Getting By With A Little Help From My Friends

Author’s note: it has been an awkward, yet exciting week in my life since I last published an article. The good news is that I’m not dead; the even better news is that I have been extremely busy with a new project that will fundamentally alter the nature of ninaillingworth.com, in what I hope is a good way. 

 

The NIDC Origin Story

As I’ve often been fond of noting, the plain truth is that everyone who spends all their time producing content online, whether it be tweets, essays, or videos, has some kind of agenda. Sometimes, that agenda will be quite obvious and relatively benign; raising money for a local no-kill animal shelter, teaching YouTube viewers the basics of anarchism, or simply finding new listeners for your dope podcast on SoundCloud, for example. Of course, sometimes that agenda will be obfuscated and quite sinister, such as convincing folks living in a world on the brink that climate catastrophe isn’t real so a handful of billionaires and oil executives can continue raking in the profits.

Naturally, I’m no exception to this rule; especially as someone who spends entirely too much time online. When I first created this website in March of 2016, my goals were fairly modest. I’d recently had my first (of many) encounters with corporate censorship, and I wanted some place to share my analysis that couldn’t be deleted by a bougie tech bro minion if I swore at the wrong rich person on Twitter. Given that I was still working full time, and I had almost no money to throw at this project however, I was firmly operating on a hobbyist basis; although I must confess that as my readership quickly grew, I did occasionally dream about making a career out of it.

Unfortunately, due to some combination of the ongoing algorithmic censorship of dissident left wing voices, and my preternatural ability to piss literally everyone off by exposing their faves across the political spectrum, that dream died a quiet death a few years into this project. I spent a little while relentlessly bashing my head against the problem, but the truth is that I never really got anywhere in terms of solving it. Ultimately what saved me was pure fortune; through literally no merit of my own, my small family’s financial situation simply improved enough that I could take up writing full time, and I didn’t actually need to make any money doing so to pay my rent.

 

This May Be A Blog But I’m No Blogger

Quite frankly liberation from the tyranny of rent changed my lived experience in a number of profound ways that go well beyond the scope of this article. I was by no means wealthy, but I could now afford to build a cracking leftist library, and for perhaps the first time in my adult life, my time was my own. More pertinently, this drastically changed my approach to writing as a whole. Although it took me a while to realize it, and perhaps even longer to act on it, my newfound financial stability allowed me to escape the blogging model.

Now to be clear, this isn’t some sort of credentialist sneer; there are a great number of bloggers out there online who consistently produce much better work than you’ll find in mainstream media outlets. The act of blogging, and in particular getting your work out to the wider public without the benefit of a marketing department and in an objectively hostile media environment, is however a dark art of the vilest design. This is literally the hot take economy baby; good bloggers specialize in churning out a huge volume of provocatively-titled posts that make their readers exceptionally angry at someone, but not typically at the blogger.

Again, this really has nothing to do with the quality of the content being produced on a blog; it’s mostly a question of mathematics and economics. Most bloggers get paid through ad revenue, or subscription models that are also dependent on constantly drawing new eyeballs to your work. Provocative headlines bring in more clicks, writing more provocative headlines per month gives you more chances to earn those clicks, and getting your audience to mash the outrage button increases their emotional investment, thus ensuring they’ll come back and generate a whole new cycle of page hits. Naturally, it helps if you’re good at networking, guerilla marketing, and SEO manipulations, but mostly this business is about volume and emotions.

 

A Very Strange Business Model

Now all of that may sound easy enough, and for some people I’m sure it is. For my part however, I’m a nerdy anarcho-syndicalist who washed out of the academy because in the long run, nobody is going to pay you to write heavily-sourced, scholarly dissertations about why we should eat the rich and abolish capitalism, in a society dominated by rich capitalists. I like to write long essays, about fairly complicated subjects, and cite infinite sources to prove my arguments; which generally means I produce far fewer posts than most bloggers, and the posts I do publish typically appeal to a more narrow, ideologically left wing audience.

Sure, I swear like a drunken sailor and I’ve spent decades polishing an extremely casual, labor class writing style; but at the heart of my work you’ll still find academic essays that try to teach critical thinking, and often demand an uncomfortable level of introspection from the reader. Of course, whether or not those essays are in fact any good is another question entirely; but what they are clearly not is the way to build a successful blog that pays your rent. Not only do I prefer academic writing, but there are days I even think I’m good at it; in all the time I was trying, I never once thought I was particularly good at blogging.

This in turn has left me with a curious and wholly unprofitable business model; I’m essentially wasting time, and burning money, for the sole purpose of teaching critical theory, raising class consciousness, and opposing reactionary thought in our shared discourse. Given that I have no need to make rent, or reason to believe this endeavor will become profitable, I can write whatever I want, whenever I want, as long as I can offset some of my expenses with modest Patreon donations. I don’t have to charge for my work, or hide essays behind a paywall; and most importantly I can write for the kind of left wing, labor class, and marginalized audience the corporate outlets would rather pretend doesn’t exist.

 

Expanded Horizons

Naturally, I am neither immune to criticism, nor the the perils of vanity, but for the most part this arrangement has allowed me to write the kind of articles I want to share with the type of readers I’m trying to speak to; the only real problem here is that there’s a finite cap in terms of how much content I as one writer can conceivably produce at a loss. Recently however a close comrade of mine and longtime fan of my writing, has offered me the opportunity to also burn some of his money in a project to expand the work we do on this website; with no editorial strings attached.

At first, I was obviously going to plow the money into stock buybacks like a bougie maggot. Given that this website is in no way a real business however, I eventually decided to spend it buying content from pinko writers who wouldn’t otherwise have an opportunity to sell their work and reach an audience online. Please allow me to stress the point here; this is not a fundraising drive, I’m not asking you for donations, I’m just going to pay a bunch of my friends who should be better compensated for their efforts, to write more free-to-read articles for ninaillingworth.com.

While I see no reason why this would affect my own level of content production (for better, or for worse), it does represent a significant change for this blog. Shifting from just me, to some sort of “we” arrangement raises a number of sticky questions; many of which I’m still not prepared to answer after eight days of research and dialogue. Quite frankly I have absolutely no clue what I’m doing and if I told you I expected money labelled “for leftist content production only” to fall into my lap one day, you’d be free to call me a liar. Obviously, I’m still working with a finite budget here, but that’s unarguably better than no budget at all.

 

This Will Be a Process

I have already solicited my first article from a trusted creator, but I’m a long way away from finding the coterie of regular writers I’m going to need going forward. At this point I don’t even have a copy editor, a style and submission guide, or any way to vet writers I don’t already know. Furthermore, the magnitude of what I now realize that I don’t know about the project I’m undertaking here, is a little daunting in its own right.

I do know that I want to fairly compensate my comrades for their efforts while still allowing them full creative control over their content; including the right to publish it elsewhere, as long as I get it first. I also know that I’m only interested in sharing class conscious content that ultimately fits within an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-fascist framework. After that, I must confess that I’ll be learning as I go while running a neophyte dictatorship of the unprofitable; I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty excited about this opportunity.

In the very near term, this all means that readers of ninaillingworth.com will slowly begin to see articles with new bylines, and the keyword “friends of the blog.” In fact, we’ll be publishing our first piece by Jacksonville, Florida IWW organizer Chris Walker tomorrow, and I strongly encourage you to check it out. Long term however, I’m budgeting for a time when we can publish new content on this website every single day, while continuing to keep it ad-free, and publicly available for anyone to read without charge.

Ultimately, the story here is that you get more content, more perspectives, and all the regular essays you’re used to from this website, for absolutely nothing; that’s the kind of deal cash literally cannot buy, because I won’t sell it. In turn, you can help me lose money to teach class warfare by sharing links to all of the additional free content this new funding is hopefully going to allow me, or rather us, to create. In one fell swoop we can annoy rich people on Twitter, help aspiring socialist writers pay the rent, and participate in literally the worst business plan I’ve ever come up with; the whole idea is patently absurd, and I absolutely adore it.

Alright then, let’s raise some hell and build some solidarity.

 

 

• nina illingworth

 

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Instagram, Mastodon, Facebook, and other social media.

Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud. Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites.

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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”