For a few years before the pandemic, I used Airbnb pretty regularly. At the time I was making a lot of short documentaries, mostly for The Intercept and Univision. We were typically on the stringiest of shoestring budgets, and it was way cheaper to lodge our crew, usually three people, through Airbnb than in hotels. But it was also kind of preferable. When we were lucky we’d find some pretty charming homes in residential neighborhoods with plenty of street parking that were just a few minutes’ drive from restaurants and breweries (we drank a lot on those trips). We didn’t have to deal with valets or parking fees or patronize overpriced hotel restaurants.

But in the last five years, I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve used Airbnb, and most of those were for vacation house rentals that I could have just as easily found on VRBO or by sending an email to Sea Ranch. When I go on work trips I book hotels. I don’t even browse home share listings. I think the reason is that nowadays when you find a place on Airbnb, it’s almost certainly going to be a cheap investment property owned by a real estate corporation, furnished by Ikea, with a keypad by the door and a clean, empty fridge with some Poland Springs water and a single bottle of mustard in it. It will be practical but completely devoid of charm, perhaps even bordering on depressing. The individual homeowners who used to host Airbnb rentals have long been pushed aside by this nameless blob of corporate middleman agencies. I’d rather just stay at a Holiday Inn.

It feels to me as if the same thing that happened to Airbnb is now happening to Substack. In April, the company hosted a party in DC that was billed as an alternative to the White House Correspondents Dinner. According to the Washington Post, Substack had tried to buy a table at the actual WHCD, which, as it turned out, was abruptly adjourned by an assassination attempt on President Trump. The director of the White House Correspondents Association turned down the offer, declaring that “independent journalists were not news, would never be news, and would never be invited to the dinner.” So Substack hosted its own party instead, which became “one of the hottest tickets of correspondents’ weekend.”

The WHCA director denied the quote, and frankly, it sounds highly implausible to me. A legacy media organization saying such a thing about Substack seems about as likely as a scheming villain saying, “and I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you kids” after being lassoed by the Scooby Doo gang. It’s not only just too childish and undiplomatic to be believed, but it also happens to perfectly cast the company as the heroic underdog vis-a-vis the arrogant and out-of-touch Establishment Media, which is fitting for a quote that was sourced from Substack’s Head of News and Politics. In this story, Substack is the Molly Ringwald character in Pretty In Pink, rejected and humiliated by the sneering rich kids only to come out on top, as a karmic reward for her virtue and humility.

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From an outsider’s point of view, Substack’s “alternative” party didn’t sound all that different from the main event. Jim Acosta was there. So was John Dickerson, former host of CBS’ Face The Nation, and Tara Palmeri, formerly of ABC, CNN, and Politico. So was Gavin Newsom and Sean Spicer, Meghan McCain and David Hogg, Joachin Castro and Marianne Williamson. If the party was meant to celebrate the ascendance of the “independent creator,” it achieved the opposite: it showcased Substack’s glee at being colonized by the establishment it was supposed to displace. The contradiction between these two postures was illustrated almost too vividly by Michael Tracey’s near fistfight with Acosta.

I’m picking on a party from months ago, but only because it’s emblematic of what I suspect almost everybody now recognizes about Substack’s trajectory. The top political publication at Substack is The Free Press, a $150 million company now owned by Paramount Skydance, whose founder now heads up CBS News. Next up is The Bulwark, which brings in $12 million in annual revenue and which was founded by a Republican political consultant, a journalist who has been a star on conservative talk radio since the early 90s, and the neocon founder of The Weekly Standard who almost single-handedly engineered the propaganda campaign that led to the Iraq War. The number three Substacker in technology is one of the most famous Silicon Valley venture capitalists in the world, who co-hosts a massively successful podcast with the guy who wrote the Trump administration’s AI platform. The Substack leaderboards are filled with celebrity household names, while the New York Times masthead is populated by people you’ve never heard of. Who is the media establishment here? Beats me.

I don’t mind Substack patting itself on the back for its success, which has been fairy tale-level remarkable. For decades, the legacy media has badly deserved to be disrupted, and Substack is the company that pulled it off. But the social impact of that success has been, on balance, a wash. The stars of the media establishment have not been displaced by Substack, but buoyed by it. That might be a good thing if you believe that Jim Acosta has finally been released from the choke chain CNN executives kept wrapped around his pit bull-like collar and will now revolutionize DC punditry. But if there’s a single person in the world who believes that, it’s Jim Acosta.

Airbnb once disrupted the hospitality industry, though hotels still seem to be doing fine. Not unlike Substack, the company boasted incessantly about how it was the champion of regular people in desperate need of supplemental income. What it became was a platform for corporate middlemen to corner a new market that peeled a few customers away from Hilton, Marriott, and La Quinta Inn. The power structure remained intact, but now Airbnb is a modest part of it.

That’s what Substack is. With a handful of exceptions, few are making real money on it who weren’t already getting paid extremely well in media or business. The company has tilted the balance of power in the media industry, but only between the executives in the C-suite and their on-camera or in-print star talent. And the legacy brands are already joining the party, like they did when Facebook, YouTube, and every other tech media disruptor started chiseling away at their business model. There is nothing revolutionary about this. It’s your grandmother’s capitalism.

Substack is great blogging software, and its subscription platform is a handy tip jar. The discoverability it provides through Notes and Recommendations probably compensates for Elon Musk burying its links on X.

These are nice things. They’re not great things. They don’t challenge anyone in particular. They don’t topple media empires. They don’t discover great talents in the wilderness and bless them with magical wings. The Substack platform is a feature. It’s fun and it’s useful. It gets a lot of attention and generates a lot of money for its investors. It’s Katie Couric at a house party. It’s Mehdi Hasan flying commercial. It is what it is, which is really not all that much.