Substack is vlogging

A case for reformatting YouTube trends & my WIEIAD

---

One of my favorite things to read on Substack are diaristic personal essays that take the structure of listicles. Listicles themselves are from another place and time (BuzzFeed circa 2015), now finding a less corporatized (maybe…) and more culturally serious home in 2020s nouveau blog culture. It’s this convergence—of personality-driven blogging with a democratization of critical writing—that I find particularly interesting; between personal diaries, aesthetically curated recipes, and intellectualized cultural commentary, Substack is less a revival of 2010s blogging than it is a reinterpretation of 2010s vlogging. I wasn’t really around for early music and Mommy Blogging, but I am exceptionally well-versed in the explosion of influencer culture on YouTube between 2010 and 2019. The explosion of TikTok in 2020 took the wind out of vloggers’ sails, reverting online video conventions from 45-minute background noise back to the short-form, hyper-focused form of early YouTube. But if early TikTok was one-liner-centric, even “short”-form content has since taken a turn back toward the long winded lifestyle report. In MMF’s words, for example, The Costco Guys and Rizzler videos are “characterized by time chasms and simulated sleep paralysis.”

I think this turn is partially motivated by the explosion of Substack as another influencer platform; what weird cultural productions come from an ecosystem of ephemeral, 1-minute videos and long, dense essay-writing? Even Substack is directly ushering TikTokers into blogging, framing Substack as a place to post anything.¹ It’s uncomfortable to describe professional writers and recipe-developers as “influencers,” but monetizing self-published content by curating any sort of public persona (even if partially anonymized) is, I think, definitionally “influencing.”² While that might be problematic in certain ways, I don’t mean to derogatorily call writing lowbrow; I love vlogs as much as I love intellectually rigorous criticism. Substack just allows people to formally and generically Frankenstein those approaches to art or cultural commentary, which is fun and exciting. When Max Read posts a “roundup” of songs and books he’s been consuming, or Fran Hoepfner a list of things she watched and read that week, framed by, say, her reflections on contracting mononucleosis, I am excited for them to guide me through recommendations: for people I admire to influence me to buy, read, listen to, or watch something.

Another approach to the Substack diary is MMF’s Quick Bites, wherein he lists some things he ate the week prior. Much of this is also recommendations-oriented—Trolli Gummi Pops are good; plant based ice cream shop Frankie & Jo’s is better—but it also assumes a curiosity in the elusive individual, my close personal friend “Michael Mann Facts.”³ In fact, all Substack diaries assume an overly intimate curiosity in someone’s personal life (how is Fran Hoepfner’s mononucleosis faring?). This is the interest that started and continues to sustain influencer culture; influencers straddle the line between celebrity and normal person, striking an attainably aspirational appeal to people who want to improve their own sense of self. I want to listen to music like Max Read when I grow up, and I want to know as much about food as Michael Mann Facts (ijbol–I’m serious, though). Litigating Substack’s cultural role in the intellectual public sphere is over complicated: most of us are vloggers of the written word.

In my own paywalled approach to Substack, I usually freewrite “Weekly Updates” that come out as listicle-ifed personal essays. For example, once I invented “Super Soda” before reviewing Oh, Mary! and debuting my AI art (read this for free–how could you resist that?). This is a good example of why, despite strongly believing in my ability to charismatically use my palm to make a camera autofocus on a beauty product (normal thing to believe), I never tried to be a video-based influencer; my disposition falls a bit more to the “crazy moron who needs a handler” side of the influencer divide between celebrity and normal person.

jessica doesn’t know the trick!! (vogue)

My point is that we can and should very easily transport old school YouTube trends to Substack, because we already are. One of my favorite subgenres of moving images to emerge in the last 20 years, for example, is “What I Eat in A Day” (WIEIAD) videos. Plenty of people have complained about how these are an Internet-abiding generation’s answer to diet culture—watching someone eat yogurt with the explicit or implicit desire to emulate their eating of said yogurt does not a healthy relationship to food make—but that’s exactly why I love them. What a weird, secretive way to celebrate and normalize certain foods and bodies; why do you have to watch someone make eggs and pretend it’s not because they’re really skinny and you’re hoping the eggs will make you really skinny? Morbid!

Though, I also think they are anthropologically interesting. Without finding evidence of this (not getting paid enough—subscribe for $5 and maybe I’ll do more Google searches), I’m sure Joan Crawford was telling women’s magazines what she ate to stay “slim” (let’s bring that vocab) as much as she was revealing her diet to satiate broader celebrity fetishization. Sure, it’s all part of a dialectically determined world of violence against women and consumerism, yadda yadda, but I also want to know what Grimes eats, and no one on Earth wants to be anything at all like Grimes.

Food is personal and knowing what people do with it and how they think about it is fun for all. I’m going to do a WIEIAD right here, right now, and I’m going to take it really seriously and give you a ton of detail (but I won’t include pictures—that’s not really my job). Maybe next week, or in a couple weeks, my paid post will be a “Draw my Life” (it won’t) or “Recreating Outfits from Pinterest” (maybe). It’s my Substack and I want it to be YouTube.