• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, Yesterday

It’s Mid-April. Vancouver. I’m sitting in the TED Theatre, and the media world is melting down.

Paramount is reportedly considering a $75 million settlement in a $20 billion lawsuit filed by Donald Trump against CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” alleging election interference due to edited interviews with Kamala Harris.

The Los Angeles Times laid off more journalists—again. Fourteen more union members gone. That's after a January bloodbath that axed 100+ jobs. California’s flagship paper is looking more like a haunted mansion than a newsroom.

And The Washington Post? Chaos at the top. Jeff Bezos’ hand-picked CEO Will Lewis has told staff the paper is bleeding money, shedding readers, and may not survive another Trump term. Executive editor Sally Buzbee “resigned” with a push, and the newsroom is leaderless and leaking.

So no, I wasn’t expecting hope that day.

I certainly wasn’t expecting it from Hamish McKenzie.

Hamish isn’t loud. He doesn’t strut on stage with Steve Jobs energy. There’s no bombast. No laser pointer. His shirt’s unassuming. His tone’s mellow. The flashiest thing about him? A pair of  black sneakers with white stripes.

But as soon as he started talking, I knew something was different.

“We’ve gone from catechism to cacophony,” he said.

That line hit me like a brick. It wasn’t just clever—it was painfully accurate.

We once had a media world of order. Of editors. Of gatekeepers. You can hate it or romanticize it, but at least it was structured. You read your local paper over coffee. Watched the nightly news after dinner. Everyone got the same front page.

Now? It’s chaos. Rage clips. Conspiracies in carousel format. Doomscrolling in bed until you’re too numb to care.

And the system isn’t broken—it’s working as designed: designed to addict and divide.

"We're living through the most significant media disruption since the printing press. For decades, we all lived in a media world that was kind of like a temple. It was taught down, centralized, and controlled by gatekeepers," Hamish added.

The Garden Is Not a Metaphor

So here comes Hamish, co-founder of Substack, telling us it doesn’t have to be this way. That another system is already growing. He calls it The Garden.

And at first, I’ll be honest—I thought it was too precious. A garden? Really? That’s what we’re bringing to this burning media hellscape? Raised beds and compost metaphors?

But then I heard what he meant. Not metaphor, framework.

The Garden is a decentralized ecosystem built around trust, not traffic. Around relationships, not reach. Where creators speak directly to their readers. Where money changes hands without middlemen. Where the power doesn’t flow to platforms -- it flows between people.

“Economic autonomy gives creators freedom. Instead of answering to bosses, or an advertiser, or an algorithm, they can focus on deeply serving their communities," Hamish said.

It’s Already Happening—You Just Might’ve Missed It

Hamish didn’t pitch a fantasy future. He showed us what’s already working:

— Caroline Chambers, rejected by traditional publishers, built a half-million-strong Substack following around one simple question: “What’s a cook to do when they don’t feel like cooking?” She now has a New York Times bestseller.

— Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, two political commentators from opposite sides of the aisle, walked away from corporate news and built "Breaking Points" from scratch. Subscription-based, audience-funded, watched by millions—no boss, no filter.

— Matt Yglesias, who co-founded Vox and helped build the modern explainer-journalism machine, walked away to write solo. Now, on his Substack Slow Boring, he makes over a million dollars a year. That might not be jaw-dropping for a Fox News anchor—but for a policy nerd typing away from home with no editor, no ads, and no corporate backing? It’s a seismic shift. He owns the work. He owns the audience. And he's living proof that one smart writer can build a sustainable media business without selling their soul to the algorithm.

These aren’t influencers. They’re not chasing brand deals or follower counts. They’re building businesses on the back of trust. That’s the difference. That’s the model.

The Dinner That Connected the Dots

A few nights later, Hamish joined a private dinner hosted by my company. Just a dozen of us—journalists, funders, activists, builders. We weren’t there to pat each other on the back. We were there to figure out how to stop the collapse from swallowing everything.

Hamish didn’t preach. He listened and nswered questions. He challenged us when we defaulted to “save journalism” tropes. And what he said landed hard: The old system can’t be saved.

It was built for scarcity. For mass. For monoculture. And now, that mass has shattered into a billion fragments. Attention is too fractured. Trust too eroded. And the economic incentives? Still built on surveillance and speed.

But in The Garden, trust scales -- slowly, intentionally, one subscriber at a time. It’s not fast. It’s not viral. But it’s real. And it’s sustainable.
“When creators own their relationships with their audiences directly, no platform or algorithm can suddenly cut them off from their community,” he said

But What About the Nazis?

Let’s talk about the thing that makes even Substack fans squirm.

Substack has come under fire for its refusal to deplatform extremist voices, including some that openly espouse white nationalist or Nazi ideology. More than 200 Substack writers signed an open letter last year calling for moderation standards. Some walked away entirely. Others, like me, kept watching, waiting to see if the founders would flinch.

They didn’t.

Hamish and his co-founders have been consistent—and blunt. Their stance? Substack is a platform, not a publisher. They don't curate or promote. And they won’t remove someone just for having repugnant views.

As Hamish put it in a public post: “We don’t like Nazis either—we wish no one held those views. But some people do. And we don’t think censorship makes the problem go away—in fact, it often makes it worse.”

This is where The Garden model rubs up against reality. No editors. No algorithmic suppression. No content police. That’s the promise—but it’s also the risk.

Hamish isn’t naïve. He knows some people will abuse that freedom. But his counter is simple: Trust the readers. If the business model is trust—not clicks or outrage—then bad actors won’t thrive. They’ll wither.

Hamish told me that in the end,  "We did take down five of the six extremist publications that Casey Newton put forward for consideration, which had a total of 100 active users.”

Agree or not, it’s a hell of a contrast to the black-box moderation chaos of X, Facebook, and YouTube. And at least with Substack, you know who you’re dealing with—and how they’re making money.

Substack Isn’t the Point—It’s a Prototype

Let’s be clear: Substack isn’t the whole story. It’s one node in a larger movement. The Garden also includes Patreon, Ghost, Twitch, YouTube subscriptions, even paid podcasts.

What matters isn’t the tool. It’s the shift—from centralized to distributed, from attention economies to intention economies.

No, It’s Not Perfect. Yes, It’s the Future.

Can Substack be gamed? Sure. Can it host extremists? Unfortunately, yes. That’s the risk of a truly open system. But the fix isn’t more algorithmic control—it’s more accountability, more transparency, and more choice.

We’ve lived through the chaos. We’re still living it. But now we’ve got a glimpse of something better.

And I didn’t expect that hope to come from a guy in low-key sneakers talking about gardening.

But here we are.

A Vote for the Culture You Want to See

“Every subscription, every share, and every minute of our attention is a vote for the culture we want to flourish,” said Hamish.

That line stuck with me.

Because it’s not just about media. It’s about culture, about choosing nuance over noise, depth over dopamine, sonversations over clout.

I relaunched my Substack after that. Not because Hamish convinced me. But because I saw what I hadn’t before: This isn’t a newsletter platform. It’s a lever. A way to opt out of the chaos—and grow something worth subscribing to.

So, yeah—plant the damn garden. Because the wreckage isn’t going to fix itself.