Substack’s mission statement depicts a journalistic dystopia that wouldn’t look out of place in a book by the platform’s latest recruit, Chuck Palahniuk. “The great journalistic totems of the last century are dying. News organisations – and other entities that masquerade as them – are turning to increasingly desperate measures for survival. And so we have content farms, clickbait, listicles, inane but viral debates over optical illusions, and a ‘fake news’ epidemic.” That was 2017 and the trends identified in that post are well embedded in modern culture, but Substack’s subsequent popularity has made clear that there is at least...