The New Year
Plans, Rants, and Working Harder
Happy New Year!
Words cannot express my gratitude for your attention, subscriptions, support, and readership over the course of the last year and hopefully many more to come. As so many others have done, I wanted to write to you all about my plans for 2024 on Substack, alongside my general plans continuing on as the amphibian known as “The Prudentialist.” I will be breaking down what 2024 holds in store for you in terms of my workload and production of essays, livestreams, and videos. However before I get too far into that I wanted to review 2023 and the work that has passed us. I will put in bold here, your feedback is very much appreciated and welcomed.
2023 - Substack and YouTube
These two platforms are where most of my work output can be found. My most read Substack pieces this year were focused on “The Discourse” of various topics, including the discussion over Kruptos’ thread about the trailer home resident/single mother about class, The Blaze Media’s Iowa Conference, Ireland’s Riots over Migrants to the most shared one being about the flash in the pan moment over the Japanese McDonald’s commercial showing a functional nuclear family. Rank Punditry is great I suppose but they lack the staying power of essays I can go back to with respects to my other colleagues. Morgoth or Dave The Distributist have videos/essays that have aged incredibly well, and that’s what I would like to transition towards.
There’s also the need to balance the high concept, “theorycel” take on things with the news. Of course when it comes to writing or conceptualizing ideas into a longer format than just some tangent on a tweet or just some conversation on a livestream.
On that note I cannot express my disdain for the livestream enough. It is a money-maker, I am aware it is one of the most profitable ways to do the YouTube/E-Right Politics game for some. However I find that it inhibits fully fleshed out thoughts and ideas from happening, or at least from being put down onto some kind of paper or record. I remember an exchange on a livestream once between Mr. J. Burden and The Distributist where J. Burden had apologized for not having a thought on the topic fully fleshed out; to which Dave had replied “It’s a livestream the thought is never fully thought out.” That has stuck with me considerably over the course of the last year.
YouTube appears to be algorithmically pushing for what you regularly do. If you regularly stream (or have an audience that expects you to) the Streams and the VODs of the streams will be getting more views that your fleshed out video essay. I’ve noticed this between my streams of various interviews, geopolitics, and of course The Digital Archipelago compared to my video essays, pre-recorded discussions, and the ongoing book review/breakdown of Sean McMeekin’s Stalin’s War. It’s frustrating to say the least, but we’ll get to that later.
2023 concluded with 10.9k subscribers to YouTube, was hoping to cross the 11k threshold but I growth from 10k to 11k has been slower than it was getting from 5k to 10k, in part because of an ongoing shift in focus. Geopol is still important, but like with all things one does with passion, you can fall in and out of love with it. I don’t do this as my sole full time job, although I put the hours into it like it is. Overall, 2023 was the year of the livestream, although I wish to never be known as a “streamer” with regards to politics. I do plan to stream less in 2024.
Substack/writing in general has been an interesting exercise from more thought-out pieces getting less attention than the spur-of-the-moment punditry pieces. Words cannot express my personal frustration that my most well read piece of 2023 was that ridiculous discussion over the Japanese McDonalds’ advertisement but I suppose you take your wins where you can. This isn’t intended to sound like I’m bitching, you have to grind for your clicks in order write about what you want, but I do want to be take things to a more serious degree than writing an article explaining “the twitter discourse of the week” as you could go to the New Right Poast for that here on Substack.
Streaming incentivizes superchats and less effort, less effort in the sense that your work to content output is almost 1:1 but the video and the essay need to make a come back. I’ll wrap it up there, as I am grateful for the support and the views and growth over the course of 2022.
Plans for the Year
For Starters: Write More.
While streams and the podcast circuit work wonders on boosting your public image, you need things that actually represent said image. This means written work and some kind of portfolio. Earlier this week I had a discussion on the value of writing, at least in the blogosphere sense of the word, that it allows someone like myself to continuously pour content and work to write for other publications. While it does seem like streaming and the short-form content is the future (for the time being) I think the long-form video or the essay will survive well into the future as that audience is still the competent batch of people who still read. Literacy in all things is necessary, and whoever survives this post-literate filter will be someone you want in your corner.
2024 will be the year I spend more time on Substack, and submitting to publications like IM-1776, Man’s World, The Dissident Review, and The American Mind. In full transparency to my readers and listeners, I’d like to get hired somewhere by someone in our relative media ecosystem. Doesn’t mean it’ll happen, but I am striving as all men should. Although if we’re being realistic and honest, this will remain a side-job for a considerable amount of time but I will continue my efforts to grow, learn, and offer what insights I can to you and to others.
Website/Diversify Platforms:
I’m already doing mulit-streaming to Twitter, YouTube, Rumble, and other places. As Substack continues to face pressure with its deboosted links on Twitter, and no more recent attacks against “Nazis” on this platform, I’ll probably work towards developing a website or at least move to other blogging platforms as well to continue up writing and video hosting. Not to say that I am Nazi, but when anti-facsism is “stuff I don’t like” to the progressive state religion, probably best to be safe. Lord knows they’ve harassed Substack before for people like Eugyppius, so we’ll see what happens in the year ahead.
For instance I’m on Gab, although I don’t really use it and I have argued and will continue to argue for staying on mainstream platforms for as long as possible to get as much as possible out of them. YouTube, Substack, Twitter, all of them still are the most widely used and we should take advantage of our time on these platforms even if our days are innately numbered by being on the Right. However with Elon Musk now controlling Twitter (X, but I’m never calling it that) things do seem on the up and up there but one should remain highly cautious and skeptical.
Topics of Interest
There are a few things I plan to get into further this year, especially as blogging, tweeting, and live-streaming remain king for ways in which our ideas are spread and matriculated online. This doesn’t mean I won’t be paying attention to current events or commentating on the news (heck that’s half the content on The Digital Archipelago or when I’m on Pony Express Radio) but I want to get further into the works of scholars and thinkers that still have a major impact on how we view the world today.
Digital Media and Communication - I will be reading more McLuhan and Harold Innis this year, the more I think about how much my mind is warped by Twitter, YouTube, or even audiobooks the more I want to understand how it affects my mind and the communities I inhabit online.
Pedagogy- How do we learn? How are we being taught? Who teaches you? Are we all autodidacts teaching other people who come onto the scene? What is the traditional approach to criticism and research? Does anyone remember their early intro into research classes? The more we know how to learn, the better we can teach the next generation.
Industry/Logistics - Not too many logistics or maritime experts let alone civil engineers come to the field. Too many theorycel types. I want to learn more from the Subject Matter Experts.
Looking Ahead
This Year I will be writing more, which will make the YouTube/Video Essay game easier. On top of this I will be trying to be more active in the actual “meat space” of sorts, going to more events, meet ups, with organizations friendly to our side of things as well as The Old Glory Club.
2024 will be a rough year in terms of it being an election cycle, to regional conflicts still ongoing alongside an economy that feels like it could go belly up at any moment. When looking at other’s on my timelines and livestreams there is both unease, optimism, and a renewed focus that comes with what lies ahead. I’m not a betting man with predictions, but this will probably be a year unlike any before. Chasing the high of 2016 will probably continue writ large for a lot of people online, but I think it’s abundantly clear that we’re all simultaneously searching for that high whilst trying to escape the darkness that surrounds our present times. St. John Chrysostom tells us that prayer is the light of the soul, giving us the true knowledge of God. I pray that we find ourselves aware of what must be done, and that the road ahead is long, but we will God willing, endure.
A podcast may draw more people but a good article is what makes people actually pay you and admire you. I like your content but as someone who enjoys articles more than 3 hour long podcasts i had to unsub because it became unjustifiable cost-benefit wise. I'm thankful you will write more, you are one of the best out there.
And i don't mean to single you out on this, i dropped AA's subscription aswell (altho i bought his book) due to him abandoning written pieces and focusing on 3 hour long podcasts.
Happy new year!