Exploring the New Substack Tool that Ticked off Elon - Notes

Let me know what you think - pro or con.

Substack’s clever artwork for its Notes launch

I’m test driving Substack’s new Notes feature - yes, the micro-posting option (you don’t get it as an email) that freaked out Elon Musk so much a few days ago that he instituted some bizarr-o barriers to posting Substack links on the bird platform. As I tweeted earlier today, some of those walls seem to have crumbled.

Substack leaders

Hamish McKenzie

Chris Best

and

Jairaj Sethi

explained the basics of this new platform here.

So if you don’t like Twitter but would like short-form input from me that doesn’t end up in your in box, sign up!

Here’s a bit of my Notes test drive:

In my first Notes post, I said this: “it’ll take years for any competitor to approach the scale and dynamics built by countless engineers (and lawyers, etc.) before Elon Musk bought the bird. But I’m always willing to test paths to effective engagement in pursuit of a cooler relationship between people, their planet and each other.”

My second post using this feature encouraged followers (that would be you) to read the essay the paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill contributed to a new collection edited by Rebecca Solnit and Thelma Young Lutunatabua, with a wonderfully clear title: Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story From Despair to Possibility.

Gill’s essay was published as a standalone piece by Sierra Magazine.

In it she recalls how her research, including the trip to Siberia that almost killed her, is essentially an effort to reveal extinctions and new biological flourishings in the long chronicle of planetary time. She writes:

For those of us born into individualistic cultures, the vastness of deep time can be just as terrifying as it is comforting; it provokes our deep-seated fear that we are insignificant and powerless, even as it assures us in our darkest moments that things will not always be as they are now. But just as an ocean is a multitude of drops, eternity is an amalgam of moments: the minutes, hours, and days in which we find ourselves bound together, and to the planet, with a charge to be good ancestors. In five billion years—nearly as long as the Earth has existed—our sun will explode, regardless of whether we are very good or very bad at tending to the planets it illuminates. This fact does not lessen our responsibility to fill that time with as much regard for life as we can, in the liminal space between Earth’s creation and destruction. We have always known this, deep down; why else would we plant trees that we know will never shade us?

I plan to have the editors and Jacquelyn and another contributor or two on a Sustain What webcast later this month. It’d build nicely on this marvelous pre-Substack webcast and post with Annalee Newitz and Elizabeth Kolbert, the acclaimed authors of recent books charting humanity's bumpy and wondrous urban history and the future we’re building with technologies that raise as many questions as answers.

If you’ve read this far, let me know what you think of all of this. I need to avoid big opportunity cost in spending time on communication tools that don’t spread or deepen progress.

Your guidance is invaluable!

A different kind of note

So here’s a parting TWEET that partly features notes of the Post-It kind. But wait! It looks like Substack is doing a bit of reverse sniping at Musk and Twitter by not auto-embedding tweets?

https://twitter.com/Revkin/status/1612302553038864387

Insert, 4/24, 4:15 pm - I had missed an April 7 Verge post by Mitchell Clark and Jay Peters that included a section on the loss of tweet-embedding capacity on Substack. There’s a chance this is related to changes on the Twitter end, not at Substack. I haven’t seen updates since, have you? - End insert

The tweet was from a visit I made to our 24/7 cheesecake automat - yes in downeast Maine. There’s an honesty box for cash. Imagine. The Post-Its are thank yous!