TLDR: Please share IBT. You will be rewarded!
At the end of February, the legendary sportswriter Peter King announced his retirement. I grew up reading King’s masterful long-form articles in Sports Illustrated, and his unique blend of narrative story telling and genuinely insightful coverage of the behemoth that is the National Football League inspired me and countless others to push the boundaries of what is possible with the written word.
While King is leaving the industry on his own terms, thousands of other writers have not been so lucky. Media, especially journalistic media, has been in crisis mode for at least a decade. In the last six months alone, outlets ranging from Vox to Highsnobiety to the Los Angeles Times have had layoffs, while famous publications like Vice and even Sports Illustrated appear to have shut down entirely.
Much of the blame for the slow death of media can be laid at the feet of Silicon Valley, especially Meta and Alphabet. An estimated $300 billion in ad buys, representing 50% of global spending, passes through the two tech giants. Social media sites like Facebook and Instagram profit off headlines while disincentivizing outbound clicks, depriving publications of ad revenue, while Alphabet continues to nudge users to stay within Google Search rather than clicking through to results, offering features like snippets and automated summaries of common queries.
And then there are the Large Language Models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, built on the back of trillions of words written by humans and scraped free of charge, often without the knowledge or consent of their original authors. The next step in the so-called AI revolution: Replace human writers entirely.
In other words, it is a horrible time to decide to become a writer. By coincidence, that is the exact decision I made in late 2020!
Three-and-a-half years and 90 Substack posts later, I am only more convinced that writing is my preferred form of expression. Running my own little publication has allowed me the freedom to explore topics as diverse as Central New York’s skiing monopoly, the simple beauty of foregoing jarred pasta sauce in favor of homemade, and the futility of Congressional hearings on the very tech companies that have destroyed the field I so love.
But now I am feeling stuck. I had hoped that after three years spent sharpening my skills with the written word, memorizing when to use adjectival hyphens, and learning how to turn an interview into a story, I would be able to land paid pitches in real Big J publications.
This has not happened. I still struggle to land a rejection notice from an editor, let alone an actual placement. When I combine the inertia of my writing career with the rapid decline of Twitter, the one digital network that provided me and other extremely early-stage writers a modicum of discovery potential, I feel as though I am fighting just to tread water. Subscriber growth to IBT has stagnated, and I have started to worry that if I can’t figure out how to build this publication further, my goals will remain unattainable forever.
Reader, this is where you come in. I need you to share IBT. As the major social networks fracture and the internet collapses inward upon itself, the one constant has been that when a reader shares a post, new people sign up. Whether sharing a post to your Instagram story, texting a link to one of my stories to your cousin, or simply forwarding these emails to someone else who might enjoy them, every single share helps. The best part? I’m launching a few initiatives to make sharing IBT worth your time.
Substack added a referral program that enables publications to reward readers for bringing in new subscribers. I have activated the referral program for IBT, and there is now a leaderboard tracking the best promoters. Each tier of referrals (three, five, and ten new signups) comes with one, three, and 12 months of IBT premium (more on this in a moment) respectively. Additionally, five referrals nets a free IBT sticker of your choice, while ten referrals earns you the right to select a topic for me to write about in a future post.
And yes, there is now the ability to pay for a premium version of IBT. I have held off on pushing this much, and I will continue to do so, but I believe in the maxim that you have to take yourself seriously if you want others to do the same, so if I want to be a professional writer one day, I have to enable the ability to be paid for my work.
To start, paid IBT subscribers will have access to my entire library, as posts older than three months will now go behind a paywall. A premium subscription also comes with a free IBT sticker. Lastly, I will soon be launching my much-delayed journey through the 100 greatest movies of all-time, and the plan is to limit this project to paying subscribers.
I know. It’s weird for someone to ask so directly for you to consider paying for their work, especially someone you likely know personally. And frankly, I would much prefer that 20 of you take advantage of the new referral program than if two of you converted to paid subscribers. But I love to write, and I want to be able to call myself a writer. Growing IBT is the best avenue I see for gaining access to future writing opportunities.
I would hate to waste an entire post on navel-gazing and whining, so keep reading for updates to some previous IBT posts.
🎵 It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year 🎵
College basketball is my favorite sport, so it only follows that March Madness is my favorite holiday. Even as a college student at a football-dominated school, I was obsessed with our men’s and women’s basketball programs, having fonder memories of the women’s basketball title I experienced on campus than the embarrassing College Football Playoff appearance — despite working for the football program.
With the men’s tournament tipping off for real on Thursday, I have brought back the Ben & Schurmdog Bracket Pool for the Golden Crayon. Now in its tenth year — and now offering a trophy for the winner — the pool is open to all. You can find full rules and an invite link here. I hope you’ll join the battle to win the first-ever golden crayon!
Congress Wants to Ban TikTok... Again
Nearly one year ago, when the calls to ban TikTok gained traction for the first time since President Biden entered the White House, I wrote that the real solution to the problems presented by TikTok was obvious: Congress should write and pass a data privacy law, much like those in place in the European Union and California.
Instead, more than 300 members of the House of Representatives, few if any of whom demonstrated even a basic understanding of how the platform works, voted to either force ByteDance to sell TikTok or otherwise face a ban.
It remains unclear if the Senate will take up the bill, but with President Biden confirming he would sign the bill into law, the app has never been closer to a full-scale ban in the United States. This is, in a word, stupid.
The basic arguments against TikTok are usually some variation of the following:
ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, is a Chinese company, and China is apparently our new Big Bad in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union
American social networks, like Facebook and YouTube, are banned in China, so the U.S. should do the same
Anti-Chinese content is supposedly censored on TikTok, while content censored on U.S. social networks, such as support for Palestineans, supposedly reaches a wide audience on the platform
TikTokkers are accused of making the U.S. economy seem worse than it really is, discouraging young people
There are other arguments raised by proponents of the TikTok ban — most notably, the as-yet-unproven claim that the Chinese government is using TikTok to spy on Americans — but the points laid out above are the ones I hear most often. Let’s run through them quickly:
It is true that ByteDance is a Chinese company, albeit in a more convoluted way than one might expect
The Chinese government does a lot of terrible things that the United States should not do, and censorship is not a good place to start
I encourage you to read the Human Rights Watch report detailing anti-Palestine censorship on Meta, but if that’s not enough to make it clear to you that social media censorship is not a uniquely TikTok problem, can I interest you in the time Elon Musk threatened to sue the Anti-Defamation League because the ADL accused X of permitting anti semitic content under Musk?
Economic inequality has surged around the world in the 21st century, which helps explain why some feel things are worse than ever while others claim the economy has fully recovered from the pandemic
Banning TikTok would not solve any of those problems. It would simply move the United States closer to China in terms of the heavy-handedness of its censorship. The nation that gave the world the First Amendment banning the most prolific social network of our time would be darkly poetic.
The ban would also be a major coup for U.S. social networks. In just a few years, TikTok reached as many active users in the U.S. as Facebook and has far surpassed Snapchat and X. A ban would kill this momentum, while a forced sale would likely send TikTok down the path to irrelevance in the vein of Tumblr or MySpace, both of which were sold to non-tech companies and have since floundered.
Steve Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury under Donald Trump, is also reportedly interested in a bid for TikTok. I’m sure censorship wouldn’t be a problem under a former Trump official!
At its core, the TikTok ban is a knee-jerk reaction to the reality that the United States no longer has 100% control over the world’s largest English-language digital platforms. As we learned back in 2013, Western intelligence agencies work directly with major telecommunications firms to monitor the world’s communication, an intrusion that is presumably impossible with a Chinese-owned social network like TikTok. Former intelligence operatives can be found across the leadership teams of megacorps like Meta and Alphabet.
And the lack of a national right to be forgotten privacy law means that the Chinese government — or any other bad actor — can simply purchase our data from hundreds of data broker firms operating on U.S. soil, rendering Biden’s recent executive order toothless.
I’m tired of saying it, but we need data privacy laws, not censorship.
The Obituary Pirates Are Going Live
After the death of my mother last October, I stumbled down a disturbing rabbit hole into the world of obituary piracy. As best as I could tell, spammers posting dozens of times per day to YouTube capitalize on search traffic for recent obituaries to earn ad revenue through YouTube’s Partner Program.
I didn’t think it was possible, but at the end of February, 404 Media reported on a gross evolution of the trend. The spammers have become full-on scammers, duplicating funeral information to create fake livestreams, primarily on Facebook, to attempt to steal financial details from grieving family and friends.
There’s no happy kicker here. This story made me feel sick to my stomach. Next time you have to attend a funeral, keep a close eye out on search results to ensure you’re on a legitimate site, and check in with elderly family members to be sure they aren’t cheated by these losers.
Things I Enjoyed This Week
Death and Faxes | erbillion films (YouTube)
The gap-year road trip that healed an Ivy League hoops star | The Athletic
The man trying to make condoms sexy | The Guardian (completely SFW!)
Coronado High | The Atavist Magazine
The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries | Nine Lives
I know this post wasn’t exactly the most fun to read. I appreciate your patience, and thank you as always for reading. Enjoy some hoops this week!