Heading Back Down

Like Brigadoon or Halley's Comet, I’m back and feeling literarily in cycle

I’m baaaaaaaaaaaaack babyyyyyyyy

Are you excited to hear from me? Elated I’m back? Confused as to who I am? Annoyed that you got this email? If so, please rest assured, I’m with you on all of it and here to help explain it all.

But for the first timers and old timers alike, this here blogletter is Down The Pipes, a resurrected weekly newsletter about nothing and everything, sent to your inbox with hyper regularity when the spirit is striking me (I believe she is striking me).

As always, I’m your local blogger, man of internet business, muse to his nearest & dearest, and your friendly cis white ally in social justice, James Del.

Some of you have been reading my bullshit online since 2003, to my old friends, family members, and fans who still keep up with this, thanks for enduring my stretches of radio silence. We are back (“we” being myself and the mouse in my pocket).

Many of you have never gotten this email before though, probably because you subscribed to this Substack blindly via recommendation while I was on hiatus (hello! welcome to the party, you’re in now, don’t go anywhere I promise it gets better than this!).

If you are new here (or just looking to relive past glories like the rest of us), it might be worth pawing through the archives a bit, get a feel for the cast of characters you’re dealing with. It’s mostly about me, it’s sometimes about us as a society or a class or a generation or a cult or a body politic, but usually it’s still about me. This is me:

Getting Down, 2022

Anyway, housekeeping stuff and then we’ll have a proper catch up…

A number of the posts on this site are paywalled, they were written in an earlier time when nobody really knew I was doing this except the people I knew IRL. I wouldn’t say they’re private but they’re not public, and I intend to keep most of them that way.

Previously, I gave away lifetime paid access to anyone who knew me personally, so if you were an original subscriber to Down the Pipes and this is triggering sweet memories of the summer of 2022 (lol) then welcome back, your subscription is still and forever comped. If you were previously paying, I turned off all subscriptions awhile ago out of mercy, they’ve been turned back on as of today. Email me if you’d like to discontinue being a paid subscriber (or you’re free to navigate the Substack app and do it yourself, good luck and godspeed).

Moving forward, I’ll have a weekly free post for everyone, and once in awhile I will post some deeply insidery, probably not interesting to the internet at large private posts for my OG followers and anyone willing to pay moving forward as a bonus. Just internet economics baby, we’ll get into that topic plenty here.

What else? I think that’s it for Substack stuff, I guess next up would be answering the “where have you been?” of it all for the non-noobs (I’m sorry, I know the ‘blogger back from break’ recap is narcissistic trash, but I feel compelled to share anyway).

For the last 3ish years, I’ve been running a newsletter for and about the “creator economy” called Passionfruit. It was published/paid for by a company called Fragment, and for reasons I’m not authorized to speak on publicly due to separation agreements, I am not doing that anymore, and Fragment has decided to hit the pause button on that publication entirely.

Don’t get excited/upset, nobody did anything bad or wrong, but our visions on where the opportunity sat for internet media and creators at large were not converging. So we’ve diverged. I’m back to solopreneurship, so your paid subscriptions to Down the Pipes are once again encouraged:

The people who I got to work with at Passionfruit were awesome and they are currently doing a wide variety of their own internet hustles, Substack darlings like Taylor Lorenz and Liz Plank were a joy to publish and you should all go subscribe to them if you don’t already. My dude John Michael Bond is funny as hell and a wildly gifted photographer, writer, and editor you should keep an eye on, Eric Rodriguez continues to make The Reactorverse, and Drew Grant has taken her assets to OnlyFans (no judgment, everyone who makes money on the internet is titillating you somehow, Drew has just always been more honest and direct about that).

I heard Steven Asarch is working on a Youtube commentary show with our part time editor Nightmind, and Charlotte Colombo continues to be one of the best freelance journalists on the block, if you’re in a position to hire her, please do so. Also shout out to Elizabeth Spiers who came in at the end to try and help us save our ship, and Rusama Islam and Grace Stanley who—let’s be honest—were the backbone of that site before I got there and helped grow it substantially while we worked together for 2 years.

There were others…freelancers, interns, superfan readers, colleagues at other titles, a few agencies and consultants, you know…the standard collection of wonderful people who inevitably congeal when you try to do a good thing. I’m thankful to all of them and bummed it didn’t work out the way we wanted it to.

I wish I could say more about the why or the what happened there, because that whole newsletter was built on transparency around the creator economy. Not explaining where it went sideways feels as incomplete to me as it probably does to the 60k-ish creative folks who were subscribed to it. I’m most thankful (and sorry!) for them.

One day maybe I’ll start doing some roman à clef pieces about it, keep it fictionalized, but honest. Maybe, who knows! (You won’t, otherwise it won’t be very good roman à clef). But out of respect for what they’re doing at Fragment and the people still trying to do it there, I won’t say anything more about the subject openly.

Which brings me to now. Projects! I’m back to doing projects. Secret projects, business projects, development projects, production projects, creative projects, consulting projects, romantic projects…I do love getting involved somewhere early, despite my numerous mixed results with ‘em in the past. Whatever, they’re better than having a stable office gig (or suffering a matchmaker).

You’ll see and hear more of what those projects turn into soon, the collaborators and co-conspirators will mostly look familiar to this audience, but I’m sure we’ll have some new faces turning up too. More TK.

But for now, consider this email the first klaxon that I’m back on this fishy, subversive slice of Substack, right on time for cucumber season and summer reading lists (or listening lists, do check out Foster’s Summer Fridays radio show for some real beachside bops).

Future issues will have all the kind of political and sociological lore y’all gobble up, from fascism to federalism, feminism to fatalism…and my dudes, I HAVE THOUGHTS. We’ll talk about my love life (eventually, calm down), we’ll do some tarot pulls and get woo-y (I’ve gotten embarrassingly good at it since this), and I am sure I will talk shit on a number of internet entities and interests that should make the former Passionfruit fans here feel a sense of continuity. I was writing about creativity well before I got to Passionfruit, after all:

This newsletter is not and will never be a news dump. It is not a “round up.” There will be no “features” though I reserve the right to do interviews. It is not concerned with format as much as it’s obsessed with form. Well, the newsletter isn’t concerned with anything, it’s inanimate. But I am obsessed with form.

The internet is gonna keep fucking everything up, and I’ve had a front row seat to this chaos for pretty much all of my life. Whether it was suffering the first troll army through Gamergate or learning about the AI-ification of everything from Ray Kurzweil 10 years before you knew who Sam Altman was, I’ve been here the whole time, baby. I was at the Facebook frat parties in Palo Alto in 2009, I’ve missed like 2 SXSWs since 2010 (and hosted some of the best parties at more than one of them, iyky). I watched the man burn alongside the first era of crypto bros in 2016. Chelsea Handler flirted with me on Myspace while I was in college, motherfuckers.

I haven’t even mentioned Gawker once yet (OG readers will be both pleased and disappointed by this), that’s my real villain arc that I’m still too paralyzed to write about with any real honesty. It’s been 10 years since I left though this month, so at a certain point I need to start sharing it or I just know that a louder, stupider version of that history will prevail. Now that Denton is out of the country maybe it’s time.

That’s kind of where The Great American Wasteland manuscript picks up, so expect more of that too.

The point is, this leftist millennial internet Svengali you’re currently reading only comes out when shit gets interesting, and shit is interesting.

Whether you’re a first time reader or a long time friend, it’s nice to be back in your feed and inboxes talking about it all again.

Respond to this email and we can talk about it together (response times will vary, and ignorance will never be tolerated, but otherwise, say hi…DMs are open, as the journo kids used to say).

Welcome back Down.

Until next week!