Substack and the Rise of the Creative Middle Class: A New Model for Community Engagement

In the wreckage of the ad-driven internet, a quiet revolution is underway. It’s not loud. It doesn’t chase clicks. It doesn’t serve brands. Instead, it serves people—through the radical idea that writers and creators should be paid directly by those who value their work.

Once a niche newsletter platform, Substack has become something much more consequential: an emerging civic and cultural infrastructure—one that’s fostering a creative middle class and, in turn, new models of community engagement.

At Otherwise, we’re interested in how people form meaning and connection in contemporary life. We pay special attention to the spaces—digital, physical, psychological—where individuals come together to shape culture. In that spirit, Substack is not merely a platform. It’s a networked commons, where trust and dialogue take precedence over virality and ad impressions.

A Return to Human-Scaled Media
Substack’s value proposition is simple: a writer can sustain a livelihood with just a few hundred paying subscribers. A few thousand can make it lucrative. No affiliate marketing, no clickbait, no chasing algorithmic dopamine. This stripped-down exchange—creator and audience, unmediated—is deeply human. It’s an invitation to opt into relationship, not just content.

And with over 5 million paid subscriptions, people are opting in. What’s emerging isn’t just a new business model—it’s a community-based media economy, where value is measured in attention, trust, and relevance, not just reach. Writers aren’t producing for advertisers. They’re writing for people who care. That simple alignment of values—writer and reader, creator and community—feels radical in an era where most digital spaces have been optimized for extraction, not engagement.

Substack as a Site of Cultural Continuity
Major media institutions are collapsing under the weight of their own contradictions. BuzzFeed News shuttered. Legacy outlets like NPR, The Washington Post, and the LA Times have undergone massive layoffs. The editorial commons that once held public discourse together is fraying.

Substack, however, is offering continuity—not by replicating old institutions, but by building resilient micro-communities around individual voices. Nate Silver, Mehdi Hasan, George Saunders, Margaret Atwood—these aren’t just big names cashing in. They’re participating in something cultural and experimental: a return to editorial intimacy.

When a platform becomes a place to gather around ideas, it starts to function more like a digital salon than a media outlet. Substack writers are hosting comments, building mailing lists, facilitating events, even forming collectives. These aren’t content producers. They’re cultural conveners. What they’re building isn’t an audience—it’s a community of inquiry.

The Creative Middle Class as Cultural Infrastructure
At Otherwise, we’ve long been interested in how emerging economic models might support a more pluralistic creative landscape—a world where more people can make meaning and make a living at the same time. Substack’s structure—where 86% of revenue goes directly to the writer—creates not just sustainability, but dignity. It’s a non-extractive platform that wins only when its creators win.

This model is nurturing the emergence of a creative middle class—writers, thinkers, artists, analysts—who aren’t beholden to the logic of scale. Instead of optimizing for virality, they optimize for resonance. For meaning. For care.

That’s not just good for creators. It’s good for all of us. Because when creators are accountable to communities—not algorithms—we all get a healthier, more human-centered information ecosystem.

The Substack Ethos and the Otherwise Imagination
At its best, Substack is an example of the kind of participatory media ecology we believe in: one that is transparent, soulful, and non-transactional. It shows us what happens when platforms step back and let community become the organizing principle.

This isn’t just about journalism or newsletters. It’s about how we want to live. Who we want to support. And what kinds of cultural infrastructures and creative public life we want to build as the old versions fall apart.