The Rest Is Substack: Mehdi Hasan, Zeteo and the Parallel Establishment

I recently watched a February 2025 interview on the BBC’s Media Show with Mehdi Hasan, the journalist behind Zeteo. He’s using paid subscriptions to Substack to build a left-leaning media company (complete with branded hoodies) as an alternative to legacy outlets such as the BBC. Naomi Klein, Owen Jones and Cynthia Nixon are already involved in delivering content.

I'm not uncritical of Substack, nor unaware of how it works. Still, at first glance, I could see the appeal. OK, Zeteo is largely comment and opinion-driven - because, as we know, these platforms require a constant stream of (ideally clippable) content to keep engagement high. And it’s much easier to come up with that on a regular basis if you're offering 'hot takes'. Yes, Gary Lineker's The Rest Is ... podcast empire, we're looking at you. And, indeed, a lot of the material on Zeteo does come across as filmed podcasts and Zoom calls. Podcasts and Zoom calls with high production values maybe, but podcasts and Zoom calls nonetheless.

However, I can understand why liberal-left journalists might be drawn to Substack, and to Zeteo - especially given what's going on at the likes of the BBC, Washington Post and Guardian right now. (The Observer’s John Naughton can’t go a week without recommending something from a Substack newsletter in his Networker tech column - usually by a man. What's that about?) So I got intrigued.

But before even more of us rush out to join Substack, let me say that lasted all of about five minutes.

Then I came across this piece from a few days ago on America 2.0, which delves deeper into the politics of Substack. It highlights how the platform isn’t just a neutral tool for independent writing and journalism - it’s also a key pillar of what Marc Andressen, Balaji Srinivasan and other advocates of the 'Network State' call the 'parallel establishment'.

At the inaugural Network State conference in Amsterdam in October 2023, Srinivasan laid out a vision in which Silicon Valley elites replace existing legacy institutions with their own alternatives:

So for example, at the top there's San Francisco and we're replacing San Francisco with things outside it like Cul-de-Sac in Arizona and Prospera in South America and Cabin, which is in Texas, but also around the world ....

We're gonna take out Harvard, and we have parallel education that's Replit, that Synthesis ... but it's also AI tutoring, the Thiel Fellowship, Emergent Ventures ....

We replace media with parallel media. It’s Twitter and X, it’s Substack. ... This concept of the parallel establishment, if you take up all of these new institutional replacements ... that’s a parallel establishment.

The goal? Pretty much what we're seeing unfold in the US right now. Disrupt and dismantle democratic societies and their institutions - governments and government departments, universities, the courts, the press, even cities - and replace them with decentralized, corporate-backed alternatives that function as competing fiefdoms. Seen in this context, Substack isn’t just an outlet for independent writing and journalism; it’s part of a broader push to erode traditional public institutions in favor of privatized, libertarian tech enclaves.

So, just in case anyone is tempted, while Substack and Zeteo may seem like promising alternatives to legacy media, you know... best keep in mind how they fit into the bigger picture.

Masked Media by Gary Hall - new open access book from Open Humanities Press

Announcing the latest title in Open Humanities Press MEDIA : ART : WRITE : NOW series:

Masked Media: What It Means to Be Human in the Age of Artificial Creative Intelligence by Gary Hall

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

If we want a socially and environmentally just future, do we need a radical new theory of change – or to radically change theory? It’s this question Gary Hall and his collaborators have been addressing for over twenty years with experimental publishing projects such as Open Humanities Press, Liquid and Living Books, and the Culture-Led Re-Commoning of Cities. Unsettling received ideas of the author and the book, originality and copyright, real and artificial intelligence, these uncommon communities of theorist-mediums are testing the ‘non-modernist-liberal’ modes of creating and sharing knowledge that are enabled by various media technologies, from writing and print, through photography and video, to computers and GenAI. By thinking outside the masked black box that renders Euro-Western knowledge-making practices invisible – keeping the human ontologically separate from the nonhuman, be it animals, the planet or algorithmic machines – they show there’s no such thing as the human, in any simple sense, the nonhuman already being in(the)human.

Masked Media is one such experimental project. It is not a ‘human-authored’ work. Instead, the thinking within it has been generated by a radically relational assemblage that includes AI and more. Although the book appears under a real name – ‘Gary Hall’ – which, like Banksy and Karen Eliot, acts as a mask, it is not the intellectual property of a singular human individual, and is published under a Collective Conditions for Re-Use licence to reflect this. Masked Media shows how such norm-critical experimentation is of vital importance to our understanding of everything, from identity politics and the decolonialisation of knowledge, through epistemologies of the Global South and the possibilities of open city infrastructure, to extractive capitalism, planetary destruction and the Anthropocene. It thus constitutes a call to radically redesign theory for a time of multiple crises.

In Masked Media, a follow-up to A Stubborn Fury, Hall proceeds to show how our ways of writing and working can be reinvented to produce a more socially just future after the years of austerity, the coronavirus pandemic and (re)election of Trump.

Like all Open Humanities Press books, Masked Media is available open access (and can be downloaded for free):

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/masked-media/

Masked Media is a media experiment as much as it is a work of deft media philosophy. Moving beyond well-worn practices of book authorship, Masked Media yields something far more substantial: a collaborative media praxeology for the twenty-first century and beyond. More than a book, then, the pages assembled here represent an all-too-rare achievement that makes good on the posthumanist promise to collaborate with nonhuman materials and challenge deeply rooted notions of human sovereignty pervading academe. This is an experiment in performative media theory that is sure to inspire a new generation of theorist-practitioners across a wide range disciplines and practices. .

Adam Nocek, Director of the Center for Philosophical Technologies, Arizona State University

Before reading Gary Hall’s new book, you might think it was just another quantifiable volume by an established media theorist about the relationship between academic conventions, the development of new digital technologies and their embedding in an inescapable economic system. As you read it, however, the masks fall and you have to ask yourself who actually wrote this book – and is it a book at all? The positions discussed, critical as they are of liberalism and individual authorship, provide indispensable material for training new AI models in order to enable them to become equally self-reflexive and authorship-critical media, themselves performing authorial agency.

Cornelia Sollfrank, artist and researcher

A crucial volume for understanding the profound transformations in the perception, notion and political value of sharing information and related infrastructures, reflecting a few decades of practice. It deeply challenges the whole concept of authorship with a new radical approach, where the ‘author’ has a collective and multiple dimension, in which human and nonhuman authors are seemingly integrated.

Alessandro Ludovico, Winchester School of Art, editor of Neural magazine

Making it Unfair, or Who Owns Creativity? AI, Copyright and the Battle for Wealth and Control

Today has seen yet more protests - this time from newspapers and musicians, the latter including Kate Bush, Damon Albarn and Annie Lennox - against AI companies for using their copyrighted work without permission to train generative models.

https://inews.co.uk/opinion/made-in-britain-stolen-by-generative-ai-3552357?srsltid=AfmBOoob68TTNnxBjj9RpcBcR8XQC3dUNlNM11WPxSpZwgvW1mCCsVbw

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/24/1000-artists-release-silent-album-to-protest-uk-copyright-sell-out-to-ai/

Yet, to reiterate, the solution to what OpenAI, Stability AI and co. are doing is not to preserve or strengthen existing copyright law. That would be to continue upholding a system that benefits a relatively small group of organizations and creatives - Kate Bush, Damon Albarn and Annie Lennox included - to the disadvantage of nearly everyone else.

Or is that, in fact, the issue? Is the debate really about who gets to belong to this small, privileged group in the future? Newspapers, musicians/music companies, or BigAI?

Crucially, the approach of the wider UK Creative Industries’ Make It Fair campaign - of resisting AI ‘piracy’ by preserving or strengthening copyright law - ignores the fact that, as David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu make clear in their recent book Who Owns This Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Copywrongs:

• Copyright is a major driver of inequality in the twenty-first century.
• It plays a pivotal but often overlooked role when it comes to understanding the roots of disparities of wealth in modern societies.
• the wealthiest corporations globally derive their power primarily from owning copyright and patents, with ‘sixteen of the fifty richest people in the world’ amassing their fortunes entirely or partially from copyright-related industries.

What’s so fair about this?

The Afterlife of the AI Author

In 'The Death of the AI Author', Carys Craig and Ian Kerr endeavor to provide an ontological exploration of 'what an author must be' by moving away from the figure of the romantic authorial self as rights-bearing legal subject. This figure, they argue, is a 'mythic' ideological construct that is also underpinned by legal and philosophical liberalism. And, like liberalism, the romantic author lies at the heart of both copyright doctrine and contemporary ideas of AI authorship, too. According to Craig and Kerr, AI should not be 'treated as special-purpose human beings' producing work-for-hire; nor should it be mischaracterized as a radically individualized creative entity capable of being the 'sole creator and master' of a text. Engaging with some of the most influential thinkers on the subject of authorship and its relation to the law – Martha Woodmansee, Mark Rose, James Boyle, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Nancy Millar, Peggy Kamuf – they maintain that authorship is both a fundamentally human endeavor' and 'fundamentally relational'. It is 'a dialogic and communicative act that is inherently social, with the cultivation of selfhood and social relations being the entire point of the practice'.

Craig and Kerr may view creativity as an ongoing 'collaborative and cumulative process' in which the 'act of authorship cannot be separated from a social context'. However, even as they emphasize relationality, they retain the normative modernist categories that ensure those living persons engaged in this dialogic process of 'authorship with relational autonomy' are kept ontologically distinct from nonliving artifacts. The AI author, they insist, 'bears no ontological resemblance to the human author'. As a result, they offer a vision of authorship that is 'dynamic' and based on 'relational theory', a vision they contrast to both the romantic and machinic author. Yet Craig and Kerr stop short of advocating a radical ontological (and potentially de-liberalizing) understanding of relationality of the kind found in the work of theorists such as Arturo Escobar, Karen Barad and Rosi Braidotti. Their account of the 'ontology of authorship and its social significance' is careful not to critique humanism, for instance. Authorship for them remains 'exclusively within the human domain'. They also reject the possibility of the non-human author, along with the threat of the transformation of copyright law to reward any such nonhuman production. Instead, what they mean by relational is an 'human interchange' that embeds authors-cum-speaking subjects within their otherwise black-boxed social and cultural relations.

Granted, Craig and Kerr acknowledge that AI machines are not 'islands' and that their outputs 'depend upon, and are inextricably linked to, a vast sea of texts authored by human actions, interactions, and creative processes'. However, there is little sense of the human's entangled, intra-active relations with a diverse array of human and nonhuman elements of the kind that creates fundamental problems for the normative modernist division between human and machine. Ultimately, it is hard not to conclude that Craig and Kerr’s 'de-romanticizing' of AI authorship is an effort to preserve a more nuanced version of the Euro-Western, modernist, humanist author – and by extension copyright – rather than to fundamentally challenge it. In their concern to demonstrate that a 'human author as perquisite to copyright' does not necessitate the romantic author, the whole thrust of 'The Death of the AI Author' appears to be to rescue humanism and copyright (and, intentionally or not, the inequalities of economic wealth and power they entail) in the face of what Craig and Kerr see as the mistaken claims to authorship of robots and AI.

On Not Writing Accessibly - with David Graeber and Rebecca Solnit

In an extract from her foreword to David Graeber’s new collection, The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World, Rebecca Solnit writes that Graeber:

wanted to put [ideas] in everyone’s hands … Which is part of why he worked hard at – and succeeded in – writing in a style that … was always as clear and accessible as possible, given the material. Egalitarianism is a prose style, too.

…. A sentence Lyndsey Stonebridge wrote about Hannah Arendt could apply equally well to him: 'To fixate on her exceptional mind is to miss something that is important about her lessons in thinking: thinking is ordinary, she teaches; that is its secret power.'

Yet isn’t this itself an example of not thinking, and instead of merely going along with received knowledge, with 'widely shared assumptions'? As is pointed out in the Robot Review of Books #11, which looks at Feeding the Machine by James Muldoon, Mark Graham and Callum Cant, advocating for accessible writing is far from neutral; it’s often wielded by journalists and others to criticize certain works as too academic or overly intellectual. Here, "'accessible' and academic”’ are  shorthand for '“good” and “bad'", as Rachael Allen, poetry editor at Granta, observes.

What’s needed, to quote feminist sociologist Rachelle Chadwick, is a certain ‘epistemic generosity’ and openness to different ideas, positions, and problems, as well as to ‘difficulty and friction’. Such a different form of critical engagement requires ‘a commitment to thinking rather than the easy repetition of accepted ideas (which often reproduce privilege) or a stubborn and defensive clinging to unexamined attachments and assumptions. Privileged persons are unfortunately prone to the latter. Comfortable social positions (and the desire to maintain them) often breed "willful ignorance".'

Besides, if they were really serious about placing their ideas in everyone’s hands, wouldn’t these thinkers make their books available on a free/libre basis, instead of selling them for £25/£10.99 each? ('It does not have to be this way', indeed. We don't have to accept it. This is only one way of doing things. There are others. This, too, can be made differently; these assumptions and values changed.)

Unfortunately, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the liberalism of Graeber, Solnit et al., far from being the solution to, say, the illiberalism of Trump, Badenoch et al., is actually part of the problem.