Why Aemula?

Changing the protocol behind online news and analysis

For a few months now, posts from this Substack have been cross-posted at a new kind of writing platform, one called Aemula. Don’t get us wrong. Substack is a breath of fresh air when compared to X.com and other social media, but it doesn’t (yet) break free of their limitations, nor their perverse incentives.

You’ve problem already noticed some of the problems. The first being that there’s not a whole lot of writers who can individually command the minimum $5/month subscription fee. We’re not sure we’ll ever monetize Taming Complexity on Substack for that reason. Plus, we’d face having to spend months generating sufficient content to warrant such fees, while not being able to make enough to cut back hours at our day jobs. In short, Substack really doesn’t work for most part-time writers.

The other issue is that the quality on Substack has already begun to suffer. The old newspaper adage, that “if it bleeds, it leads” has continued into the social media era. The difference is that clickbait is a much more diverse set of questionably helpful information.

Although there are plenty of high quality essays from public facing philosophers and journalists, Substack is increasingly saturated with polarized “hot takes”, success columns, and doomist blogs. One of the biggest conservation bloggers on Substack, to take one example, has earned tens of thousands of subscribers while repeating a simplistic catastrophic narrative about biodiversity that a great many environmental scientists would disagree with. The lurid, inane, and inflammatory still rises to the top on Substack, and most of us struggle to get out from under the shadows of the Matthew Iglesias’s and Noah Smith’s of Substack, whose huge followings often seem to have more to do with their knack for cultivating a highly visible personality brand than with the quality of their arguments per se.

Enter Aemula.

The idea behind this new platform is to do a few things. First, allow readers to access a wider variety of writers for single subscription fee. This gives authors a more practical system for monetizing their writing, leveraging the advantages of functioning like a magazine without embracing the ideological narrowness of traditional media outlets.

Second, Aemula seeks to break up of the echo chamber of online media. This is accomplished by rewarding writers for the value that provide to a diverse set of readers. As a result there is less incentive for writers to preach to the choir and all the more reason for them to meaningful engage with ideas that they may disagree with. Aemula’s algorithm nicely visualizes the relationship between different perspectives on the platform, providing a clear signal to writers about whom they are (and aren’t) engaging. It also suggests articles to readers that are far from their comfort zone or usual reading habits.

No doubt that the problems with today’s polarized political culture won’t be solved by platforms like Aemula alone. But they are much needed experiments. And we hope that, if you would like to help financially support our efforts at Taming Complexity, that you consider subscribing to Aemula and engaging with our articles there.