We're Leaving Substack for Beehiiv

We’re Switching to Beehiiv!

Now that we’ve entered the dead zone of the NFL offseason, Wide Left has the ability to make some changes we’ve been planning for some time now. The biggest such change is moving our publication from Substack to Beehiiv.

In the short term, this should mean no changes for you, the reader. You’ll continue to receive emails with updated analysis and news, formatted in a slightly different way because of the change in platform.

In the long term, we hope to add new features to the site to provide a bit more for subscribers. Is that why we made the change? In part, but not entirely.

To help support us in this switch, consider subscribing at a discounted rate!

We don’t always have the luxury of choosing what systems we need to interact with in order to thrive. That’s true in business as well as in everyday life; we might make a decision to avoid Amazon but still find ourselves interacting with an exploitative supply chain for our food. One might go to a locally owned clinic but still rely on behemoth-sized insurance companies and global pharmaceuticals in order to acquire necessary medicine.

Indeed, the very infrastructure of the internet we rely on requires the use of these mega corporations whose values don’t align with mine; “Tier 1” networks are generally the networks that build the backbone of the internet. Owners of this infrastructure don’t charge transit fees to each other but do charge carriage fees for other networks to use their pipes.

They are unavoidable, and it’s the case that I need to use AT&T, Lumen, Verizon or other such networks at some point in the chain if I want to run an internet business. Or exist at all. These networks lobby governments around the world in order to maintain their monopolies, fund far-right media operations, cooperate with illegal government surveillance regimes and lobby to destroy a fair, neutral internet.

The leftist canard that “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is not to suggest that one shouldn’t try to make ethical choices whenever possible, but rather that one is constrained and that even the most ethical consumption decisions have ethical baggage; we need to focus on systems rather than individual choices when we want to forge ethical pathways forward.

This is why I’m not (generally) upset when other creators take on sponsors or make content decisions that I avoid; we all deal with different constraints and have different audiences that define our decision pathway. On top of that, many of us have teams or employees to watch out for and cannot just make decisions that impact only ourselves.

But, sometimes, we get the choice to measurably improve our impact on the world. Here, we get to leave Substack for Beehiiv.

So, why would leaving Substack constitute that kind of ethical choice we rarely get to make? For different people, there may be different answers. There are a few reasons. I’ve always been uncomfortable with Substack’s ownership structure, with a16z — also known as Andreessen Horowitz — likely the largest institutional investor that owns somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of Substack.

But before we get into Andreessen Horowitz, we can talk a little bit about how the platform itself operates.

Many people have decided to leave Substack because they’ve consistently platformed — here meaning both “provided a platform” to, in a literal sense, as well as the more colloquial sense of “boosting” such content — Nazis.

Something I often encounter when I see people discuss “Nazis” in contemporary politics is eyerolling and an assumption that commentators are exaggerating or conflating more acceptable political worldviews with an almost cartoonish avatar of evil. Godwin’s Law.

But, that’s not really the case here. Self-described Nazis are on the platform. People who call themselves white nationalists, white supremacists, race realists and National Socialists are on the platform, making money for themselves and Andreessen Horowitz by denying the Holocaust.

It’s more than just hosting the platform; Substack had actually sent a push notification to unsubscribed users for a publication that describes itself as “National Socialist weekly newsletter featuring opinions and news important to the National Socialist and White Nationalist Community.”

In response to this, Substack apologized for sending that push notification but not for hosting or profiting from that content. They argued for “free speech absolutism,” an odd stance for a corporation to take regarding its own platform rather than one that applies to, say, governments.

In response, they said, “But some people do hold those and other extreme views. Given that, we don’t think that censorship (including through demonetising publications) makes the problem go away – in fact, it makes it worse."

This is the dream of institutional liberals and maximalist libertarians: that open and free dialogue reduces extremist impulses. The evidence suggests overwhelmingly that this is not the case. Deplatforming reduces the reach and spread of extremist ideology. While some research suggests that migration to alternate platforms increases radicalization of some individual banned users, even as they do not find an audience to spread their violent ideologies, the net effect on banned users is moderation.

So, in short, no. This is a flimsy excuse to continue making money by profiting off of extremists. This year, Andrew Tate joined the platform and became a bestseller.

But there are other reasons to be concerned about Substack’s affiliation with right-wing extremism.

Marc Andreessen, one of the two billionaires who owns Andreessen Horowitz, recently went viral for claiming that introspection is a modern invention that holds people back. Aside from the fact that introspection is the basis of all modern philosophy in every cultural tradition dating back thousands of years, it’s also a shockingly worrying advocacy for someone who controls the platform I publish from.

That, along with what he himself calls “AI Accelerationism,” is enough for me to feel uncomfortable — but neither of these is enough substance for me to spend time talking about him specifically in the context of leaving the platform he partially owns.

Instead, it’s how his “techno-optimism” serves eugenics and a deeply conservative politics. He published a manifesto on this worldview and in it, he draws on a number of futurist philosophers and writers throughout history. He includes a citation list at the bottom of his manifesto, and in it, he encourages people to read (among others) Italian fascist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Again, this isn’t an exaggeration; Marinetti was a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto in 1919. In his Manifesto of Futurism, he says “We will glorify war — the only true hygiene of the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, the beautiful Ideas which kill, and the scorn of woman.”

He also adds “We will destroy museums, libraries and fight against moralism, feminism and all utilitarian cowardice.”

His Futurist Political Party merged with Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascist Party in 1919 and continued to develop party philosophy through the 1920s.

His work is echoed in Andreessen’s screed, where he argues that social responsibility is an ill that needs to be wiped out for society to progress:

Throughout the manifesto, Andreessen continues to make unproven arguments, some bordering on the absurd — like the claim that people act only for “love,” “money,” or “force,” a claim wholly unsupported by any studies of human behavior.

Worryingly, Andreessen vaguely gestures at his eugenic tendencies in the piece when he talks about “Becoming Technological Supermen,” but we’ve seen him substantiate these beliefs more explicitly in other fora, like in a podcast where he talks about IQ engineering and eugenics in response to the “population crisis.”

He also, including in his manifesto, heartily recommends accelerationist Nick Land — a contributor to Curtis Yarvin’s “Dark Enlightenment” philosophy, one that dispenses with notions like democracy and consent of the governed for a monarchical libertarian future. It has been characterized accurately as techno-feudalism and neo-Fascism.

This isn’t a game of trying to connect dots from one thinker to another; aside from the fact that Andreessen directly recommends Land’s work on this technofeudalism, he also recommends Yarvin’s work as part of his futurist philosophy.

Sometimes, we can’t help but put money in the pockets of people who will turn around to use it to make our lives worse. But this time, Wide Left gets to make the choice to avoid this particular pitfall in this specific way.

 Beehiiv is not wholly independent and has received investment from venture capital firms — no one is free from this particular sin in the modern economy — but, as far as I can tell, ownership is diffuse enough among private equity and venture capital firms that the impact is relatively minimal.

The concern with platforms owned in part by a16z (Andreessen) or the Founders Fund (Peter Thiel) is that they funnel money directly into political projects designed to rob us of our rights. Beehiiv’s investor list, which constitutes far smaller ownership shares than Andreessen Horowitz has in Substack, is not ideologically pure; Lightspeed also invests in the defense industry, and so does NEA.

But it is a big move away from some of the most serious concerns I’ve had with Substack. Not only is significantly less subscriber money going to these firms (more on that below), but the impact each dollar has with regard to my primary ideological concerns is minuscule by comparison.

There are other reasons to move on from Substack, too. Speaking purely as a writer evaluating the platform's structure, it is fairly good for people starting out; Substack charges a 10% fee for every paid subscriber — easily absorbable early on — and has powerful network effects that connect like-minded writers and their readers across populations. It’s great for growth in a number of ways.

It’s also a fairly turnkey solution; one can get started writing immediately without worrying about needing the technical knowledge and design instincts to put together a functioning, easy-to-use website for writers and readers.

Beehiiv approached Wide Left a while ago about moving our newsletter to their platform. Even before they approached us, we had discussions about moving our publication to Beehiiv or another platform for both technical and ethical reasons.

It wasn’t a good time for that, however, and we still needed to engage with economic reality.

Substack’s biggest draw for newsletter writers is their recommendation engine; when people sign up for our newsletter, they receive recommendations to subscribe to others based on the publications I specifically recommend and similar newsletters in the network based on what other subscribers have signed up for.

These network effects are significant for a newsletter like ours; a sizable portion of our readership comes from recommendations through other Substack newsletters. One must always be aware of where one’s data comes from, but Substack’s internal analytics indicate that about 25 percent of our paying subscribers came through their network.

In short, I need to eat.

That’s primarily the answer to why we wouldn’t have done that before, despite Substack’s well-known issues. Even now, Wide Left runs on debt.

If you’d like to help us as we switch platforms, we would love your support!

But while Substack’s fee system is fine for smaller publications, it seemingly punishes growth. Beehiiv’s fee structure will save the publication thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.

There are some feature-side benefits to switching as well.

Substack is great for those who don’t want to be involved with the technical side of running a website, but those with a bit more technical knowledge or willingness to learn will find themselves held back. The element that makes it user-friendly can also limit it.

We want to offer more features and give our readers much more bang for their buck. We have a few ideas in mind but need to work on them before even promising that we can offer them in any real way. We couldn’t do that on Substack’s platform and the hope is that we can find a way to do that on Beehiiv.

We’ve also mentioned before that being a paid newsletter doesn’t preclude us from taking on ads. Substack doesn’t really have an internal ad network to use, while Beehiiv does. We’re in full control of those ads and we can avoid advertising for companies or newsletters that violate our values — when approached, it’s been almost entirely for prediction markets and gambling sites.

So, you may see some inserted ads going forward. But not from Kalshi.

There will be some technical hiccups as we transition all the content over to the new platform. If you encounter one, please let us know.

Despite these up-front benefits, there is a long-term risk. We hope to build the kind of site that readers want to return to again and again to pay off that risk.

Thanks for following along.