The Seneca Blog is Growing

Can Substack beat Censorship?

My old, trusted, “Olivetti 22” typewriter that I used to write my Master’s thesis in the 1970s. A little obsolete, but it has the advantage that what you write on it cannot be spied upon by the powers that be. Will we have to get back to that way of communication? Maybe.

After about six months of publication on Substack, the “Seneca Effect” blog is doing well. You see below the trend of the contacts. There are oscillations, but it is clearly growing. Among the recent posts, the most successful has been “The Philosophy of Collapse,” with some 1500 views. A little earlier, my post on Javier Milei, president of Argentina, reached 2000 contacts.

These are reasonably good achievements for a blog that deals with world matters from a philosophical view. In the golden days of the blog, when the search engines did not sabotage it, a good post could get more than 3000 views. But after feeling Google’s boot, the best it could do on Google’s “Blogger” platform was less than half of what it does now.

So, I think that Substack is doing something good. The philosophy of Substack is not to rely so much on search engines but mostly on private emails. I can see that with my posts, which receive about three times more contacts from direct emails than from search engines. It means that the blog is not so much a “publication” (in the sense that it is directed to the public) but more of an internal affair among subscribers. That gives less space to the accusation of spreading dangerous disinformation among unaware people. Not that it removes it completely and, right now, Substack is under attack. We’ll see how well it can resist against the forces of censorship. Hoping for the best, preparing for the worst.

At the time of the Soviet Union, people would do something similar to what Substack is doing, but in a more artisanal manner. They used the “samizdat,” самиздат, homemade printed publications that were exchanged among friends at the risk of being jailed. We may have to get more into this kind of mindset as our world becomes more and more similar to the old Soviet Union. A similarity already noted by Dmitri Orlov several years ago. Honestly, I didn’t imagine our life would get there so fast, but that is how things stand. I don’t think we will have to go back to cyclostyle printing, as in the old days, but who knows? I discovered that you can still buy mechanical typewriters, and they have the advantage that they can’t be spied upon. Just in case, I still have the one I used to write my master's thesis. An Olivetti model 22, made, probably, in the early 1970s. Maybe it will turn out to be useful again!

For the time being, we can keep going on Substack. Then, we’ll see. For the time being, I am concentrating on writing one post every week (or a little more frequently, if I can), trying to do my best. I must say that it is becoming a job after that I retired from active teaching at my university. So, after having noted that several people offered a financial contribution to my work, I decided to open the blog to paid subscriptions, with many thanks to those who feel they can help in the dissemination of thoughts and ideas worth disseminating.

For the time being, I think that the posts published here will remain open to everyone. But I may soon decide to publish some rather more “sensitive” material behind the paywall with the idea that not everyone might appreciate it.

And we keep going. Opening at random the book of Seneca’s work, I found this quote in one of the Letters to Licilius:

A primo mundi ortu usque in hoc tempus perduxit nos ex splendidis sordidisque alternata series. Non facit nobilem atrium plenum fumosus imaginibus: nemo in nostram gloriam vixit nec quod ante nos fuit, nostrum est: animum facit nobilem, cui ex quacumque condicione supra fortunam licet surgere (p 546)

Which I can translate as

From the first origin of the world, a series of alternate splendid and sordid events took us to our times. What makes us noble is not an entrance full of blackened pictures: nobody lived for our present glory, nor anything that was before us is ours. It is the soul that makes us noble since, in any condition, it can rise above misfortune.

A bit magniloquent but nice. I always say that Seneca was the first blogger in history!

Another post of mine on the same subject: censorship and Substack