Praise, rent, and the platform: Substack and the enclosure of blog culture

Abstract

This article situates Substack within the platformisation of blogging and the enclosure of cultural production within proprietary infrastructures. Tracing the genealogy of blogging as a decentralised practice that carried within it the seeds of citizen journalism and informal intellectual life, I argue that Substack does not restore an apparently lost cultural practice but renegotiates and interpolates blogging into a platformised logic. Framed as a return to independent, writer-led publishing, Substack instead, as I argue, renders free-labour interaction as a source of rent. I analyse the rhetoric and revolving discourse around Substack’s internal curatorial project, ‘The Substack Post’. Drawing on Jodi Dean’s account of blogs as displaced mediators alongside theories of digital labour and platform capitalism, and approaching Substack as a simultaneously platformised and infrastructuralised formation, I argue that praise operates as a platform-specific form of commodity fetishism, animating the platform while obscuring the labour relations that sustain it.