As 2022 rounds out, I wanted to provide some thoughts on where the blog is headed. Over the past year I’ve decided to take writing quite a bit more seriously than I had in the past and “make a go of it.”
What making a go of it consisted of for a while was a commitment to publishing a new piece every week, a commitment which has been interrupted by work and life. Nonetheless, I still consider Bracero very much an active project, but as my time has diminished and my intellectual ambitions have grown, the output necessarily suffers. To do my topics anything like what I consider justice, I have to do a lot of reading. I always start with some thesis, but my writing process is easily 99% a reading process, in which I pull together various sources for whatever I want to discuss, try to read them as thoroughly as I can, and do my best to represent them as accurately as possible. Once I’ve gotten a decent mass of information together, I generally realize that my initial thesis was stupid and terrible, and try to faithfully alter it in accord with whatever the reading has given me. As a result, the theses of my essays are increasingly (albeit with some exceptions) modest, because I’m typically overwhelmed by how little I realize I actually know, and the prospect of offering some useful thought on any of the subjects I cover becomes baffling.
After a brief existential crisis, I then come back to the essay, accept that I’m a mere mortal who can neither read nor understand everything, and that whoever will ultimately read the end result is in the same boat to one degree or another. I’ve accepted that Bracero is not a place where I lay out what I regard as irrefutable doctrines, but rather a developing process where I take little bites out of what I believe to be true, and work from there. The alternative is to write nothing, and despite what some may think, I do actually think my writing has at the very least the potential to be thought provoking for someone smarter than me, and thus it’s better that I bother and not just throw my hands up As a result, nothing here is necessarily revelatory; I hope at least that it’s honest, and I do think it’s gotten better over time.
Going through this process a decent number of times now, I’ve developed a clearer idea of what my intentions for Bracero actually are:
Full-time blogging is not in the cards-as nice as it sounds to be able to write essays about philosophy for a living as a nonacademic, it’s too good to be true. The fact of the matter is, that’s not really a thing that happens, except pretty much exclusively in the case of writers who already had a significant following of some kind. God bless them, but I have no illusions that quitting my day job will ever be an option, no matter how much time and effort I am able to spill into this project-nor do I think it’s worth the pressures it would create on other parts of my life (my relationship, my hobbies, maintaining friendships etc.) if I were to attempt to push that particular boulder up the mountain.
I’m committed to keeping Bracero free-substack’s business strategy is for writers to build up an audience through a steady, consistent stream of free content, and then, eventually, to “go paid”-paywalling most or all of their content for paid subscribers, and thereby generating a revenue stream both for themselves and for the platform. There is nothing wrong with this model! In many respects, I think it’s great, and is in line with substack’s commitment to real free speech, something which is effectively impossible under an advertiser model. If I were to do this successfully, I would have a lot more time to write, and therefore, one would imagine, the writing would be better, and there would be more of it. There’s obviously lots to be said for that.
However, this does still make those writers susceptible to audience capture, and, obviously, makes their work cost prohibitive for many readers, who can’t afford to pay a slew of subscriptions every month. For myself, since I do have a separate source of income, I can write about whatever I want and allow my opinions to develop organically without fear that it’s going to harm my livelihood-and do so without a sense of deadline pressure. Writing, and the process of research and preparation, is a pleasure and intellectual exercise-I don’t want it to become a chore, and leaning too hard into a paid subscriber model makes that all the more likely.
Likewise, I write because I want my writing to serve as a point of departure for discussion with smart, interesting people about interesting topics. A paywall necessarily limits that-and it severely limits the likelihood that I will receive a critical readership which will substantively challenge the views I express.
In light of all this, it’s my intention to keep Bracero free of charge, no matter how large of an audience it may eventually cultivate. Obviously, those who can support me are encouraged to do so based on whatever degree of value they feel my work provides, but this will never provide access to bonus content (though it will help me pay my rent, and that definitely does help me generate any content whatever). Am I screwing myself by saying this? Maybe, but probably not, and either way, I believe it’s the right thing to do.
My goal is for more community engagement-Generally, most of my posts get a few hundred opens, and occasionally they will spill over a thousand. On paper, the growth of Bracero has tracked pretty linearly with how much work I’ve put into it-the more pieces I write, and the more I share them around the internet, the more readership I tend to receive. That’s gratifying, but not as important to me as getting readers who actually think about, comment on, and critique my work. If there is anything I’m really seeking to accomplish in my writing, it’s the development of an intellectual community, and in developing that community, contribute to the renewal of a genuine intellectual culture which reaches beyond academia, particularly in the US. I really do believe that the intellectual life is, if not the best, an important part of any human life, and necessary for a functioning democracy. Bracero has always been intended as a vehicle of sorts for that, and I’ve always aimed my writing at fellow non-academics. Apart from this, I personally rely heavily on discussion for ideas, as well as for my own intellectual development. So I suspect there is a positive feedback loop to be found in creating a more active readership.
I have, occasionally, but more often, been receiving the odd substantive, thoughtful comment on my essays from complete strangers, which is a very cool and gratifying thing to have happening, hopefully one that will continue.
So for 2023, I don’t expect much will change. The winter will be slower as my real life remains fever-pitch busy, but the spring and summer will hopefully give me time to write more. Currently, I’ve been spending a great deal of time on Plato, and am generally interested in the idealist challenge to naturalism which remains a central debate in philosophy. Having spent a lot more time recently on ontology, epistemology, and ethics, I would like to be able to move onto the subjects of ecology and back into politics and political economy.
The hope in investigating philosophies opposed to dialectical naturalism is of course that I’ll either talk myself out of it, or be able to more precisely articulate the epistemological and ontological framework of the idea, and then be able to approach those other subjects with a philosophical engine that has most of the kinks worked out. But as with any philosophy, it’s quite likely that a fully satisfying picture of it will never be fully constructed, and at some point I’ll throw up my hands and make hay while the sun shines, albeit with a somewhat dull scythe. I’m also interested in implementing substack’s new chat feature-but for that to be useful, as always, will likely require further expanding my readership.
Having said all this, here’s to a fruitful 2023!