8 Questions for... Mills Baker
Sucks to Suck
is Head of Design at Substack.
Sucks to Suck is the unfocused work of , and . We post about how much it sucks to suck; technology; culture and the liberal arts; and occasionally about the froth and scum of the eternal sea (that is: “news”). But really, we just post whatever. It’s not some big deal; it’s more like no big deal.
"We have to endure the discordance between imagination and fact. It is better to say 'I am suffering' than to say 'This landscape is ugly.'" - Simone Weil.
1. Why Substack?
Well, I work at Substack! I've been writing online since the late 1990s and working at companies on writing-related projects since 2015. Given that I could and would never even try to earn a living writing, this has been a happy professional adjacency. When a writing platform is fun to write on and I work there, I tend to post there a lot. It helps me kick tires, understand users, and all that, and it's just sort of fun to use a product you help make. If I didn't work here, I'm not sure I'd be posting; it's an excuse for me to do so, and I need excuses! Without Substack, I'd bother my friends even more. I often wonder how many of us "needed" a layer beyond the social but without aspiration of the global; I guess we used to write letters to editors or get into HAM radio.
2. How long did it take you to find your groove?
I don't have a productive groove; for me, sensitivities and anxieties and dark reactive paths or spirals are the problem for creative work, nothing else. So "my groove" —such as it is!— is just that to the best of my ability I really do try to let the Internet and all that I find on it come and go; I try to assume the best, forget the worst, take a "process" view rather than a "snapshot" view, etc. You have to take a statistical understanding of things online, both crowds and individuals: we are all collections of so much, and all these interfaces are so partial. There's just a lot of randomness to everything; in such an environment, all apparitions and phantasms and Brownian motion, you have to be a cautious surfer, as calm as it's possible to be (however you "feel"). We're all humiliating ourselves together, electronically; you either take what comes or you suffer additionally, beyond the core requirement. It's a bit as though we're all doing strong drugs together; expect people to "not be cool" for periods, e.g., whatever that means, and so on. My groove is when I remember this and just "do what I do," without any tilting at windmills (🤓). Now: all of this is easy to say when you're not trying to make a living from it, as long as it's a hobby. The more consequential it is, the more I'm sure this is all useless advice.
3. How has it changed you?
Well, Substack has mostly affected me as a reader; I've read things I'll remember for the rest of my life here, things that have led to entire intellectual journeys and shifts in beliefs, things that have helped me solve real, pressing problems in my life, be a better husband or father, and so on. As a writer, it's made me more mindful of my limitations; the gaps that exist between me and those I consider "real" writers —it's my mind, I get to think whatever I want!— are even clearer to me now. It's also made me more aware that I can relax and have fun; I don't actually do this in real posts, but I see others play, experiment, do interesting things, and I am at least inspired emotionally! And although I'm not sure why, I think Substack has made me feel more comfortable being weirder; I'm also in my 40s, which I'm told does the same.
4. What mistakes have you made?
Oh, just bad posts! Bad posts, bad notes, bad comments, dumb things of that nature; letting myself get bothered by things others say or do or don't say or don't do, when it happens; mistaking others for others, hallucinating groups and moments, all the usual stuff that happens to us online. It happens much less here so far, I think because the user base is actually sort of different.
5. To pay or not to pay?
Well, everyone here is already paying my salary and benefits. And anyone who comes to Substack to read Sucks to Suck —imagine this person lmfao!— is someone I'd rather have paying another writer so that our company is successful. So: no payments. (If they fire me, I might go paid!).
6. What artistic and technical choices have you made?
I have a psychotic cloud of rules that hangs over me when I post. I try to be really precise with language and structure, and to not "waste time." I am naturally digressive, but I make an effort to keep that shit to the footnotes. For whatever reason, I remove a lot of my personality, or my social self, from my writing, and always have. I love the idea that personality as such is already too compromised for anything one takes seriously; I don't mean this harshly, I'm absolutely a "personality"-type, but I find it plausible that personalities are mostly defence mechanisms, projections, manias, anxieties, and so on (or as Simone Weil put it: "Our personality is the part of us which belongs to error and sin"), that is: unintentional messes, a lot of unconsidered and confused slop. I love them, but when I'm trying to be serious, I want mine out of the mix. Probably the most "consequential" "choice" I've ever made —I'm not sure I could have done otherwise— is divorce my writing style from my social energies to some extent. Although the "I" that writes is not the "I" that speaks, it's nevertheless the case that I try to write as I speak, just with those restrictions: fewer digressions, less personality, more scepticism.
7. What’s been the effect on your writing?
Well, as mentioned I think it's made me a bit more comfortable being strange in my writing, getting straight to the odd part of whatever interests me with less preamble. I have less of a sense of anxiety about posting than I have historically, even on platforms I worked on before, and I think part of that is that it really is just slightly more "clustered" here, even in the public spaces like Notes. Groups are smaller, more niche; scenes are likelier to face inward. I think for better and worse, I'm more "myself" here; and it really is for better and for worse. I think a lot of how I write is just awful, but it's what I like!
8. In it for the long haul?
I would love to work at Substack for the rest of my career, and I don't plan on retiring early. I would love to write on Substack forever, too. Over the coming decades, barring significant disruptions or interruptions, I expect the technological (and thus cultural and artistic and literary) landscape to shift quite a lot, and I have no idea what will make sense for me to get up to. I sometimes suspect that as full of shit as it is, this "text-based" Internet of ours—and even with TikTok, the Internet is still largely about rhetoric, language, texts of various kinds; that "discourse" became a common word tells the tale)— will be just a short chapter. We might all in 30 years look back on this "golden age" for anyone who's a nerd about words, loves to post, enjoys texting people, is given meaning or purpose by intellectual struggle, and so on with intense nostalgia: as though, for decades, the entire world ran through theatre or music (which would rule). "Imagine it, grandchild: feeds, feeds of text as far as the thumb could scroll! Everyone was making claims or reacting to claims; it felt as though reading and writing were an interface to the levers of power, to the shape of all things!" But everyone will have moved on, or back, to something else; and the idea that everyone should be an essayist, or a reader of essayists, and a local news anchor to boot, will seem like the frankly hugely dorky shit it's always been. I love it, but please!
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“Imagine it, grandchild: feeds, feeds of text as far as the thumb could scroll! Everyone was making claims or reacting to claims; it felt as though reading and writing were an interface to the levers of power, to the shape of all things!"
Fantastic interview all around. Thank you, Eleanor and Mills.
I think you are a major force on Notes Mills, and I greatly enjoy reading your insights and takes (even when they are weird at times...). Your comment about how Subtack has changed you sounds like a fitting ad for the platform as a whole :)