Seeking your support
An appeal, and a (qualified) mission statement
Dear subscribers and sympathetic readers,
After five months of experimentation, we have decided we should go forward with a version of North South Notes that regularly publishes serious writing. The response has been very encouraging. We want to continue to pay contributors around the world, and pay them well; I want to keep using this platform to write about global developments.
To do this, we need to raise the funds. If I can garner the sufficient amount of “pledges,” I will activate paid subscriptions and go forward, and we will found a magazine together. If it turns out there is not enough support, that’s fine. If it can’t be done, I will step away from Substack. But I think it can be done.
Let’s get this over with
I will write a lot more, below, on our thinking and planning for this publication. But if you are already on board, you don’t even need to read it. The point of this post is to get people to pledge a small amount of money, and launch a publication. If 5% of the current subscribers decide to pledge five dollars per month, we will have everything we need for now. If a few generous people become “Founders” — I will send them signed books to say thank you — we will be on our way very quickly.
That is: I reckon that if we got a pledge from everyone that can easily spare the money and has a genuine interest in founding this publication, we would be done. I will launch North South Notes, start discussing ideas with the subscribers, and we can avoid the tricks and strategic use of paywalls customarily employed to produce revenue here.
If that describes you then please, offer a pledge, and we can get this over with.
Edit: if you have a problem offering a pledge with the Subscribe buttons, use this link instead.
But if you do not have the resources, or you are not sure the project has value, do not pledge. A free subscription is deeply appreciated; you could also send this publication to someone who might be interested in subscribing and supporting. The idea is to use my platform here to re-direct some funds to writers around the world, not to suck money out of the periphery.
The plan and the promise
The most prominent format for a Substack newsletter — and there is nothing wrong with this — is that an established writer uses this platform to post their takes on the news. They read a bit of the internet and write their thoughts about that internet back onto the internet. I would not ask you to fund that.
The proposition here is different. We will use this platform to create a little global affairs magazine. We pay people around the world to do real, original work and contribute meaningfully to human knowledge. In a small way, of course.
At first, at least, we will privilege quality over quantity. In the ideal month a contributor from say, Mongolia or Chile will write a report from their country, and I will also write something. The next month, it might be an essay from Albania and a book review. The focus of the magazine will be the capitalist world system. So — we could write about almost anything; but the guiding theoretical approach presumes that there is a world system. It can be changed, and it is already changing. Pieces may go deep into the details of a given nation or city or individual, but there will usually be some attempt to relate those details to the global context. There is no geographic focus and we do not privilege the “South” over the “North” or vice-versa, but we do believe that North / South is a relevant distinction. We send you notes from each.
In the ideal year, a subscriber will have read a number of reports from around the world, and about as many from me. Or, you can skip everything that doesn’t interest you, and still know you have supported their publication. Each contribution will seek to be truly original, but also allow the casual reader to catch up on events in that part of the world for the year.
Our imagined audience is someone who is interested to learn about, say, union organizing in Korea or protests in Morocco, but is not likely to read about those countries on a regular basis. We seek to publish serious, edited, and accurate writing that stands the test of time. The three international contributions so far — from an Indonesian journalist, a Romanian academic, and a Mexican art critic — are just as relevant now as the day they were published. I hope North South Notes can be cited in books and peer-reviewed journals, and that interviews and reviews can contribute something to political and literary culture. In addition to the three contributors we have had so far, four editors contributed fact-checking, additional feedback, and copy editing. All of them and more are rearing to go, if we can get the money.
At the very least, we promise to publish eighteen pieces per year that require real work. I might also throw some little blogs in here and there, and the publication could potentially grow much larger. I write something, then something comes in from far away, and so on.
Get it? North / South Notes. That’s the idea. We are creating the most important publication in the world. We are launching a fun little Third Worldist blog run by a Californian. We are going to create The Free Press but in Maoist Standard English. Please join us.
Subscription levels
1. Anyone generous enough to sign up as a Founder gets both of my books, The Jakarta Method and If We Burn, signed and sent to wherever, if you want them.1
2. All Paid subscribers at any level can: comment; participate in “editorial” discussions (threads in the chat), ask questions, and offer input; take part in periodic book giveaways, with stylish translated editions included.
3. We will try to keep as much as possible available to everyone. Free subscribers get all the open notes. And, as I have done the past two years, I will sometimes give things away to this type of supporter, too.
It should be clear by now that we are seeking patrons more than customers.2 If need be, I may experiment down the line with putting some things behind a paywall, to gently nudge people to do what they may want to do anyway. Or, we could just get this over with right now.
Defense! Defense! Defense!
Journalism is dying. Substack is not the solution. The business model that this platform relies upon will not and cannot be sufficient to the task of providing crucial information to the world’s citizens and rebuilding a public sphere.
That does not mean, however, that defensive measures are worthless. We have to do what we can to weather the storm. In theory, I support large newsrooms with public support, and do not believe that decentralization is synonymous with democratization. In practice, I believe that creating a new Substack publication that commissions new writing can make things less bad in the short term. Paid subscriptions can help create a small, private space in which we can advocate for the nationalization of the internet. In the long term, we need structural solutions to the epistemic crisis, not just voluntarism; but right now, today, we need some volunteers. In the short term, I see this as a war of position.
By the same token — there are a lot of great, under-employed writers around the world, both experienced and up-and-coming. I have gotten to know a lot of people like this over twenty years of traveling and reporting. North South Notes is not about to employ thousands of them, but I think that paying first-world magazine rates to people in São Paulo or Kathmandu can make a very small contribution to keeping these communities alive.
Because finally, I believe that creating a base of reader support for this kind of writing is the best way to survive the crises comprising this very strange global moment. When talking with contributors, I sometimes bring up other publications that do publish the kind of work I want to host here. But I will say that I know from experience that they rely on one of a couple business models. While recognizing that there is nothing wrong with employing them, and that they all produce vital work, I think they have limitations:
One option is to rely on the generosity of an individual heir, oligarch or business man who uses the publication to further their own ideological project. You are subject to this person’s whims and veto power. Another move is to pay so little you can only publish grad students or academics with some other income stream. God bless them — without this coterie of writers, left-wing publishing in the English language would be in trouble. But there are more people out there. I want to work with them, and I want to publish things that might not be allowed by the owners of NYC clout rags or the Open Society Foundation. At the very least, I don’t want us to have to worry about them.
Moreover, I will admit that some part of me hopes this publication can become a semi-profitable small business, and therefore give myself some kind of an insurance policy. So far, I am in the hole — I have only lost money on North South Notes.3 But if I can be paid to edit this little publication as well, I myself would be less dependent on the whims of powerful individuals.
I have signed a new book deal — more on that later — with great people and am very excited by what I am working on. I consider my full-time job to be “author,” and I have given myself some protective armor by proving that I can sell books. The world of publishing — compared to whatever the hell was going on in journalism — has proved to be reassuringly capitalist and predictable. If you bring money in, they are not inclined to kick you out. But it remains true that a single person could decide that I opposed the wrong war, posted the wrong thing, or protested the wrong genocide, and render me immediately precarious. That could come in the form of an attack from the state, or a decision made by some corporate bureaucrat looking over his or her shoulder. Basically, I am trying to use this period of relative calm to move eggs into more than one basket, both for myself and quality media in general. Resist the NGO-ization of media. War of position.
I have done this before
In Brazil, from 2012 to 2016, I ran a small blog for Folha de S. Paulo. I only published a few things a month, but I liked doing it. I liked commissioning, and I liked editing. As it happens, the two primary contributors have sadly passed away. First, we lost Claire Rigby; then, in 2022, Dom Phillips was killed in the Amazon rainforest. I loved working with them, and I love looking back on the things we did together. We published Brazilians and gringos and serious reporting and I also snuck in some weird little bloggy things.
Back then, editing that publication was not my full-time job. I spent about 20% of my time on it, and 80% on my primary work. In addition to my own reporting, I could commission travel and far-flung research from a desk. I’d like to do that again.
What with everything what is going on right now
History, unfortunately, keeps happening. I came up with the name North South Notes, bought a domain, and opened an account here in 2022. From the beginning, this was the idea I had for the publication. But I went back and forth on whether to execute.
What finally tipped the scales, I think, is a desire to remain engaged with geopolitics. My current book research is wildly captivating for me, and it is a bit different than what I have done previously. I really look forward to sharing more. But I did not want to disappear into the topic, with no good reason to even read the daily news, as the United States seeks to violently re-make the imperial order in a more crude and vicious form. Even if I am not doing weeks of reporting for each post, there are things that I have learned and contacts I have accumulated over the years that might be relevant.
I am glad, for example, that I was in this “experimental” period as it became clear that the United States may seek to attack Venezuela, and made sure to write something about it. In January, I wrote that parts of the Israeli and U.S. government “want Iran smashed into thousands of pieces.” I want to continue to comment on world affairs, and have a concrete reason to do so. I want to keep learning from contributors.
The output and the ideas
Since October, I have tried to offer a sense of what we might do here. In Jakarta, Hanna Samosir did extensive reporting to offer an account of unexpected mass protests in Indonesia. From Bucharest, Romanian scholar Florin Poenaru wrote a captivating account of a network of neoliberalized spies and the “Russian interference” that no one can seem to find. Last month, Gaby Cepeda used the world of contemporary art to examine Mexico’s strange relationship to the United States and a new global content regime.
Along the way, I myself warned that Donald Trump had nefarious designs on Venezuela, and that they had nothing to do with “regime change.” Then, I tried to write a history of the verticalization of the public sphere, before returning to Trump’s designs on the Americas and attempting to coin the term “autogolpe imperial.”
Check out any of these pieces out now, if you like. But even if you missed them the first time and don’t care about them now, you might appreciate that they have made an impact. Hanna’s story was translated into German; Florin went on podcasts to explain his work; Gaby’s report was passed around the Mexican art world (on Instagram stories, of course) and re-shared and discussed by its Gen-Z practitioners. My little concept of “regime collapse” operations was translated and published by Boitempo in Brazil. Previously, I have done book reviews and a well-performing movie review and dumb little personal essays.
What else might we do? Part of the idea is that this will emerge through conversations with contributors and subscribers, but here are some other ideas, potentially: the situation in Bahrain during the war on Iran; what does the Albanian left think about Hoxha?; an interview with the publishing house run by Brazil’s MST; the first time I thought, “I wish I had already launched North South Notes” was the outbreak of ‘Gen Z’ protests in Kenya in 2024 — in retrospect, I wish I had commissioned something anyway — we could look at the consequences two years later; a report on the New People’s Army in the Philippines; a map of the party form in the Arab world; literary fiction in lusophone Africa; and so on.
And then finally, I could more things myself that include travel or reporting. For example: in December, I went to Liverpool to cover the founding conference of Your Party UK. In the end, I decided not to write anything. If I had been on the hook to deliver one or two real things a month for money, I might have done.
More promises
These promises, I admit, are largely made for my own sake: I will resist the internalization of this platform’s algorithm and the tendency to do whatever it is that will maximize subs and revenue. There is evil lurking in this place, but I am comforted by the fact that if it all goes wrong, you can take an email list elsewhere.
I will not try to compete with other newsletters or care about the “ranking” and “rising” nonsense they push on you. I am not trying to win at Substack; I have set out how I actually plan to use this platform. At the same time, if demand in the form of subscriptions significantly outstrips what I can do on my own, I promise to expand by working with more editors and writers.
Truly, thank you —
Vincent
Of course, that is not the price of two signed books — I will sign them for free for anyone that has them and tracks me down. It is a thank you gift for those who genuinely want to support the publication in this way.
I will need a little bit of time to do this. If we can get enough pledges to go forward, I will contact every “Founder” and ask for their address, and then order a number of author copies, receive sign and send. Hopefully they could all go out within a few weeks. For a limited time only.
This, too, could be subject to change. If this thing grows enough to justify a shift in the business model, we might decide that people actually need to be subscribers to read everything. I reserve the right to modify anything I have outlined in this post, as long as I communicate the changes clearly and allow people to unsubscribe if they choose.
At minimum, I have paid rates that prominent U.S. magazines would pay for a reported contribution. Everyone has already been remunerated. If we cannot go forward with the project, I will have lost a few thousand dollars paying for some important pieces, and learned a lot in the process. But I bet we can go forward.