Contention is changing

In January, we’ll be switching to a paid subscription model

Starting next month, Contention will shift to a paid subscription model. We will be charging $10 a month (or $100 a year) for the full newsletter, with free subscribers still getting previews of every column and occasional full pieces (likely about one a month). We hope that all of our loyal readers can find this in their budget to support our work and maintain access to our analysis. 

We created Contention because this is the sort of thing we wanted to read, and the only way to get it was to invent it. The world has never been a stable place -- stability exists nowhere in the universe. But the political and economic volatility happening today feels especially threatening to all life on Earth, and the decision-makers at the heart of it all are business people and major investors. Understanding how business and finance really work can help us make sense of their actions, and hopefully equip some of you with knowledge that helps you organize for deep change. 

Doing this work can be exhausting. It requires not only constant awareness of the moves of financial markets and economic indicators, but also persistent work on theoretical and historical education even before we write and edit our pieces. Doing it on a volunteer basis has been difficult to maintain -- hence why we only put out one piece in the year between September 2021 and September 2022. We want to keep Contention going, and the ability to pay ourselves for that work makes it easier to do. 

Important caveat: we do not intend for this to be our careers or to be a significant money-making venture. 

There is a whole embarrassing ecosystem of alleged “dissident” voices on the internet seeking to “build brands” and make significant money with their newsletters, podcasts, Twitch streams, YouTube channels and other platforms. The ones that make it are only tolerated by the powers-that-be because they profit the system more than they oppose it, falling sooner or later into well-worn streams of argument that reproduce the narrow band of acceptable perspective allowed in the United States. 

We would rather go broke than tell you something you’ve heard a million times before. We are focused on quality, not quantity -- we aim to remain small, to fly under the radar as long as possible, connecting to discerning readers hungry for original, rigorous, concise, and principled analysis. We’re happy to make this our part-time job, a passion project that helps us pay a couple of bills while making us accountable to others for our own intellectual and political development. 

If you have any questions about this or anything else we write, you can always reach out to us over email. If you have an organization working for real change and you are interested in a group discount, reach out and we’ll see what we can accommodate. 

Thank you for your readership, and we hope you’ll consider this one investment we truly endorse: our words.