From OneZero:
OneZero is partnering with the Big Technology Podcast from Alex Kantrowitz to bring readers exclusive access to interview transcripts — edited for length and clarity — with notable figures in and around the tech industry.
To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast.
In January, I wrote a story for OneZero about the content moderation war in store for smaller social platforms like Clubhouse, Spotify, and Substack. As part of my reporting, I reached out to Glenn Greenwald, a strident voice against moderation who left The Intercept for Substack last year. While I’m not in lockstep with Greenwald ideologically, I wanted to hear, and present, his thoughts at length.
This week’s Big Technology Podcast features my full conversation with Greenwald, where we discuss his move to Substack, the line between content moderation and censorship, and Joe Rogan.
Alex Kantrowitz: First of all, how’s the move to Substack going?
Glenn Greenwald: It’s great. I didn’t have much time to investigate how it worked or what it was prior to leaving The Intercept because I decided I was going to leave maybe 24 hours or so prior to actually posting my first article on Substack. I started a series of very frenetic calls, and one of the things I wanted to figure out is what is it that Substack actually provides that you can’t provide on your own? Why can’t you just go and start your own site and charge the same amounts for subscriptions? Then, instead of giving Substack their percentage, keeping it yourself.
Everybody with whom I spoke emphasized that the services that [Substack] provides — not just customer service if things go wrong with the billing or with people signing in — but also just the entire platform itself, how user-friendly it is, how well it works. That alone makes it worthwhile.
Something I didn’t really discuss but I’ve come to appreciate a lot is I think [that] Substack is becoming an important symbol of certain values in journalism and political discourse that I value a lot, and I’m happy to be a part of it. I think that’s also helping to give legitimacy to the platform and to those people who are writing on it. I’ve been there about a month, and overall, I’m extremely happy.
The user-friendly part of Substack is definitely part of what drew me to it. It made sending out emails easy, so that was nice.
I’ve worked, obviously, with a lot of different systems, including various iterations of The Intercept’s, with Salon’s, with The Guardian’s. The one at Substack is not just easiest to use but also the most advanced, most sophisticated in terms of layout and the options it gives you.
I want to just speak to you for a moment about the set of values that you mentioned that Substack puts forth or now represents. I’ve always been of the opinion that it’s just a platform and we shouldn’t read too much into the fact that there are certain writers that have left their publications and made ideological breaks from them. There’s a whole variety of different writers there. You have people writing about climate change, people writing about women’s sports, and you have me. I didn’t do an ideological break from BuzzFeed; I just wanted to be independent. Am I looking at it wrong?
It depends. I think you’re correct that viewing it through the prism of a few high-profile writers who have gone there after breaking with their news outlets over relatively similar disputes is a mistake. It’s too limiting and narrowing for what Substack represents. But I think the way you described it in your question in terms of what it represents for you is an ideology — the idea of independence as a writer and as a journalist to be able to produce content free of corporate structures and the dogma that ends up being embedded in it.
Whether or not there’s a repressive atmosphere that emerges at a particular media outlet, writing within a corporate structure is a different way of writing and doing journalism than being on your own and doing it independently, speaking in your own voice for better or for worse.
There is an ideology inherent to Substack which isn’t necessarily the narrowly defined one that often is attributed to it, of a place that refugees from corporate outlets go when woke ideology prevents them from speaking freely. That’s obviously true for a few people, but probably not the majority. I think, more so, it’s a place that’s designed to enable people to write freely and independently. I do see [that as] increasingly as an ideology [in] a journalistic climate where control and structure and homogeneity are becoming more predominant....
....MUCH MORE
Previously:
"Ye olde Substack: publishing’s hot new business model has 17th-century origins""Announcing the next Substack Fellowship for Independent Writers"
"The Substackerati"
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