Finding your economic base- I mean, "audience"
On the need to access society's deep revenue flows
I - The business of independent scholarship
Any writer building an audience on the internet eventually asks themselves the question — “who am I writing for?”
Writing gurus dissuade folks from asking this question too early on in their writing process, and there are good reasons for this. It introduces concerns of identity and imitation into the writing process at precisely the point where the budding writers needs to be exploring their own thoughts and intuitions without triangulating them through what other people might think about them.
However, as you start to find your voice and feel out the lay of the digital landscape, you may begin to wonder what type of person your writing might be for. After all, with the exception of a few Uncle Teds feverishly scribbling in their cabin in the woods, I think that most of us wonder about this question because we want to feel a sense of connection to others through our writing.
Does my work contribute anything of value to anyone’s life? Are they reading it and finding it helpful? Am I wasting my time? What am I really doing?
As I’ve explored this for myself, I’ve come up against mental blockage that keeps recurring, and that’s the question of what economic base would compose an audience for my work. What might bind my readers together in common economic concern, providing the material foundation of their social position?
My work puts a number of distinct communities and their discourses into dialogue with each other (Christian theology, continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and Buddhist studies), which can be a strength in that it attracts a diverse range of people who find themselves drawn to one or more aspects of my writing, but I also find myself wondering about whether such a bricolage of individuals shares any underlying interest which would unite them.
I am using “interest” here not in the sense of mere intellectual curiosity, because, while one can certainly attract an audience with writing that interests them, I’m not persuaded that one can sustain a business on an audience’s curiosity alone. To be an independent scholar for the long haul demands that one create a business, a portfolio of revenue streams, albeit a highly idiosyncratic and flexible one. After all, even Mozart had to write commissioned pieces for the wealthy.
You see, you can’t build an organization which focuses on research and publication by seeking your economic base amongst students, scholars, and clergy. People who want to study philosophy or religion typically do not have much money, and while their passion might make them willing at times to invest some of their scant resources into purchasing a good book or an enticing course, they cannot form the long term bottom line for a sustainable organization’s finances. To build something that can achieve liftoff, you have to find a way to pitch this scholarly work as providing some benefit — as addressing some interest — of an economic base which enjoys a certain volume and regularity of revenue flow.
This is why many conservative Christian organizations or think tanks are funded by petite bourgeoisie figures such as lawyers, financial advisors, small business owners, etc… these figures provide the economic base of interest in thinks like theological defenses of liberty or early Christian sources of liberalism. It’s precisely this economic base which will show up at fundraisers, write checks, and keep the lights on so the scholars can keep doing their thing.
We can think here also of the myriads of online publications which have sprung up within the past few years. With independent magazines like Compact or Pirate Wires, or even some of the more lucrative Substacks, such as Bari Weiss’s The Free Press or Matt Taibbi’s Racket News, these dissident Right publications are able to spring up and fund themselves because tech entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, crypto degens, and disaffected elites understand that this type of research and reporting directly affects their lives — their interests.
This is what I would call an underlying revenue flow. For an independent scholar to access an income sufficient for living, they need to tap into one of these revenue flows which wend deep beneath the surface of our society, like subterranean aquifers, channeling money from its source (the Federal Reserve) downstream to the rest of society through a core set of intermediaries.
II - Your base might not be what you think
In my case, what do questioning Christians, inquisitive Buddhists, and psychoanalytic theory buffs have in common from the standpoint of their economic and political interests such that they would pay for someone’s writing? If my views don’t align with any particular sect or institution, don’t clearly cash out into some technique for increased earning potential, or obviously tap into some broad topic comprehended by most of society, why would anyone give me their hard earned wages?
I’m struck with how
describes their ideal audience, using a persona they refer to as “workers with earbuds” — it’s a great image because it immediately evokes a young person laboring at a warehouse or delivering DoorDash or working in a bakery with an AirPod in one ear listening to Žižek’s Sublime Object of Ideology. The autodidact who uses the corporation to fund their personal studies while secretly plotting their own liberation from the machine — that’s who Dave and his crew at TheoryUnderground are targeting with their courses, lectures and events. With just three words, this concrete image indicates a whole way of life and set of concerns they are addressing.Everything about building an independent scholarly business comes back to this question of an economic base, whether it’s DC policy wonks, tech entrepreneurs, or workers with earbuds, but part of my motivation for writing this piece was my noticing how some language in the creator space can obscure this reality.
What should we think about guys like this who organize private groups and retreats which provide a “nonrivalrous” space to “confront violent theology?” What economic base are they serving with this particular brand of theology? Or perhaps think of figures like Peter Rollins with his Pyrotheology — who is paying for his multi-day retreats in Ireland or showing up to his private events through Patreon? I suspect that these aren’t really his moneymakers, and that he mostly does these for fun. So, how is he actually funding his operation?
In asking these questions, I do not impute any bad faith or nefarious motives to any individual, but merely aim to awaken the reader to a new way of seeing creators and the underlying economic structure which makes their work and their lifestyle possible. Most creators have a portfolio of different revenue streams, and this is especially true of larger or more mission-driven organizations, so the question to ask is what economic base are they tapping into for their revenue streams?
Someone whose writing and thematic emphases echoes the Christian discourse you might find in ChristianityToday or other top evangelical publications (consciously or unconsciously) signals that they are hoping to tap into that same economic base of churches, para-church ministries, and Christian colleges which are rapidly changing ideologically from staunchly conservative and Republican spaces to liberal and Democratic ones which champion the dominant discourse of the professional managerial class, albeit cloaked in the guise of biblical proof texting, selected theological motifs, and (mostly) implicit discursive norms. Thus, a translation is required to understand the moves being made.
Peter Rollins additionally borrows the words and the cadence of meta-modern influencers who are offering gnosis, personal transformation, and connection with fellow outcasts. Rollins to his credit is trying to bootstrap something entirely new from the ground up, as his institutional base seems unclear to me, but even he has to occasionally play on a distinctively Christian evangelical style of discourse in his public messaging to attract people to his offerings.
So, I think part of the temptation for intellectuals working in more abstract spaces like religion, philosophy, even psychology, can be to adopt language which signals to a particular economic base that we are a fellow member or that we share their same outlook on society. This move becomes most pernicious when we allow that discourse to sink deep into our own thinking and become the frame for our theoretical work, thus capturing our thoughts and imaginations right at their point of origin.
III - Closing thoughts on technology
This brings me to my final point on this topic, which I believe is an overlooked force operating beneath the contemporary Cambrian explosion of internet intellectuals seeking to build follows and financial independence. This emergent intellectual ecology has found itself inextricably entangled with another development ecosystem, namely, the underlying technology which makes these endeavors possible in new and unprecedented ways.
Through the power of social media (YouTube, Elon’s X, Rumble, etc), email newsletters (Substack, Ghost, ConvertKit, etc), private communities (Circle, Discord, Patreon) and underlying financial technologies (Stripe, crypto), we lucky individuals have today at our finger tips all the necessary tools to build and run an independent creator business online, whether that’s drawing anime p**n on Ko-Fi or writing cutting edge philosophical theory on Substack.
These technologies not only make the internet intellectual’s lifestyle possible, but they also subtly shape and transform the field from within. The rise of Stripe and automated billing has made subscriptions the gold standard of revenue, even amongst tech startups looking to raise funding, a mentality which has seeped into the writing community as well because of services like Substack which enable and monetize subscription billing.
Since subscriptions optimize for consistency over time, they are also disincentivize changing things up or releasing your long time readers who maybe need to graduate from your content. I think that the subscription model is attractive primarily because it most closely resembles the wage-dependent lifestyle many of us are used to already. We want to see that same amount of money coming in each month so we can budget for it and handle our fixed expenses, and subscriptions do just that.
Justin Murphy’s (free) ebook The Independent Scholar does a great job exploring the other revenue paths which an internet intellectual can explore on their path to financial sufficiency, and you’ll often see successful creators not relying on any single one of these to ensure they aren’t forced into catering their work to the idiosyncrasies of any particular monetization strategy.
But even if one has a moderately successful newsletter, a small but growing online community, a publication, a smattering of speaking engagements, maybe even some brand partnerships, it still begs the question of what economic base your work taps into — what types of people have both expendable income and personal interest in supporting your project monetarily?
The advice often says to “find your niche,” but no one talks about how not all niches are profitable. What makes certain niches profitable? It’s how a niche connects with a certain economic groups interests, which means that you can bypass the idea of niche entirely, and simply aim at understanding what need your work serves in the lives of those who are near society’s main monetary channels, if you will.
This can mean either that you focus on a problem that a large group of people are experiencing, like Paul Millerd’s focus on work culture or Andrew Huberman’s focus on health and lifestyle optimization, or that you identify a smaller or underserved group which is highly aligned or ascendant amidst the social churn taking place in our world today.
However, don’t make the mistake of thinking you don’t have to find an economic base for your work. I’m sorry, but you will not make a living as a writer by sharing your “thoughts and musings” on Substack. There are deep subterranean flows of money in our society, and some folks are closer to it and some are farther away — to become an independent scholar, you have to access these flows, and the only way to do so is to offer something of value to those who feed closer to the source.
I’ll probably return to this topic again, as I haven’t addressed what in it truly bothers me. While I can’t quite identify the economic base my work addresses, I find myself feeling icky about even wanting my work to connect with the interests of a particular group or institution. Somewhere in my psyche their lurks are strong attachment to some imagined idea of purity from the filth of social or economic concern. I plan to explore that more in the future.
I would just point out that Samsara Media is not the primary place I share my writing — you can subscribe for free at Samsara Diagnostics to receive a weekly piece on topics in religion, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Also, I encourage you to purchase my book “Ideology and Christian Freedom: a theo-political reading of Shusaku Endo’s Silence” on Amazon (paperback) or on my store (ebook) which addresses contemporary dilemmas of agency by looking at the historical and philosophical context for the events in Endo’s novel Silence.
Super-helpful post!
Finding your audience, voice, and income are the three most wicked problems for every DIY scholar and you've nailed the main reasons here. Really good stuff. Nobody will be able to read this and then continue watching all the theory content they do the same way, which is exactly what good theory will cause: a shift in perspective that changes everything. But you go a step beyond that by bringing the question of politico-economic conditions of possibility into view, which is one of the most erased aspects of theory writing. Money is almost as taboo as politics in certain spaces, and on the Left the general assumption is that it's bad and that everyone should do everything for free. But considering the fact that the left is largely made up of the PMC side of the middle class, that's awfullly convenient for them—the checks come from salaried positions paid by tuition, endowments, grants, taxes, etc. In theory that should mean they don't need to worry about the profit motive (at least on the professional side—not so much the case for managers of course). Yet even when they are able to live indifferent to the actual interests of economic capital, there is symbolic capital that they get by maintaining either aloofness or disdain towards all economic concerns. Expressions of such attitudes are a sign of status, lorded over others. This is usually not done consciously but is instead simply part of the habitus of the given fields that constitute the possible positions one can take, roles that can be fulfilled, or functions one can serve. So your feeling-torn about owning up to the economic interest is, ultimately, partially due to intellectual integrity confronting the fact that there's a lot of disavowal of these issues inherent to the fields we want to inhabit. I think you'd really dig the lectures I've done recently on Bourdieu, because most of what I'm saying here is why I appreciate and have been going hard into his work!