda lives is flourishing. But the second layer is flourishing as well. Substack has been a key component of that; though to be more precise, I think perhaps it’s been the nexus of Substack and what’s surrounded it, perhaps most particularly the usage overlap between Substack and Twitter.

Facebook super-charged huge societal changes in how the first layer of interpersonal interaction occurs. It also had an outsized impact on news interaction; because of the way Facebook and Google have monopolized advertising, and also because of the way Facebook algorithms have buried broad realms of content while elevating others, Facebook has become a platform best suited for a combination of idle banter, propaganda, and, well, more propaganda, in the form of incessant advertising.

Twitter is different. Twitter, much more than Facebook, is the commons. You can find all of the layers of communication and news there. But it’s also just such an awful place to be. And under its new ownership, it has gotten far worse, tilting even more so into a different form of propaganda. And yet it’s seemed like it’s been destined to persist, because it is that commons.

And so again, I understand why Elon Musk flipped out over Substack Notes. For people like me, and no doubt many of you as well, if the content you’ve been most interested in is Substack fare in the first place… well, now potentially we can move into a sphere where we get a lot of what we want and it doesn’t smell like a goddamn rest area.

Speaking of “news” and rest areas, last week I mentioned having written the Rockford Jr. Journal. At one point along with whatever baseball stats I was concocting, in writing about a particular trip, I wrote the headline DAD SLEEPS IN 3 REST AREAS. I always get a kick out of stumbling upon that one.

While hanging out on Substack Notes in the early days I saw this foolishness:

Max is apparently the new forthcoming Warner Bros. streaming service, some combination of HBO and Discovery.

Seeing the above, I promptly replied:

I DO NOT WANT MY STREAMING SERVICE TO BE LIKE A MID-’80s FRENCH IMPORT WHICH I CAN ONLY ACQUIRE IF I WIN IT ON TIC-TAC-DOUGH.

Speaking of Tic-Tac-Dough, here is a 3:14 long version of the theme song:

and, also, well, there is this:

Also may you please be informed here that Wink Martindale is very much still alive at the age of 89, which means he’s still 10 years younger than Bob Barker, thank you very much.

Now please tell me, what newspaper was going to give you information like that?

and, well, shit, now I’m just going to share a bunch of Renault commercials:

THE ONE TO WATCH

THE ONE TO WATCH

THE ONE TO WATCH

”the lovable Le Car”

my aunt had a Le Car, by the way

This is a 2:08 long… commercial? Where would such a thing have ever been shown? Did they actually license this wonderful song?

When I was 6ish I recorded a lot of songs that I made up, one of which was called “Get Me an Encore”. Did I mean… that I wanted European design from an affordable point of view?

what … the … hell …

oooh that’s some wicked good mileage right there

Get me an Encore!

ok, that’s enough of that

For the record, I have never met anyone named Wink, and certainly not Wink Martindale…

But I have, on multiple occasions, stopped at Wink’s Mart Mart in Mansfield, Illinois:

too far, they said, too far…