Support My Work: Scripts, Stories, and Narrative Systems
“There is nothing inherently wrong with ‘telling ourselves stories’:
it all depends on what the stories are doing.”
— Yves Citton, Mythocracy
If you subscribe to newsletters, listen to podcasts, or watch videos on YouTube, I've no doubt that you’ve been asked to support the person or people who created them. You can always support with a like or a share, of course. But generally, the support they’re looking for is financial.
And for good reason, life is expensive. Jobs with good pay and decent benefit packages can be hard to find—especially in the culture industry.
But I gotta tell you, I’ve always been a little irked by the word “support.” It’s not inaccurate. Not unethical. Not even gauche. I just think it’s the wrong word.
“Support” describes the energy we put into political movements, the time we spend volunteering, the emotional investment we put into close relationships, and the structures we build for our families. Yes, that support can be financial—but it happens within a larger, more meaningful context than the average transaction.
To put it another way, “support” is a distinctly non-capitalist word that we’ve steadily applied to more and more capitalist exchange over the last couple of decades. When we examine how markets have failed to live up to their neoliberal promises, the urge to support or be supported makes a great deal of sense. Student loan debt, medical bankruptcy, wealth inequality, the growth of the precariat… this isn’t the world I was told we were building back in the 90s and early aughts.
“In a way, capitalism is an ongoing disaster anticapitalism alleviates,” observes critic Rebecca Solnit. Our impulse to support one another when things are bad can be and should be a source of hope. Communities find a way forward. Art and culture continue to be produced. We can find hope in the novel ways we figure out how to meet needs—our own and others’.
Here comes the “but.”
But, our very human desire to support one another can also be exploited by the same people and institutions that made that support necessary. We end up feeling responsible for mitigating the harm that those with far more resources than we have set into motion. We focus on the little ways we can lend a hand rather than acting in solidarity to put the pressure back on those who wield power.
To make this more concrete, I would like to examine two examples of this framing in action. Both concern Substack and the creator economy, but the implications are broad. Whether or not you identify as a “creator,” whether or not you buy from creators, whether or not you even follow creators on Substack, YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram, I promise this will be relevant to you. Because, regardless of your personal or professional relationship with Substack and the so-called creator economy, their very existence and continued growth reveal a great deal about how we all work and consume in the 21st century.
None of my analysis here should be construed as an indictment of media makers who sell subscriptions or of the subscribers who help support their work. My aim is to shed light on the idiosyncrasies of this economic and cultural moment. When we’re more aware of those idiosyncrasies, we can zoom out to get a better understanding of the much, much bigger system that this little corner of the internet is part of.
What follows is a piece in three parts. The first examines an article in the New York Times from May 10 about how much money we’re paying for newsletters. The second part considers a manifesto of sorts about the future of media organizations written by Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie in April. And the third part will draw on a new English translation of Mythocracy by Yves Citton to make sense of it all.
Stick with me, and I’ll give you a framework for rethinking the stories we tell about how we support one another.
Part 1: Support My Work
How many newsletters do you pay for? What about Patreon subscriptions? The answer could very well be zero. However, if you pay for any creator subscriptions, I’d bet you pay for more than you realize.
Our borderline blitheness when it comes to these subscriptions was well-illustrated by a May 10, 2025, article in The New York Times titled “How Much Are We Paying for Newsletters? $50, $100 … How About $3,000 a Year.” Journalist Logan Sachon spoke to a number of subscribers about what prompted them to start paying for newsletters and how much they’re spending on the ones they subscribe to.
The first subscriber featured in the article guessed that she was currently paying for five or six. She was actually paying for 11—or about $600 per year. Writer Sari Botton estimated that she was paying for “35 or maybe even 50.” The actual number was 127.
I subjected myself to this same scrutiny. I guessed I was paying for eight newsletters; the truth was 10. So not bad. But sadly, I haven’t read any of those in a long time. I also pay for 6 Patreon subscriptions—all podcasts. There’s only one of those that I don’t stay obsessively current with.
The tendency to lose track of the number of premium subscriptions we pay for wasn’t the only pattern Sachon uncovered in her reporting. The other pattern was why people pay for these subscriptions. That pattern can be summed up in one word. You guessed it: support.
One subscriber said, “I just want to support them and their work, and that’s how I feel like I can do it.” Another wanted to support the people she felt a “parasocial” connection to. Yet another subscriber shared that he would pay for every newsletter he reads if he had the money because, “I’m a firm believer that if you’re putting in quality work, you deserve to get paid.” Botton said, “I just want to help everybody,” and expressed her dismay at how the “decimation” of media and literary fields made it nearly impossible for people to earn a living in any other way.
“Decimation” is a strong word—so let’s look at the conditions on the ground. The Pew Research Center found that between 2008 and 2020, newsroom employment dropped by 26%, including a 57% decline at newspapers. Of course, digital journalism jobs have grown considerably since 2008, but not nearly enough to compensate for the difference. At the same time, significant changes have occurred since 2020, and successive rounds of layoffs are transforming the landscape of print, broadcast, and digital media. More than one in 10 journalists and editors have been laid off in the last three years.
Media companies downsize, merge, and reorganize to maintain a modicum of profitability. That profitability is squeezed by venture capital-funded business model disruption, i.e. platforms. Those platforms are all too happy to take the newly unemployed media creators and put them to work—for free, of course—producing content as freshly minted creators.
So Botton has a point. Media makers do need support. Their options are limited. Continuing to make media and pursue stories while selling directly to subscribers is a better “opportunity” than many.
If anticapitalism is what alleviates the disaster that capitalism creates, as Rebecca Solnit suggests, then the peer-to-peer (financial) support network that a large portion of the creator economy relies on makes sense in this context. The media industry is in disaster mode.
The $5 I pay to “support” fellow writers and podcasters becomes my tiny contribution to alleviating the ongoing disaster of capitalism. I’m glad to be able to do that to the extent I can afford it. But my financial support does nothing to change the underlying system. In fact, the small ways we come together to partially alleviate this ongoing disaster naturalize this ever-present crisis. The public, individually or collectively, picks up an increasingly larger portion of the tab for the havoc caused by a small group of extremely wealthy people and companies.
Naturalizing the message that we need to (financially) support one another also blurs the line between charity and product. Creator subscriptions, by and large, are not charitable contributions. They’re payments to for-profit entities.
The value proposition of a charitable contribution (in so much as it has one) is moral, ethical, and/or principled. We send off our money with no expectation of anything in return but the satisfaction of knowing we did something to further a cause we wholeheartedly believe in. But while our principles and ethical commitments may be strong, the value proposition is fragile. Most of the time, our material needs will prevail when we’re deciding how to allocate limited resources.
And this is why we have a whole regime of regulations and incentives that govern non-profit organizations. Societally, we’ve decided that this value proposition is an important but brittle one, so it requires additional reinforcement, primarily in the form of tax breaks on both the organization and donation sides.
For-profit entities don’t receive this structural reinforcement because their value propositions are often stronger, more closely tied to material needs or comforts. They produce products or offer services, and we purchase them because we either need or desire the value they provide.
Maybe a product solves a nagging problem for me, or a service saves me boatloads of time. Maybe I acquire an item that makes my home more beautiful or pay for an experience I won’t ever forget. When making a purchase, I weigh whether the specific value I’ll receive matches (or exceeds) the price I need to pay for it. The stronger a for-profit entity can make its value proposition and the more effectively it delivers on it, the more it’ll sell. The more it sells, the more likely it will turn a profit—the other reason that for-profit entities don’t get the structural support that non-profit organizations do.
When a creator’s value proposition rests on the notion of supporting them, it usually has the same fragility that the value proposition for a charitable donation has. However, the creator receives none of the structural reinforcement or incentives that a non-profit organization receives, as the creator is a for-profit entity.
There may well be a stronger value proposition at play, but without foregrounding it, the exchange remains ambiguous. And if that stronger value proposition is actually access to additional content, well, that turns the exchange into a debt relationship, a bet on future productivity or creativity.
Again, this is no fault of the creator or the subscriber, and it is not a suggestion that you should do anything differently.
But it's important to note that often the creator's request for support is a narrative guise that obscures how capital flows from the consumer to the platform that ultimately collects rent on every subscription.
It's a massive wealth transfer from consumers to capitalists, from consumers to entrepreneurs.
And that leads us to Part 2.
Part 2: The Future of Media Organizations?
“The internet has fundamentally reordered the media landscape,” writes Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie in his personal newsletter, “Now is the time for the new.” Luckily, McKenzie has a vision for the future. He continues: “Media organizations of the past, present, and future are wondering how to adapt to and build for this new reality. Here’s a simple heuristic: they should consider how they can support, rather than own, talent.”
McKenzie’s preference for “supporting” talent rather than “owning” it might be obvious. Substack’s entire revenue model is built around skimming a bit of that support for themselves. It pays for Substack to craft a narrative around the creative freedom or journalistic independence that a direct financial relationship with the audience is supposed to allow. McKenzie’s vision for “new media organizations” simply reapplies that same narrative to the capital side of the equation.
McKenzie writes:
The future is a multiverse of media businesses that range in scale from the micro to the macro, controlled by independent operators who can start with close to zero costs and grow on the strength of their direct relationships with their audiences. The Substack ecosystem, which continues to enrich many independent journalists and creators, reveals the mega trend. Media organizations can either watch while this trend overcomes them, or invest in it, and share in the benefits of a system that gives more power to independent publishers, creators, and entrepreneurs.
There are so many upsides to this vision! And even if there weren’t, it’s inevitable! So get in now while the getting’s good!
I jest.
This is a word salad with cost-saving croutons.
In its incoherence, this paragraph, in particular, and the piece as a whole reveal Substack’s project—a project well-supported by noted right-wing techno-optimist Marc Andreessen: creating a narrative system in which entrepreneurs take no responsibility for the cultural producers from whom they profit while those cultural producers respond with unquestioning gratitude for their creative and financial “freedom.”
This is made clear when McKenzie discusses the “ownership” benefit for cultural producers. In his vision, media organizations allow their media makers to retain ownership—over what he doesn’t spell out. While he likely means intellectual property, “ownership” is also a dog whistle for “precarious labor conditions.” My informed but unscientific opinion is that anytime someone is trying to sell you on the benefits of “owning” your job, they’re trying to absolve themselves of all responsibility for you while maintaining some flow of profit.
McKenzie claims that the purpose of the media ecosystem is to “help a billion flowers bloom” in the form of “better, richer, and more valuable” industry conditions. But this claim defies one of the central principles of systems thinking: the purpose of a system is not what you say it is. “Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals,” writes Donella Meadows. Entrepreneurs, media executives, and platforms can claim that their aim is to support creators. However, if the system’s design and resulting behavior suggest a different purpose, i.e., profit extraction or investor manipulation, then that is the actual purpose of the system.
If we deduce purposes from the behavior (and effects) of platforms like Substack, Instagram, TikTok, and Amazon, then we end up in a very different place than the story those companies tell about why they exist.
Part 3. Scripting the Future
A bit ago, I said that McKenzie’s essay was part of a “narrative system,” one in which labor relations are reconfigured to absolve entrepreneurs of responsibility while workers thank them for their newly realized creative and financial freedom. To put it differently, McKenzie is attempting to script the desires, beliefs, and actions of others in the media.
“There is nothing inherently wrong with ‘telling ourselves stories,’ writes media theorist Yves Citton, “it all depends on what the stories are doing.” In this case, the story McKenzie is telling creates a fictional future that he is actively working to make real. Essays like McKenzie’s become scripts that others can use to guide their actions.
It’s no coincidence that both McKenzie and the subscribers quoted in The New York Times article use the word “support.” The word itself is scripted, but so is the impulse for individuals to take on the responsibility that was once the purview of employers. That’s not to say that McKenzie actually authored this script—far from it—just that the flow of attention and desire within the story is a reinforcing feedback loop.
We take our cues from the script, from the story. “Every story that ‘gets across’ is intended to move people to do something,” argues Citton, “(to make them laugh, cry, fear, say something, buy a product, get riled up, become involved, vote).” In this way, stories are vectors of power. If power is defined as our capacity to get things done, then those who tell stories that shape how others act will hold immense power even without holding a political office or using coercive force.
Stories shape what we pay attention to, what we believe, and what we desire—see also, marketing. We can determine where power is concentrated by noting what we are paying attention to, believing, and desiring. As Citton puts it, “The direction in which our desire-attention points both reveals and helps to reorientate the way in which we plug in to the power structures that govern us.”
By creating and diligently rehearsing a script that puts my focus on creative freedom, financial independence, passion, and purpose, people like McKenzie make me want what they want me to want. That desire then makes it all the more unlikely that I’ll notice that the story being told isn’t the only story we could tell. The inevitability of this scripted future all but erases the alternative scripts we could write and rehearse.
Citton notes that scripts are most successful when they play on existing narratives. What we already desire or believe makes it easier to desire something similar or believe a new yet related belief. Subscribers want to support the creators whose work they value—that seems to be a natural impulse based on a timeless human urge to care for the people with whom we share a community. Creators want the freedom to make the media they want to make—that seems natural, too.
These more organic desires set the stage for a narrative system with an explicit agenda. This narrative system naturalizes a script that makes subscribers feel guilty for canceling subscriptions and encourages creators to accept the continued degradation of their working conditions. Similar, but not the same as our community and creative-oriented desires. By shifting the orientation of our desire, the script naturalizes the profound disparity between those telling the story and those who are acting it out.
This type of scripting is present in every corner of our lives because stories are how we know ourselves and how we become ourselves. Narrative systems shape our beliefs, desires, and actions—which means: “In whatever scenario I happen to find myself living, I always have to ask who is in a position to [script] it.”
Citton’s theory isn’t only a powerful tool for critique. It’s also a recipe for reimagining the future. The thing about a good story is that any of us can tell one, given the right skill and care. It takes time and coordination, but alternative stories—the scripts we want to write and rehearse—can contribute to an imaginary of power where truer freedom is achieved through shared responsibility. Where there are far more choices than eat or be eaten. Where culture is a public good and not a commodity. Where there are real constraints on capital’s ability to abuse and exploit.
That’s the story I try to tell. And I hope I have your support.
