Notebook: A Notebook on Notes

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

Making in analog, living in digital

Our dear little newsletter platform, to speak of it affectionately if not entirely accurately, Substack, was in the news last week for having prodded Elon Musk into unusually flagrant retaliatory action. When Substack announced a new feature called Notes, in which you, as a subscriber to this newsletter, are entitled to participate (see substack.com/notes or the Substack Reader app), Twitter at intervals attached a warning label to all Substack links, made it impossible to like or share or pin tweets with a Substack link in them or tweets from Substack’s own account, made searches of the word “Substack” deliver only the word “newsletter,” made it impossible to embed tweets in the Substack platform. These measures were rolled back after a couple of days, but the Twitter master had showed his hand in a way Substack’s seventeen thousand writers and their non-Substack peers will not soon forget. Simultaneously, NPR and PBS withdrew from Twitter after being identied as “state-affiliated media,” and news organizations became obliged to pay for the “verification” marks that used to identify them as authentic.