The Red Flag Society
The Red Flag Society
My new subscription level for Analog Revolutionaries
We are 250 days in to this Substack experiment, it’s May 1st, it’s a gorgeous, luminous spring day—a good day for something new. Substack’s subscription architecture includes four tiers: one free, and three paid. Every subscription to The Detourist, whether free or paid, is a vote cast in favor of what I am doing, and I cannot overstate how big a deal that support is to me. The fourth, and “highest,” tier is called, by default, the “Founding Member” plan, and was created to allow readers “to pay more than the listed price as an extra show of support.” I have offered this level at The Detourist since it launched on 24 August 2022, and I am so grateful for the ten Founding Members who have helped this little road trip out of the garage with their hard-earned cash, and more importantly, with their votes of confidence. Those first ten Founding Members have done their work, however, which is establishing a good foundation. So today, I am disabling the Founding Member plan.
Here is why.
If you are an avid Substack subscriber, you might get several (or even dozens) of emails a day from people whose work you really want to read. If you are a Substack writer, maybe you wonder if—in the midst of the apparently (and encouragingly) rapid expansion of the platform—your work will get lost in an increasingly crowded digital space. And as great as Substack is, it won’t fundamentally change the way we interact with reading material, which is still predominantly by way of some expensive digital device. Even Substack’s new additions, like Notes, seem to parrot existing avian-themed social media apps, and it’s not yet clear how this is going to avoid becoming just as overwhelming. I am worried less about the tone of conversation here, which is generally in keeping with the humane spirit of the Substack model, than of the sheer volume of material there is to consume. And Substack is a genuine ray of light in a social media landscape that increasingly looks like something out of Blade Runner or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
I love technology, I really do. Sometimes. But I have tired of the incessant barrage of news about how computers can now write shitty freshman English essays just as proficiently as your average human. I find it difficult to summon the least bit of excitement about the artwork that AI can supposedly “make.” None of this really holds my fascination for more than a half-hearted nanosecond. I’m not interested in purity either: I know that total extrication from the digital omniverse is effectively impossible. But there are some experiences that, in our excitement over new media, we should not really have dispensed with so hastily, or contemptuously. What is more, I have become weary of reading online (not least because of its toll on my vision), and sometimes long for the days of the broadsheets, books, and magazines that you could buy in a store and hold in your hands.
THE BACKSTORY:
I want to try and recreate something like that experience, in some small way, at The Detourist. I am not trying to reinvent the wheel; in fact the idea isn’t new at all. I am just going back to an older way of reading that uses different materials. So last week, when I put out a piece on “The 63-Cent Miracle,” I was laying out a sort of foundational logic for why I am retooling the Founding Member Plan. My work—as you probably know—has a strongly analog component to it, which is one reason I launched my most recent book of film photography in a vinyl shop. There is a quality to reading words on paper that is just different from reading that same thing on an electronic device. So on the subscription section formerly-known-as-the-Founding-Member-plan, I want to offer you some measure of that experience. In a world dominated by digital devices, I want to send you something that will arrive in your mailbox. Delivered by an actual human being to your actual mailbox, the one with the little red flag and the squeaky hinge, which may or may not be populated by a colony of local ants. Which is why I am calling this new section THE RED FLAG SOCIETY.
Yeah, I know that a red flag can mean a lot of different things. But here I mean it to refer specifically to that little device on your mailbox that you may never use. Raising that little banner generally means that you’ve got outgoing mail you would like your postal carrier to collect and deliver. And, as I wrote last week, “Anyone with at least a modicum of knowledge about human beings and our capacity to disappoint and forget one another cannot fail to see the ability to deliver, in a handful of days, a hand-written communiqué of a unique personality across a country as vast and varied as the continental United States for sixty-three cents as anything less than an effing miracle.” So if you want to associate my red flag with a revolution, then be my guest: ¡viva la revolucion análoga!
As a member of the Red Flag Society, you will receive everything I publish here on Substack in the usual digital way, but in addition, I will send you a hard copy printed on paper using actual ink. What is more, I will include a random photographic print—from a film negative, of course—and even a hand-written note from me. This is something you can’t get anywhere else.
That’s all for just $99 a year. It’s more than the monthly plan, but it is going to bring you tangible benefits that you can hold in your hand, or line your birdcage with, as my old professor likes to say. I may even add more analog ephemera as we go along, wherever that is. Like everything here at The DETOURIST, the knowing is in the going….
The essays I've read are enlightening and enjoyable, at times humorous, and insightful. My one suggestion is to encourage that they be shared by the readers to family, friends, and associates who intern can share them as well. Encourage the wider audience even though these folks are not currently subscribers. And hopefully those in the wider audience will feel free to comment so they know they have a voice as well.
Hi, Pete. It’s your fan and subscriber Louisa Abbot. I want in, too. I am already a subscriber. How do I sign up for red flag? Not sure I am fit for Society though!