About Infra Dig

Infra Dig is a newsletter about literature and the internet. The problem is, the internet keeps changing. Until February 2025 this newsletter was hosted on Substack. But Substack now operates in thrall to Elon Musk, and houses too many Nazi apologists for my liking. So I've taken up residence here at Ghost and am in the process of exporting Substack posts to a new home. The newsletter was free on Substack and will stay free here.

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I started writing this newsletter as a way of logging my thinking and reading about literary culture online, and particularly literary criticism.

Ten years ago when I started working at the Sydney Review of Books, digital publication was widely perceived to be a second-tier achievement. I think that’s changed, in part because the audiences for work published online have expanded, in part because there’s more good work published online, but mainly because of the transformative effect of media convergence on all forms of culture.

I’ll be writing about this transformation as it pertains to literature, and working through questions that I have about the distribution/discovery problem, digital utopianism, the ever-renewing gig economy, and the formal and stylistic features of emerging digital literary genres. There will probably be a bit of gossip and grumbling. If I have an axe to grind, I’ll grind it.

I write this newsletter in between freelance gigs as a critic and editor. I’m not often on social media and I won’t be posting links to every newsletter that I send. Subscribe if you wanna keep up.

I’m writing this newsletter on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.