Today marks the five year anniversary of The Future, Now and Then. This calls for a navel-gazing post, and maybe a slice of cake.
Photo by Will Echols on Unsplash
The title, “The Future, Now and Then,” was initially a bit of self-effacing humor. I figured I would be writing about tech futurism (the future, now), my WIRED research (the future, then), and contemporary political commentary (now). And I expected I’d only be writing occasionally (now and then).
The writing was indeed pretty occasional during that first year. 2021-2022 was also a low point for me as a writer. I had outlines for a dozen or so essays, all of them potential building blocks for the book. I was making progress on none of them. It just didn’t seem like I could get anything on the page. In July 2022, I got real mad at myself about a couple missed deadlines, and decided that the new rule was that I would write something every week.
That… worked. I’ve written 200+ posts since then. The Future, Now and Then has over 10,000 readers. The book is coming out in January. It’s the best thing I’ve ever written. I’m certain it wouldn’t be nearly as good if I hadn’t had this platform to work through the ideas in public first. I think I’m slowly starting to get the hang of this stuff.
A few stray observations:
Five years in, I still cannot decide if this publication is a blog or a newsletter. The genre boundaries are fuzzy, and it usually doesn’t matter. Mostly I think of it as a blog-with-an-email-reader-list. But I’ve written a lot of drafts over the years that I would’ve published to a blog, because they didn’t merit clogging peoples’ inboxes. The closest analogue is a weekly opinion column. Once a week, I vent whatever research observations or public commentary have been rattling around my head. Sometimes that’s a book review or a big-picture essay, sometimes it’s a hot take or a rant.
The fuzzy genre boundaries have exacerbated my oddball-academic status. Some of my academic research colleagues subscribe to this blog/newsletter. I show up in their inbox every week, and a subset of my posts are topical for their interests. They think I’m fantastically productive. But the vast majority of my field don’t read this column and many of them… kind of figure I’ve stopped publishing entirely? (Can’t blame them. My Google Scholar footprint is atrocious.)
An interesting byproduct is, when I attend conferences and workshops, people either really know my work or they really don't. Those who don't are a little suspicious. ("Oh, you have a newsletter? That's... nice.”) Which, y'know, fair. It feels like a smaller version of the bretbug thing. I learned pretty quickly that the Bret Stephens episode had made me Twitter-famous, which is very much not the same thing as internet-famous or actual-famous. People who are extremely online will still drop references. Everyone else doesn't know what I'm referring to, and is a little unsure why they should care. (Which, again, fair! It is extremely niche and mostly pointless.)
I don’t much bother with peer reviewed articles anymore. Maybe I should, I honestly can’t decide. For the types of intellectual contribution I want to make, I find the peer review process to be too slow and cumbersome to bother. I have deeply mixed feelings about that — I think peer review is good, and important, and mostly not-for-me. It would probably be better if I set aside the time to turn some of my longer-form essays into journal submissions. (Could “On Political Communication as a Mission Science” have been a journal article? Yeah, I think so. Would it have been worth adding ~2,000 words to the text, spending six months on minor revisions, and waiting a year+ for it to be published? Eh, I’m not so sure.)
Geez, there are a lot of you. Ten thousand readers is a much larger audience than I ever would have planned for. It is very cool and more than a little humbling. (So, y’know, thanks! Have some cake.)
And/but… 2021 was basically Peak Substack. Substack was the future of journalism, and the social media ecosystem was primed for sharing these newsletter-essays. That time has passed.
Which brings me to the Substack-Beehiiv transition, and some more substantive points about the state of online publishing right now. The chart below is my subscriber growth over the lifetime of the publication on Substack. Loosely speaking, the publication added ~500 readers in its first, sporadic year (June 2021-’22), 3,600 readers in its second year (June ‘22-’23), 3,000 readers in its third year (June ‘23-’24), 3,500 in its fourth year (June ‘24-’25), and only 700 readers in its fifth year (June ‘25-26). The growth rate slowed around March ‘25. Either this publication hit a ceiling, or Substack’s discovery engine stopped working so well for free publications like mine.
The declining growth rate was one factor in my move to beehiiv. Substack has invested heavily in discovery features that help to juice subscriber growth within its newsletter ecosystem. I knew moving to an alternate platform would decrease the reach of my writing, but also noted that the list growth was already trending down.
So far, after three months on Beehiiv, I’ve found that people just aren’t signing up anymore. Every time I would publish a Substack essay, around 20 people would unsubscribe and (for the most part) more than 20 people would replace them. At Beehiiv, around 20 people unsubscribe every time I post, and 2-6 people replace them. My dormant Substack now has almost 500 more subscribers than my active Beehiiv.
I’m glad I moved off Substack. It was the right move, and the right time. And everything else about Beehiiv has gone smoothly. Open rates are steady. I’m no longer routinely embarrassed by the platform I publish on. Also, importantly, several dozen of you have stepped up as paying subscribers, which has been enough to cover the publishing costs. (For you, corner-pieces of cake!)
But oof, yeah, slowly leaking readership is a bummer.
There are a few potential explanations. It’s possible that I have basically reached the ceiling for this sort of writing. Ten thousand people is a lot! I write in a particular, obscure niche. Also, the old Substack probably appears in search above the newer beehiiv. Discoverability might improve over time.
My hunch is that this is part of a broader trend: the open web is dying. Chatbots and AI search are replacing it, and they absolutely suck for independent publications. I suspect that’s the main story here. (also Bluesky, I love you, never change, but you really don’t drive new email signups.)
A few years ago, Max Read wrote a great piece about newsletter/blog audience growth: “Matt Yglesias and the secret of blogging.”
“the key lesson, the thing I would impart to any aspiring bloggers, content creators, or newsletter proprietors, is that the cornerstone of internet success is not intelligence or novelty or outrageousness or even speed, but regularity. There are all kinds of things you can do to develop and retain an audience -- break news, loudly talk about your own independence, make your Twitter avatar a photo of a cute girl -- but the single most important thing you can do is post regularly and never stop.
I’ve kept Read’s rule of thumb in mind for years now. It’s simple and comforting: Write what you want to write. Write regularly. Readers don’t punish you for straying from your lane. The basic reason I have a lot of online readers now is that I have spent a lot of years doing a lot of online writing, and that’s how the online writing ecosystem functions. Don’t sweat the numbers; just keep writing.
I find it interesting and noteworthy that, at least for The Future, Now and Then, this is no longer true. Around 20 people will unsubscribe after receiving this post. 2-3 will subscribe.
And look, this is all low-stakes. I don’t write this blog/newsletter in order to build an audience — I write it because I’m a complete sicko who derives joy from the act of writing — but it does set a mood that I have to work to combat. It has the feel of a standup comic, performing while a small stream of people head for the exits. And it leaves me pondering the broader decline of the open web.
Looking forward, I have some ambitions for the months and years ahead. I’m going to keep writing (obviously). I’m planning an essay series reflecting on my 2016 book, Analytic Activism, 10 years later. I’m also planning to write on AI and activism. And I have a series of essays in mind about the past, present, and future of the climate/environmental movement.
This fall, I’ll switch into book-hype mode. There are some stray bits from the Wired project that didn’t make it into the book, so I’ll publish those as blog posts here. I’ll also keep writing cranky book reviews, and keep howling into the void as the whole country falls apart around me.
Basically the way I see it, now that I’ve written my way through one book, is that I’ll keep using this platform to hash out the main ideas for the next one.
Thanks, as always, for reading. If nothing else, I can say with certainty that writing this publication has been good for me.
Here’s to another five years. Have some cake.