Paying my dues
In the changing landscape of media
We are living in a fast-changing landscape of knowledge, media and entertainment. As I was looking for the most appropriate image for this post, I realized how my generation turned into dinosaurs in just a few decades. I could not find a picture to illustrate the history of the tremendous changes of the past 40 years.
I still have books, CDs and records on my shelves. I grew up in a household without a telephone. Sometimes I had to walk miles in driving snow to find a public phone booth…… OK, enough of the reminiscing, that is not what this post is about. It’s about accounting.
The old accounting
When I came to Canada, I got a phone with an average bill of ~$35.-/month. My wife, who is much closer to her family than I am to mine, spent about $300.- a month on long distance calls to talk to her parents.
I was buying about a book or two a month, one to three records, then the same in CDs later.
I had hundreds of audio cassettes and a sizeable VHS library that later turned into DVDs and Blue-ray disks. I had newspaper and magazine subscriptions. I was subscribing to three science and technology monthlies. I went to the movies 2-3 times a month, to theatres about four to five times a year. The total cost of my communication, knowledge and entertainment needs amounted to about 10% of my disposable income.
Times have changed.
The new accounting
Compared to the 10% of my income I spent 30 years ago, I spent very little until recently.
Here are the numbers, approximately, per month:
Internet access $100, Streaming services (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Crave, Audible, Spotify)~$70
I had a three years subscription to the Blaze that ran out a year ago but I am not going to renew it because I did not watch it enough to justify it. I still buy books and occasionally CDs, and I still go to the movies a few times a year. I just do a lot more on-line and digital.
Between the WEB sources, the streaming services and various subscriptions I have far more access to everything than I ever dreamed of, yet spend less than 5% of my income on it.
What changed and why
A few months before Covid, I asked a new acquaintance about his information universe. The answer was what I expected, the Canadian left-liberal package: CBC and CNN for the news, The Globe and Mail, The Sunday Times, Times Magazine, Macleans’ The New Yorker, etc. Nothing outside the mainstream.
I promised him that I will offer my list. I never got to it because it is changing so much and because it was and is so all over the place.
In the course of the past 10 years, I cancelled my subscriptions to The Ecommunist, The Atlantic and all broadsheet papers. I read the Ecommunist in digital for a while longer, then cancelled that as well.
I digitized all my music and stopped buying CDs and DVDs. Five years ago, I cut my cable as well. No CNN, no Fox and I have not seen broadcast news in at least ten years.
Occasionally I see segments on Youtube.
Until Covid happened, I was going to the MET Opera presentations at Cineplex. For the prior few years I was already seriously irritated by the woke casting, but when Anna Netrebko was forced out for refusing to publicly condemn Vladimir Putin, I gave up on that too.
Some of the changes were going on for the past thirty years, but the Covid restrictions turbo-charged them.
The most important change was in my focus. The realization that I am no longer interested in institutions and publications, only in individual creators (including, of course, individual editors and aggregators like
Lew Rockwell or
At any time, I want to know what X, Y and Z is thinking about a particular issue or anything in general at this moment.
I replaced authoritative sources with authentic ones. Advocates of mainstream and authoritative sources would argue that only established, institutional sources can be truly trustworthy.
Well, I am not a particularly trusting person. Institutions betrayed me too many times to deserve my trust. I make up my mind about every source and even the ones I trust I do with reservations. I understand the limitations.
My media/news/knowledge landscape today
The most interesting part of this process was how the scope of my sources changed.
I have sources from all over the world. Seldom, but I read the India Times, The Jerusalem Post, Haretz and even The Guardian. I watch episodes of WION news, TFI Global, Al Jazira and RT television. I watch Deutsche Welle documentaries. I would have never thought of looking up Putin’s speeches, but since the war started, I watched all the important ones. Also, speeches and press conferences of Lavrov.
What is fascinating about this is how these information sources are in a flux. They come and go. My interest is shifting. At some point (with the Blaze subscription) I watched Glenn Beck and occasionally Mark Levin. At some point I was watching Ben Shapiro regularly and still do occasionally. When I had a subscription to the National Review, I always started it on the last page, with the Mark Steyn article.
I have three of his books, but not the ones that are just a collection of his articles. At some point he was my number one source for the event of the day. Not so much any more. I find it too self referential and predictable. Like I do with many other sources.
I developed a symbiosis between on-line lectures, printed and audio books. Most of the books I read in the past decade came to my attention in an interview or lecture online. Finding digital copies or the audiobook versions is easy and convenient. I use the online sources as I did the bookstores, browsing through what I may be interested in. If I like the book, I buy a hard copy as well. I try to be fair to creators.
This is a screenshot of my personal homepage that I put together well over ten years ago. It is overdue for a major overhaul, but time to time, I still use these links. Â
I only pick up Canadian papers when I am in a waiting room.
I do not read newspapers
I still look at the headlines on MSN news or Flipboard news occasionally, but look for details on the news elsewhere.
I read scientific papers, but not full publications.
I read papers from institutions like Cato, the Heritage Foundation, the Fraser Institute, the Mises Institute, etc. etc
I watch documentaries, lectures, presentations, debates and interviews (especially the long-form ones) on Youtube, Rumble and Spotify.
The point is that with the incredible level of access to all this knowledge and information I can afford to follow my interests with an unprecedented degree of freedom.
Paying my dues
Why am I telling you all this? Because with freedom comes responsibility. Because I realized that I am taking more than what I am paying for. Because I understand that this new business model is the future.
The model is not fully set yet, but it is taking shape and it has a direction.
In a comment to my last post,
For the longest time, Lew Rockwell’s daily newsletter was my main source of news. It was, actually, the source that led me to Substack as he is linking to several Substack authors in his newsletter. I am grossly overdue in supporting him. (I just rectified it).
And this is the point, finally, of this post: I set myself a budget and I will spend it every year.
(Just to put my money to where my mouth is).
These are, so far, my paid subscriptions on Substack:
I appreciate them all for many different reasons.
Still, the list will quite possibly be different next year.
I am thinking about some more subscriptions. Let me indulge you with my thinking:
I like very much the clear, direct and articulate writing of
.
I greatly respect the fact that she does not paywall any of her content. But she is a socialist. My personal baggage is holding me back from crossing the line to support. But she is definitely the sort of leftist I can imagine having reasonable debates with. We have lots of common ground.From the other side, I like
. We have a similar background, and he is someone, who truly gets the idea. With him, our conversations would be only about the minutia. I don’t know how much he could tell me that I don’t already know.I like
and his humor, but I have two serious reservations: the amount of his writing is overwhelming and his paid subscription drive is a little too pushy for my taste.Just a day ago, I came across some really good writing from
.
I just need more before I make a commitment.
…and I am sure that I will find more worthy not only to my attention but my support as well.
I would love to know how did YOUR media world changed in the past few decades
and what are YOUR considerations for following and possibly supporting someone.
Let me know in the comments.
I appreciate the way you explained your thoughtful curation of a healthy information diet. Substack is the best place to build your own newspaper. The horseshoe theory is real - Caitlin is also my favorite lefty/socialist writer because she has anti-war principles.
My paywalled posts contain travel guides, recipes, and podcasts that could tell you a few things you don't already know ;)
Thanks for the shout-out bro.
I see basically three eras in my own personal media/news consumption. I first developed sincere political interests for the first time in the context of the Iraq war, when I was a student in the US. I read a lot of left-leaning anti-war publications then, and some left-trending blogs. Most of what I read was quasi-mainstream but I found it at least minimally engaging.
Sometime after the financial crisis in 2008, I noticed an increasing uniformity in the content of the mainstream press that caused me to lose almost all interest in it. I also became indifferent to politics for a while. I was writing a dissertation/trying to get a job/trying to get my first book published, so I didn't have much spare time or attention anyway.
I returned to the scene for Brexit and Trump – a movement and a candidate I at first regarded with hostility, simply because everybody around me did, and which I increasingly saw as positive developments the more I read about them. I was appalled to see what a circus the press had become, and also amazed at how the German press merely recycled headlines from the Anglosphere at a few days' delay. When the wokery really hit American universities around the same time, I started reading more English blogosphere material on the phenomenon.
The third era would really be Corona and the aftermath. Late in 2020, after a viral twitter thread, I found myself with a small audience of my own, and I started reading all the legacy media I'd spent years neglecting, because people kept asking me about it and I also realised that understanding 'the narrative' itself is 70% of everything. Now that I do this professionally, I force myself through the same five or six tedious major newspapers everyday, as well as a small collection of other Substackers and blogs.