Hi there, everybody. As you may have heard, Substack has a Nazi problem.
This has been on my mind for well over a year, and I’ve slowed down my posting to this platform while I’ve been investigating alternatives.
I’ve also been investigating alternatives to Meta products—especially Instagram—since Meta has problems of its own. (Specifically, it’s been empowering fascists, bigots, and disinformation peddlers, while making life harder for queers and trans people.)
One solution has been to start sending more mail, including a lot of little zines. Send me something, and you might get something in return. (Need my address? Reach out.)
But for those of you who still want words and pictures on a screen, I’m pleased to tell you that I’ve found a solution that looks viable. That solution comes in the form of the open source blogging platform ghost.org. I am in the process of migrating a lot of my material over to that platform, including the back issues of this newsletter and its subscriber list (that’s you!).
This transition shouldn’t require anything from you, though you may want to watch your spam filters for emails that come via that platform. This will hopefully be the last edition of the newsletter to be sent from Substack.
I should note that things may start to look a little different: I have plans for how I’ll be using Ghost—I’m planning to lasso a lot of separate strands of my ongoing work together into a writhing assembly. It might be beautiful or it might just be a mess. Thanks for sticking around to find out.
Another update will be coming in the next few days (hopefully from ghost if all goes well). Keep an eye out.
In the meantime, here’s a digital collage for you to look at, made on a plane back in March:
—JPB, writing from Chicago, IL in the week ending Wednesday, April 30