The LiveJournal Moment
Or, why everyone should start a Substack
Last week's conversation with David Barnett got me sifting through the digital remains of LiveJournal, a proto-social network based around people writing longform blog posts. What a bizarre concept that seems now.
What I write here is not that dissimilar to what I used to write there, so it got me thinking about the LiveJournal era (2002-2007?) and what life was like before Facebook and the smartphone.
Whilst idly clicking around people's profiles, I came across London Tubewalkers, a community of psychogeographers who walked programmatically from tube stop to tube stop. The project was originally set up by a guy called Woody, who one day deleted his account and disappeared from the internet.
In his introduction to Tubewalking, Woody wrote:
In lieu of anything better coming along I have decided to become a cross between neil_scott1 and Iain Sinclair and walk the length and breadth of the Underground system. Not all in an afternoon you understand, but bit by bit, walking from station to station, I should imagine it will take years.
I didn’t know why I was mentioned, until I vaguely recalled writing about my arbitrary walks around London, tracing the routes of pylons or Hawksmoor Churches. It felt like an honour to have inspired this community and brought back memories of all the curious people on LiveJournal.
The internet was a smaller place and, in my rose-tinted view, everyone had something to say and took care to write entries worth reading. We influenced each other in our walled gardens, protected from geopolitical monsters outside.
LiveJournal had features we expect from a social network, with the ability to follow people, tag them, and comment on each other's stuff. There were privacy settings to hide your blog, but it was generally a prelapsarian world where people would leave their online doors unlocked.
My favourite moment in David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010) is where Mark Zuckerberg is writing on his LiveJournal. Not for the emotional heft or the character development, but because it preserves a glimpse of the web before Facebook channelled the energy and fun of LiveJournal into its addictive machine for selling advertising.
There was no algorithm on LiveJournal and barely any adverts. When you went to see your friends' updates you saw everything that they posted in chronological order. There was social anxiety around being 'defriended',2 but it was understood that you only followed people you thought were engaging.3
Reading someone else's writing can be a beautiful, intimate experience; it is also, as David Perell says, "the best way to solve intellectual loneliness because sharing ideas in public turns you into a magnet for like-minded people."
On Facebook, you generally only add people you've met in real life as 'friends'. On LiveJournal, it was the opposite: you got to know people online and then would later meet up in the pub. Because it was the pre-Facebook most people were pseudonymous4 so there was very little credentialism: you were judged by your writing, not your job title or degree.
LiveJournal was chronically mismanaged, being sold again and again until it ended up as a Russian social network (and, thus, will probably be banned in the coming days). Even so, there was an inevitability to its fading away.
Facebook was like crack to LiveJournal’s cocaine: it was a much more intense hit of social anxiety. On Facebook you had the thrill of being potentially ‘tagged’ in a photo on a drunken night out, whereas LiveJournal didn’t even have the ability to upload photos, and so is now full of watermarked or broken externally hosted images.
The move to Substack
Substack has become controversial for disrupting the news industry by allowing people to pay writers directly, rather subscribing to an entire newspaper. Prominent ex-bloggers like Glenn Greenwald, Matt Yglesias, and Andrew Sullivan were being constrained by the ideological politics of the newsroom and had to go their own way.
For me, though, Substack feels less a threat to journalism and more a return to a more thoughtful, democratic era of blogging previously seen on LiveJournal and elsewhere in the noughties. It is a way, as Fired at the Dials says, to escape the "incessant hamster-wheel of 24-hour content that colonises our every waking moment."
In a world of infinite content, choosing what to consume can be difficult. Fortunately, Substack makes no real demands on you and you only receive what you sign up for. An email arrives in your inbox and you choose whether to read it or not. I subscribe to over 120 different 'stacks, but only read a few of them religiously (Sam Atis, Andrew Key, and Ben Henley spring to mind).
I like blogs that have a unique voice and a particular perspective. I am not interested in whether someone is famous or writes about what is newsworthy. I don't want to read about the same subject week-in, week-out, from someone trying to ‘own’ a niche in order to satisfy the demands of the search engine gods. I like it when people write about whatever they are curious about.
Zach Leatherman had a good thread the other day pointing out that learning something without sharing what you've learned is selfish, especially if you have previously learned from someone else’s sharing.
There's something utopian about a world in which everyone writes: it says that everyone has an interesting story to tell, which I personally believe is true. A friend mentioned that he accompanied his Dad to a model railway exhibition the other day and, even in the couple of text messages he sent about it, it sounded like a bizarre and fascinating world. I would love to read his reflections on the experience, being reminded of Scott Alexander's hilarious report on his trip to a psychiatrist conference.
Of course, writing and reading are zero-sum activities: there are only so many hours in the day. But I would rather read twenty blog posts than doomscrolling through thousands of tweets. So, if you're reading this now, and haven't already, I urge you to set up a blog—it takes about 3 minutes on Substack—and start writing. It is liberating to publish something that you have been thinking about and seems to create space for new thoughts.
My unimaginative ‘handle’.
According to Alex Stamos on Jon Favreau's podcast, Facebook's algorithm prevents you seeing things that might make you unfriend someone. Growth metrics are everything.
Although many LJers had friending policies: “Note to anyone who wants to add me to his/her Friends List: I am of the opinion that (a) no one should need any permission to add anyone to their Friends List, and (b) no one should ask to be added to anyone’s Friends List.”
Though obviously not me … see footnote no.1.
Another great article & another world which is totally foreign to me!