Big Meeting

They gave us an ultimatum

Picture this bro:

Thursday night. My flex bedroom apartment. Macbook M2 Air open on the dining table. Internal speakers full volume. “FE!N (Lyrics video)” playing theater mode on YouTube. “Million Dollar Baby (visualizer)” - Tommy RichMan up in the queue next. Me and you criss-cross applesauce. 9:41pm on the Macbook clock—I comment on the coincidence (Apple set time in product advertisements). Astier de Villatte incense on deckington. Lighting’s warm and unobtrusive af. Genevieve Ko’s chili crisp fettucine alfredo in our shallow bowls, Marian Burros’ plum torte in the oven. Later it’s Mindy’s 5mg THC / 5 mg CBD to close it out. Making Connections puzzles that reference common idioms to wind down. This night is damn trenchant my dawg.

Now imagine all of that is ripped out from underneath us, swiftly and without ceremony.

Imagine that. Imagine everything beautiful about life in the big city can be taken away in an instant.

That’s what’s at stake here with our relationship with Substack. They’ve asked us to shit or get off the pot, essentially.

Below, I will reprint the words we have been sent from one of Substack’s Content Partnerships Managers:

You guys suck so much. Everything you publish is dogshit. Please schedule a time via the Calendly linked here so that we can discuss this. Good lord. If we were a publicly traded company I would have pulled the plug on your accounts so fast—our stock price would’ve taken a swan dive the moment investors laid eyes on this thing. Man. What an awful, awful, publication. What an affront to our personal brand. Fuck me man how did I miss this. I’m just shaking my fucking head. Can you guys do more stuff about race?? We need that. We need more people talking about race, and its attendant social issues, on Substack. Now my partner’s walked in and can see my screen—my bedroom layout unfortunately means that the doorway provides an unobscured view into what I’m looking at on my laptop. Such is life. Now she’s looking at that video of the monkey eating its own cum that you guys shared once because it’s up on my external monitor. God. How do you live with yourselves

It kind of goes on from there. We sat through a Zoom meeting with them during which we were excoriated by Substack’s marketing team, for being both stupid and Indian (don’t fact-check). And then we came to the end of another dull and lurid meeting: these guys are giving us until the end of the year on the platform. They want us to send at least one (1) good newsletter between now and December 31. And if we don’t? We become ostracized.

Substack has threatened to release our old Gchat logs from middle school to the public—in which Ritam and I had both, independently, written long screeds against the tyranny of woke culture. We meant “having to wake up too early to go to school” back then, but now, with context collapse and everything and whatever, people will misinterpret this and hang us in the public square. Substack is using this to light a fire under our taut, striated asses.

I won’t ask Ritam to step his game up. I already know he knows that. What I can promise is this: we will be trying. We will book guest stars, celebrities, random cameos; we will go out into the world and report; we will think deeply about modern iniquities, and how Low Lift Ask can go about solving them.

I don’t want to be cancelled—I’ll tell you that much. And if Substack thinks they can force my hand by threatening to dangle me by my virtual underpants on the Internet? Well, guess what?

They’re right.

Starting next week (can’t think of something this week), we will be trying. Ritam is first up. I didn’t make the rules, they just said it. So Ritam has to try first. Next week Ritam will write some fire shit 🔥🔥🔥 I definitely would have done it but that’s how the schedule shook out. It all starts somewhere.

Ritam’s Footnote

Maybe your ass is striated bro. Me? Well, I’ve never seen the damn thing, and I choose to live in blissful ignorance.