Pivot

Dear Readers — Please note this missive has escaped the custody of Substack and is now broadcast free and directly from DHowell.com. Welcome to the direly indie, handcrafted, artisanal, small-batch, farm-to-table version of the Daedalus Howell Arts & Media Newsletter

. Same guy, fewer overlords.

Escape from Substack

“Books are a commodity,” wrote Joseph McAleer in Popular Reading and Publishing in Britain, 1914–1950. A tidy observation, though he couldn’t have foreseen how thoroughly writing itself would become content, late capitalism’s term for one’s creative product—especially in an era when AI can spit out prose like a PEZ dispenser.

How do we monetize writing in this environment? I used to think the answer was to valorize writing in printed form the way music has been, er, vinylized, as a fetish format. So: books, but fancier. But then vinyl’s comeback hasn’t meaningfully helped musicians so much as it’s helped record sales and record companies. A resurgence of the medium does not eq…