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ok so let me just legit have a holler for a minute about co-running/co-founding an indie media collective in an era when slop is dominant, technofacists have unprecedented access to policy-makers, and we're all so goddamned tired making real shit is hard and costs money

in late fall '23, I wrote about what the fall of twitter did to independent journalism, which was never a safe bet even before. i tracked just a little bit of how fucked up the non-corporate news sphere was gonna be without Twitter.

The ~ newsletterification ~ of indie reporting was supposed to be our post-Twitter saving grace, even though the only way to really succeed at that point was to transfer a built-in audience to (supposedly) a Substack which even at that point, we knew Substack was a Nazi haven

Substack remains a Nazi haven, shored up by leftists who refuse to leave the platform because they either wrongly believe it's too profitable to abandon or don't care. Buncha folks left the platform anway, including me. We were all thinking how to make a business work.

This time-ish, I'm hollering at my sweet husband at the bar, four old-fashioneds deep, about the loss of feminist media and the dearth of feminist cultural criticism that shaped me. I loved/still love short-form video, but I LOVE TO READ AND I LOVE TO WRITE, TOO. And I thought: other people do too!

I literally just started emailing people whose work I loved and respected. I had no goddamned idea what I was doing, but I thought it would be possible to run an online feminist media group where great ideas could see the light of day without every individual having to hustle independently.

The people I reached out to reached out to other people. We had a bunch of weird and awkward meetings. We ended up with a core group calling ourselves The Flytrap. We launched with a Kickstarter on election day '24, which was FUCKIN AWFUL, but we made enough to get started