From Substack to Flowershow

The move is now complete. All 34 of my previously published articles, essays and reviews, together with the entire 21-episode Integral Facticity podcast, are now available through Integral [+] Facticity on erikhaines.org.

I shared some of this work in my October 27 update, A New Home for Old and New Ideas. Since then, the historical articles have been transferred, the podcast archive has been completed, and the publication has acquired its own Home, About, Podcast and Contact pages. The articles retain their original publication dates, images, references and historical context, while the podcast brings together its recordings, episode information and further reading.

The changes have involved considerably more than moving material between websites.

The publication now has its own navigation, article archive, search and RSS feed. The articles have been brought into a consistent reading format, with navigation between publications, clearer headings, contents and access to their original references. Earlier website addresses have also been accounted for through redirects, helping preserve links to material that has moved.

The podcast has undergone perhaps the most extensive transformation. All 21 episodes are presented through an interactive archive, with visual Cover Flow and Grid views for browsing, an integrated audio player, episode descriptions, notes and references, and transcripts where available. The original further-reading materials have also been organized and made accessible alongside the recordings.

The intention has been to make the podcast more than a list of audio files. Readers can listen to conversations, examine their accompanying material and return to the books and ideas discussed. For me, this has been one of the most satisfying parts of revisiting the project.

Another substantial development is the new Article Information and discovery system, introduced with this release. Each article now has an information panel bringing together its publication details, Subjects, Search Terms and related references. Readers can also adjust the article's appearance with light and dark reading modes and different text sizes without changing the surrounding website.

The Subject navigation and search features have been expanded as well. Subject pages bring together related articles and podcast episodes, while Search Terms make it possible to find material through alternative names, spellings and related terminology. A dedicated list of Subjects and Search Terms offers another way to explore the collection without depending on publication dates or knowing an article's exact title.

Together, these changes make the material easier to find, read, listen to and revisit. They also provide a foundation for the larger research library I'm developing.

Some questions raised in the podcast conversations continue to occupy me, sometimes in ways I could not have anticipated when they were recorded. More broadly, developing an independent home for this material brings together intellectual and professional interests I've pursued for many years.

I. An older interest in knowledge and intellectual history

I first encountered the work of William L. White, the American historian of addiction treatment and recovery, around 2016 through Guy du Plessis, whose writing on integral approaches to recovery had introduced me to several developments in the field.

White's historical research made a lasting impression on me. His Slaying the Dragon traced the history of addiction treatment and recovery across generations, documenting institutions, mutual-aid movements, changing professional ideas and the experiences of people whose contributions might otherwise have disappeared from the historical record. His longstanding collaboration with Ernest Kurtz offered another important example of how the histories of communities and movements could be recovered through careful research.

What distinguished this work was its relationship to the practical concerns of the present. Understanding how earlier generations had approached recovery, where they had succeeded or failed, and how their movements had developed offered valuable resources for contemporary practice and public discussion.

His Recovery Rising, published in 2018, added another dimension by bringing decades of professional experience, historical research and personal reflection into an account of the recovery movement's development. It demonstrated how participation in the life of a field could itself become a valuable resource for understanding its history.

In October of that year, White generously published an essay I had written on Canadian recovery advocacy, examining the relationship between recovery movements, public health, drug-policy advocacy and some of the divisions emerging within those communities.

I was also impressed by the extensive independent website he had maintained since 2009. It brought together decades of papers, books, historical documents, interviews and bibliographic resources. In May 2022, White announced that responsibility for the collection would be transferred to Chestnut Health Systems, helping secure its continued availability beyond his own stewardship.

That decision illustrated a problem extending well beyond the recovery field: how to preserve the intellectual and historical work accumulated over a lifetime, including the relationships and documentary evidence that give individual publications their context.

Readers can explore the collection today through the William White Library and its extensive Papers archive.

My own research interests are considerably broader, ranging across philosophy, religion, Canadian political thought, psychology, human development and contemporary intellectual communities. Yet the historical sensibility informing White's work has remained important to me, particularly his attention to the people, institutions and relationships through which a field develops.

These interests also connect with more than two decades of professional experience in information systems, organizational work and knowledge management. The opportunity to develop an independent research website brings together concerns I have pursued for a long time, using technologies that have only recently made more of this work practical for me.

II. Why move to an independent website?

Substack has been valuable for sharing my work, discovering new ideas and connecting with people who have similar interests. I intend to continue participating in those conversations.

But the platform has changed considerably since its beginnings as a newsletter service. What was once centred on publications and email subscriptions has developed into a growing social network, combining Notes, recommendations, personalized feeds and features designed to encourage frequent engagement.

There are advantages to this development. Substack has created an environment in which independent publications can find readers, build communities and sometimes sustain themselves financially. Its subscription-based business model also offers an alternative to the advertising-supported platforms that have dominated much of the social web.

Yet I have become increasingly dissatisfied with the direction of the platform. Its emphasis on social interaction, continuous feeds and scrolling has grown without a comparable development of the tools needed to organize, retrieve and connect substantial bodies of information.

For someone interested in preserving years of writing, research and conversations, this becomes a serious limitation. Substack is well suited to circulating a new article and encouraging discussion around it. It is much less effective when the purpose is to maintain an organized collection that readers can explore through subjects, works, references and historical relationships.

The problem is not simply that older material disappears down a chronological archive. It is that the architecture of the platform encourages attention to whatever is newest or most engaging, rather than helping readers find and understand the relationships among publications accumulated over time.

There is a broader tension here between social discovery and information management. A platform can be very effective at bringing something to someone's attention while being considerably less useful for returning to it, placing it in context or following its connections to other material. The endless feeds that have become familiar across social media are not necessarily good environments for sustained reading or research.

Much of my own work has grown through books, correspondence, reading groups, podcast conversations and encounters with people whose interests overlap in unexpected ways. A particular argument might begin with a book review, develop through a discussion, and return years later in a different intellectual or political setting.

I want readers to be able to follow those connections. An essay about Habermas, for example, might lead to earlier conversations about religion and public life, related philosophical works, or subsequent essays in which I have reconsidered an argument. The historical relationships among these materials are often as important as the publications themselves.

This requires more control over how information is organized, described and presented than Substack currently provides. It also calls for a degree of independence from the changing priorities of a social platform.

That is the principal reason for establishing a different home for Integral [+] Facticity. Substack can remain useful for discovering ideas and participating in conversations, but it is not the environment in which I want to maintain and develop the work itself.

III. Why Flowershow?

After exploring several approaches to independent publishing, I decided to use Flowershow to host and develop the website.

Flowershow has an interesting background of its own. It is an open-source publishing project developed by Datopian, a company founded by Rufus Pollock, who was also responsible for establishing the Open Knowledge Foundation in 2004. Pollock's earlier work included the development of open-source tools for making information publicly accessible, reusable and easier to manage.

Datopian emerged from that broader world of open data and open knowledge. Its projects have included CKAN, a widely used open-source platform for managing and publishing data, along with other tools concerned with making information more accessible and useful.

Flowershow approaches a related problem from a different direction: how to turn collections of ordinary files into attractive, navigable websites without requiring their owners to build and maintain an entire publishing system.

An important part of its development has been the connection with Markdown and Obsidian, the note-taking application used by many people to organize interconnected collections of notes and research materials. Rather than requiring everything to be composed inside a proprietary website editor, Flowershow allows existing Markdown material to become part of a published website.

This approach also connects with the wider interest in digital gardens: websites that organize developing ideas and related materials through links and thematic connections rather than presenting everything as a chronological series of posts.

In an April 2026 discussion of Flowershow's direction, Pollock considered the balance between keeping the platform simple and extending it into a more general website-development system. The central question was how much flexibility to provide without losing the advantages of straightforward publishing from portable files.

That balance is particularly interesting to me. My website requires more customization than a conventional blog, but I also want to preserve the underlying material in formats that can be maintained independently of any particular publishing service.

Flowershow allows me to publish from Markdown and HTML files, giving me greater flexibility over presentation, navigation and the relationships among different kinds of material.

An important attraction is that the underlying content remains in ordinary, portable files rather than existing solely inside a publishing platform. The website is still hosted through a service, of course, and requires ongoing maintenance. Independence doesn't mean eliminating every technical dependency. It means retaining greater control over the material, its organization and how it can be maintained or moved in the future.

Artificial intelligence has also played a substantial role in making this possible. I've been using AI-assisted tools to support research, develop website features, organize and transfer existing material, and carry out technical work and testing.

The migration itself involved more than moving text between platforms. Original publication dates, images, references, links and historical records had to be preserved. The podcast required its own work to bring together episode descriptions, guests, references and further reading in a usable form.

AI-assisted development has helped me undertake work of this kind on a scale that would previously have been difficult to manage alongside my other responsibilities. But it has also required considerable experimentation, checking and revision. Tools that can rapidly produce code or organize information can just as rapidly introduce errors, misunderstand requirements or create unnecessary complexity.

My experience in information systems and knowledge management has therefore remained as relevant as the new technology. Knowing what needs to be preserved, how information should be organized and how to evaluate the results is essential to making these tools useful.

The result is not simply a replacement for Substack. It is the beginning of a broader research environment.

Alongside the essays and podcast, I'm developing an independent research library concerned with thinkers, works, publications, intellectual traditions and communities. My own writing and interviews provide an initial body of material, but the longer-term project extends well beyond them.

One area of particular interest is the development of contemporary intellectual communities through digital media, publishing, podcasts, educational projects and emerging institutions. I have written about some of these communities and participated in their conversations over the years. Their histories and relationships deserve closer attention, particularly as intellectual activity increasingly develops outside conventional institutional settings.

The next phase involves extending the research library beyond my own articles and recordings, developing connections among other sources, people and works while maintaining the historical context and accuracy of the material.

The immediate achievement is having the complete publication and podcast available together, with new ways to explore them and room to expand the research collection over time.

IV. Substack's continuing role

I'm keeping my Substack active, although its role is changing.

The 34 existing posts remain at their original Substack addresses, preserving their publication dates and discussions. I've replaced their full article bodies with shorter first-person summaries and direct links to the corresponding articles on erikhaines.org.

This allows Substack to continue serving as a place for discovery and conversation without maintaining two competing full-text versions of the same work.

New Integral [+] Facticity articles will be published in full on erikhaines.org. I'll use Substack to share occasional summaries and announcements linking to them, along with some notes and conversations with people whose work I follow.

I don't intend to reproduce every article on Substack or turn each website update into another newsletter. It will remain one way of discovering and discussing the work, rather than the place where its complete archive is maintained.

Readers who prefer to follow the publication independently of social feeds or email subscriptions can also use the website's RSS feed.

I value the conversations and intellectual communities I've encountered through Substack and elsewhere. This change is not a rejection of them. I want to continue participating in those exchanges while giving my own work a more durable and independent home.

The articles and recordings now have a common home, but the larger purpose is to make it easier to trace the histories, relationships and continuing questions behind them. As the research collection develops, I hope the website will become a useful place to explore those connections, not simply revisit material that has already been published.

You're welcome to explore the publication, revisit the podcast, and continue the conversation through Substack.

Explore Integral [+] Facticity

Listen to the complete Podcast

Thanks for reading and following along.

Erik

Works Cited

• Haines, Erik. “A Canadian Perspective on Recovery Advocacy.” William White Library (blog), October 5, 2018. https://chestnut.org/li/william-white-library/blogs/article/2018/10/a-canadian-perspective-on-recovery-advocacy-bill-white-and-erik-haines.
• Haines, Erik. “A New Home for Old and New Ideas.” Integral [+] Facticity, October 27, 2026. https://erikhaines.org/integral-facticity/a-new-home-for-old-and-new-ideas.
• White, William L. “The Future of William White Papers Website.” William White Library (blog), May 13, 2022. https://chestnut.org/li/william-white-library/blogs/article/2022/05/the-future-of-william-white-papers-website.
• White, William L. Recovery Rising: A Retrospective of Addiction Treatment and Recovery Advocacy. CreateSpace, 2018.
• White, William L. Slaying the Dragon: The History of Addiction Treatment and Recovery in America. 2nd ed. Bloomington, IL: Chestnut Health Systems/Lighthouse Institute, 2014.