This is the end

My final post on Substack

Hi friends,

This will be my final post on Substack.

For those unaware, it’s become apparently that Substack is hosting, promoting, and, indeed, monetizing material written by Nazis and white supremacists. I will not be associated with that.

Platformer, one of Substack’s marquee publications, discusses their decision to do the same in more detail, if you’d care to learn more. But I think “not wanting to be networked with Nazis” is sufficient justification all on its own.

I believe in free speech. It’s the right of this platform to allow its users to publish that content, no matter how repulsive I find it to be. Likewise, it is my right to take my content elsewhere. Exit, stage left.

I brought Franksly Speaking to Substack just on a year ago, although I didn’t make my first post until April. I have really enjoyed the tools presented here. The mixture of longform blogging and an email distribution, with a small side of social media. I think Substack is a terrific concept and I put far more effort into writing here than I ever expected I would.

I initially planned to post once a month—which is a lot more frequently that the quarterly messages I was sending with my old mailing list provider—but I enjoyed this so much that I soon found myself posting weekly. The surge in interest in generative AI, where my day job as a data scientist meets my avocation as a fiction writer—provided plenty of inspiration and I put in hours and hours into trying to puncture the hype around the technology and examine its ramifications for the creative arts. The response has been gratifying, and I thank you all for your attention and your kind words.

Writing here also led me to rediscover my enjoyment of drawing with traditional media, which has been a tremendous boon for me.

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So what happens next?

Well, to start with, I’m taking my email newsletter back to my old host, EmailOctopus. you don’t have to do anything—if you’re subscribed here I will move you to the old provider. You can of course unsubscribe at any time. Apologies in advance if the are any hiccups with this as I port the newsletters over.

As I mentioned, a mailing list isn’t a great place for longform blogging in the same way that Substack is. I’m considering my options there but I think that my writing on publishing and creative topics will go back to my personal website and I’ll start writing about AI and data on Medium, or somewhere like it.

I’ll let you know once I have migrated the mailing list. In the meantime, you can let me know what material you prefer to receive in your email, or whether you’d just prefer links to the the material where it lives in its new home.

For the meantime I’m going to leave my Substack content up, but I do not wish to be associated with extremist material and I will scrub my presence from Substack sooner or later.

Here’s to new beginnings in old places.

Franksly yours,

— Jason