The Middle-Class Content Farm: Why Substack Is Not Your Community
By Lloyd Lewis for Art of FACELESS
Let us stop pretending Substack is a creative revolution. Let us stop stroking the platform like a wounded pet. Let us call it what it is. Substack has become a playground for middle-class hobbyists who treat writing like a scented candle: a relaxing little ritual that requires no consequences, no sacrifice, and certainly no need to pay the rent with the words they produce.
People talk about the place like it is the second coming of the open web. They talk about community, connection, authenticity. What they actually mean is validation. What they actually mean is: look at me. What they actually mean is: I love being part of a club where everyone looks and talks exactly like me and has the luxury of calling this work.
For those of us who grew up working class, who grafted for every scrap of skill, who write while juggling illness, disability, trauma, and the real cost of living in Britain, this platform is not liberating. It is a live demonstration of how the middle class can turn anything, absolutely anything, into a soft-focus lifestyle brand.
Spend ten minutes in Notes. You will see the entire class structure laid bare. The pep talks. The vague spiritual wisdom. The performative vulnerability. The interminable threads about how to grow your audience, written by people who walked in with ready-made networks and then pretend they built everything from zero. It is the same bullshit you see everywhere else: privilege disguised as grind.
Substack is full of people who speak with the confidence of someone who has never once needed their writing to pay an electricity bill. People who have no idea what it means to choose between heating and a new laptop. People who can throw around the word craft because they have never had to weaponise creativity to survive anything.
Here is the truth. Working-class writers do not have the luxury of being whimsical. We do not get to be airy. We do not get to float around making vibes. Our writing is not a brand. It is work. It is labour. It is the thing that keeps us alive, literally and creatively. It is the only space where we get to exist without apology, because Britain gives us nothing else.
Substack sells the fantasy that everyone starts equal. That is utter bollocks. The platform is shaped by the same class dynamics as the rest of the British cultural system. Time is a privilege. Health is a privilege. Confidence is a privilege. Social ease is a privilege. Financial buffer is a privilege. And Substack rewards every single one of them.
It rewards people who can be online all day. It rewards people who can comment endlessly. It rewards people who can network without the exhaustion of chronic illness. It rewards people who have the psychological space to write daily without fear gnawing at them. It rewards people who already have safety.
Then it has the audacity to frame success as effort. To imply that if you are not growing, it is because you are not dedicated enough. Not charming enough. Not posting enough. Not playing the game correctly.
It is never the system. It is always you. That is the trick.
This is not democracy. This is the cultural equivalent of a landlord telling you the rent would be affordable if you budgeted harder.
The working class in Britain are always told to budget harder. Disabled people are always told to be more resilient. Neurodivergent people are always told to be more disciplined. And now writers are told the same thing on a platform that sells itself as liberation. The irony is almost funny. Almost.
Substack could have been different. It could have admitted the real class structures at work and built tools around them. It could have acknowledged that not everyone arrives with the same capacity, the same health, the same background, the same level of inherited confidence. It could have created a space where working-class voices were more than a marketing asset.
But instead it has become a glossy, middle-class content farm where your raw experience becomes someone else’s engagement metric. Where sincerity is packaging. Where authenticity is a performance. Where every piece of writing is another brick in the algorithm’s wall.
If you are working class, disabled, chronically ill, or simply living outside the bubble, here is the secret. You are not failing. The system is doing exactly what it was built to do. Platforms reproduce their users, and Substack has been colonised by people who treat creativity as a hobby and pain as a narrative spice.
So let us not pretend the space is neutral. Let us not hold our breath waiting for fairness. Let us use it when it serves us, then walk around it, build beside it, and refuse to sacrifice our labour to a platform that wants our stories but not our sovereignty.
Substack is not your community. It is not your home. It is not your revolution. It is a middle-class self-admiration chamber with an inbox function.
And if you want to see what real critique looks like, go ahead and read the polite version of this essay, the one we dared to publish on Substack itself. Because unlike the platform, we are not afraid to speak honestly.
Further Reading (the polite version)
