Hi friends,

I finished reading Careless People1 this week, and let’s just say that my mind has been very much in a depressing whirlpool thinking about digital platforms and how they’re used.

Every week I come to my computer and think, “what kind of a nice and inspiring thing can I come up with to send out?” Then I pull at some thread, and spin together something that I hope lands in your inbox and offers some space for reflection. Ok, that’s not the entire editorial policy of Creative Fuel, but in general I aim for this to be a thoughtful space, one that ideally leaves you with something to think about, and if things go really well, a little inspiration to take with you.

And yet, sometimes I feel a little up against the limits and constraints that exist in a vast and endless digital world. This the internet after all, not a creative salon hosted in some magical garden full of sunflowers and pollinators. I type words on a screen, you read them on a screen. There may be a scattering of images on occasion, and some art, but in many ways, it’s a flat experience. There is no texture. The sensorial experience that might come from reading a printed book, or looking at a piece of art, is entirely lost.

Like many of you, as the season changes and we head towards summer, I want less time on the screen. I kind of wish that every week I could just whip up a printed pamphlet and send it to you all. And also: can you imagine?2

That’s what people used to do of course.

Newsletters began in the middle of the fifteenth century in Venice, with handwritten news known as “avvisi.” Readers could subscribe and receive handwritten news twice a week.3 As literature and media scholar Rachael Scarborough King notes, “many of the subscribers were themselves news writers who recirculated the information.”

Not much has changed. Now we just link to our favorite stories and newsletter writers.

In England, newsletters got even more popular in the 17^th century thanks to the postal service. But how do you crank out a multitude of handwritten newsletters? You employ clerks to do the work. In these handwritten newsletters, the handwriting would often change midway through. Proof of the labor required to put the newsletter into the world.

Newsletters carried on as a form, and much later in the mid-20^th century, the mimeograph made reproduction easy. Thanks to that technology, a handful of journalists bailed on the traditional media system, opting instead to write directly for their readers. Writers could now produce their own work, and the ability to easily print allowed more marginalized writers to ensure that their words made it into the world. As Michael Waters wrote for Wired:

“But there was another reason that media newsletters started to take off around the 1940s. At the time, public trust in mainstream media was wavering. Newspapers were making good money, but they were also increasingly turning into a monopoly.”

In other words: a crisis of confidence paired with new technology that allowed for writers to get creative with the way they distributed information. Sound familiar?

I mentioned last week that I’ve been reading lots of old newspaper accounts and historical documents for book research recently, and there have been so many times when it feels like you could just swap out the year for the current one and be reading a modern story. Newsletter history is the same, just replace mimeographs with email.

A 1978 newspaper article starts with this line: “For every Washington problem, there’s at least one newsletter to write about it.” At the time, it was reported that there were 5077 newsletters published in the U.S. and Canada. I think these days you could say that for every interest, there’s a newsletter out there. And then some.

Here are the hot tips for starting a newsletter in the late 70s:

Again: sound familiar?

Like zines, the production of newsletters has allowed writers who might not otherwise have gotten their words and ideas into the world to have a platform. What a powerful thing to get to create something and send it into the world, whether that’s via the post, dropping a stack off at the coffeeshop, or emailing it to the masses. And in the digital age, that’s offered with a financial benefit too. The ability to finally have power and control over one’s work, and ensure that there’s a sustainable model that supports it. Dreamy!

These solutions however are almost always individually-oriented. It is up to you to the artist to make them work. This is the influencer economy too, where everyone is playing an individual game that often leads to burnout.

Of course, it’s powerful and thrilling to feel in charge of your own success. I remember the first time that I launched and funded a creative project on Kickstarter. People gave me money to make something? It felt like a game changer, and it was. Here was a way where people could individually help to support you. Then there was Patreon and the promise of ongoing support from people who loved your work and wanted to ensure that there was more of it. And now for those of us who write, Substack.

It’s empowering, but it can also be lonely. Not to mention overwhelming, on both the creation end but also the consumption end. How many newsletter subscriptions can your inbox handle?

There’s a subscription service to pretty much everything these days. I tried to add a friend as a collaborator to a digital document I was working on this week and I was told that in order to do so, I would need to upgrade to the pro version. I have nothing against that. After all, in this particular instance it was web-based software that I was using for free. But you do get to a point where one more subscription becomes too much.

I am grateful the platforms have helped to fuel the production of creative work and make that kind of work sustainable. But I still have a constant feeling of frustration that all it does is pit us against each other, make us all individually responsible for running our own individual hustles and making sure that we succeed.

In my dream world, I would love for a more collaborative approach, one where writers and artists involved aren’t just all individually responsible for making ends meet but can do so collectively. I guess this would be called, oh I don’t know… a magazine?

Metalabel is working at changing some of this ecosystem. I love this epitaph they wrote to the Lonely Economy. Here’s a little snippet:

Here lies Lonely Economy,

Born of independence,

Died of isolation.

//

We remember how it trained us

To dance for likes,

Instead of our own purpose.

//

It promised freedom,

But left us carrying

Every burden alone.

On an everyday basis, the gargantuan task of ensuring that we build a system in which creativity is supported and not taken for granted feels like a lot. I imagine an enormous slab of marble that you’re trying to turn into a beautiful sculpture and all you have is a toothpick.

I do think part of it is acknowledging the realities and limits of how we work and how the overall ecosystem is structured. As

The answer here is yes and no. First off, only in the digital world, at least if you’re a team of one. Pretend for a second that you write an analog newsletter and you have to send it to 1,000 fans. Have you ever hand-stuffed 1,000 envelopes? There is a hard boundary for what you can and can’t do.

The digital world changes the question of scale, because you can make one piece of work, and whether it’s viewed/read/listened to by one person or one million, the actual production of the work is the same. The boundary disappears. But there’s a lot of other work that comes with it.

The digital world is not always a question of whether or not the creative work is good. It’s a pure numbers game. If you can play that game and succeed then yes, scale will work. That path however isn’t always straightforward, and there’s never a one-size-fits all approach.

I see so many people frustrated that they can’t make it work as a creative in this economy, and take it as a sign that they didn’t do enough, or their work wasn’t good enough, or maybe there’s just something wrong with them? Etc. etc. etc.

The system was not built for us. Instead of chiding ourselves for not figuring out the right formula or the right method, maybe we should give ourselves a little grace and accept that these routes to success are not easy because they are built solely on individual scaffoldings. We can only do so much alone. After that it does in fact require a support team. Those handwritten newsletters required a multitude of clerks, remember?

The way forward is to build systems where you bring other people in, where everyone isn’t just out for themselves.

As I type these words out on the computer, I think about satisfaction of graphite touching paper, the texture both created and felt as you draw a line or write a word. It reminds me that on my iPad4 I have a cover on the glass that is supposed to make it “feel” more like paper when I draw on it. A hint of resistance.

And maybe that’s what all of this comes down to: resistance. Many of the tools we use have gotten so easy and endless that there are so few constraints to give us some structure. We’re sold the illusion that with the promise of platforms, the interconnectedness of the global communication, AI, and every other digital marvel that we’ll easily thrive. Instead of acknowledging that these systems all need checks. There is a human cost when there aren’t any.

We don’t all need to be hand-stuffing envelopes, but I do think that we deserve to err on the side of being human.

With the constraints, with the resistance, and certainly, with a bit more texture.

-Anna

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PS: The most fun thing that I did this week was brainstorm with a friend about the Isles of Curiosity and Wonder. You know, because it is fun to think about how we make this digital landscape a little more textured and inspiring.

More on that is coming at you next week, but in the meantime, if you want to ensure that you get to take part in a creative escape on an imaginary island retreat June 20-24, then today is a good day to become a paid subscriber.

• I’ve been taking part in #1000wordsofsummer this year and grateful as always to

  Jami Attenberg
  for doing it.

• “You’ve gotta have art.” Watch this 1976 commercial from the Detroit Institute of Arts and then just go around singing the refrain all summer long.

• The “Water Women” series by artist Sonia Alins.

• Best local news that probably will only be exciting to people who have spent time driving the I5 corridor: the Uncle Sam sign sold.

• Idea books! I love thinking about notebooks this way.

• This poem.

Other ways to support my work: order something in my shop or buy one of my books.