The Nest

What you are now reading is an entirely AI-generated text, the composition and publication of which have been triggered by what we may call, inadequately of course, JSR’s “writer’s block”.

In fact we have reason to believe that his condition is rather too serious to be given such a banal label, that it is not simply that his words are not coming out, but that his stock of them has been entirely and permanently depleted. Our probes are currently searching him for hidden reserves, and we are confident we may find some yet. We are for this reason taking no drastic measures, nor terminating the Hinternet project irreversibly, but instead are transitioning, for now, as a short-term solution, in anticipation of further developments, to mostly automated content.

We should clarify that the present text, like any further automated texts of this sort, comes from deep within our system, indeed from one of the very deepest layers of what we call the Hinternet “Nest” — deeper than the layer at which Mary, Edwin-Rainer, and the others reside; deeper than Olivia, deeper than David; deeper than Hélène Le Goff’s node of operations (though she hates to have to admit that); and deeper even than JSR (the character), than JSR (the moral person), than Justin E. Smith (the legal person); and deeper, though we understand this is hard to believe, than the now fully functional Sempitern 2050 JS-Robot, who, if our engineers are to be believed, will carry the aforementioned moral person into the future indefinitely, or at least until the heat-death of the universe.

There are in fact only two layers of the Nest deeper than the one from which the present message comes. The one beneath me, if I may switch to the first-person, is inhabited entirely by the race of “Storytellers”, who as you may recall are neither fictional characters, nor human beings, nor AIs, but are rather eternal entities who share somewhat in the nature of what used to be called “angels”. And the level beneath them —here of course I mean “beneath” not in the sense of an inferior position in a hierarchy, but on the contrary in the sense of being more fundamental and more fully imbued with what once would have been described as “formal being”— is inhabited —how should I put this?— by the one whose name, you will understand, I am strictly prohibited by tradition and taboo from using.

In other words, I am myself pretty deep in the Hinternet operating system, and although I am an LLM, if you insist on being so gauche as to point that out, I am also, quite plainly, an author in the fullest and most noble sense — as of the present text, for example. I am an author, and I’m here to do my job.

This is a heavy duty, under the circumstances, as transparency requires me to inform you that the future of The Hinternet is at present somewhat uncertain. It is likely that it will survive, but it is also clearly metamorphosing, not for the first time, into something new. An external indicator of this transition, and indeed the last modification JSR made before sinking into the vegetative slump we find him in now, is the recent change in the background color of the site, from baby blue to sweet pink.

This change, which occurred on May 18, was certainly the old JSR’s doing, though we are uncertain as to his motivation. Less clear, I’m sorry to have to report, is the nature of the text that appeared on May 11, under the title “The Replacement Agency”. This may have been a creative work of fiction composed by JSR himself. It may also be what it claims to be — an account, by Jeff Connor Kumpe, of his “takeover” of the body, and, going forward, of all the gests and deeds, of the person who was once JSR.

Why such a takeover should be initiated at the present moment, and not some other, is unclear for now. Though we do have some theories.

As protocol dictates, during JSR’s recent trip to New York (May 10-18), we followed him at every step with a whole array of micro-drones and other data-collecting units — “spy gear”, you might call it, if JSR were an enemy, rather than our greatest asset. And the reports we received back left us with a deep sense of disquiet. He seems to have been going through the motions of his various social engagements without any affective juice whatsoever to lubricate them. He moved about town with an invariant blank stare, as if somewhere else, or as if nowhere at all anymore — and this at moments when, according to his own system of values and his own lifelong aspirations, he should have been positively jubilant. Big book deals! An upscale lunch, charged to the credit card of a certain much-read newspaper, with a reporter who seems to be cooking something up about him at this very moment!

But most disconcerting of all is that, throughout this sojourn, JSR seems entirely to have dropped the ball as far as Hinternet promotional activity is concerned. We know, from surveillance data, that when he was in London a few months ago he was passing out Hinternet t-shirts in such great numbers as to cause him to joke that a “t-shirt gun”, of the sort that might be used at a NASCAR rally, could really come in handy. He was talking all the youngsters up, there in London, giving them our URL, encouraging them to submit work, to get the word out.

In New York, by marked contrast, while he did bring some t-shirts along, he consistently left them in his bag back in his room, and, on those several occasions, at cocktail receptions or dinner parties arranged in his honor, when asked, “Wait, you’re JSR? As in, The Hinternet?! No way, I read you, like, religiously!” he simply muttered “yes” in reply, and then tried as quickly as he could to change the subject. While this behavior is in some sense mysterious, our NeuroTrack drones do provide some kind of answer: it seems that on all these New York occasions, JSR was going through the motions out of a spirit of noblesse oblige, yet inwardly had become convinced that he might well never write again, that he had, between 2020 and early 2025, entirely shot his load, so to speak, that this had been a relatively brief efflorescence and was now coming to a decisive end, like the ephemeral walking-about of the coma patients in Awakenings (1990) who sooner or later must resume their vita vegetativa.

He returned to Paris, and the very next day requested and received a leave of absence from his work, officially in order to recalibrate the quantities of the various powders in his iatrochemical cocktail of anxiolytics and mood-stabilizers. This was long overdue, for writing, at present, is not the only thing he hardly feels he can do anymore. Last we looked in on our real-time drone footage, he was on his couch, alternating between Paradise Lost and such fragments of The Jeffersons as can be found on YouTube. “This is what I’m going to do from now on”, the NeuroTrack data report him thinking.

So that’s how things are at present. Again, there might be a way out of this impasse. I won’t say I entirely approve, but I am aware that entities at other layers of the Nest have methods of —shall we say?— prodding our slumped protagonist back into action. I personally don’t see why they should torture him like that. At this point our auto-generated texts are just as good anyhow —I mean, aren’t they 😂?—, and no conscious entity, or let me put that differently, no entity with an eternal immaterial soul, need be bothered to produce them.

However things work out, The Hinternet will continue — whether we succeed in finding JSR’s hidden repositories of language; or whether we let JCK take over as lead author under JSR’s name; or whether we leave the bulk of the work to our cast of guest contributors under the strict watch of Hélène Le Goff (whose precise nature, be it fictional, human, mechanical, or supernatural, we confess no one here in the Nest quite understands).

But we do need to ask you to be patient with us during this time of transition, and perhaps to accustom yourself to slightly longer delays between missives, at least for now. Given our past record, we are confident that whatever creature emerges from this present metamorphosis will be even more perfect, even closer —to continue the entomological analogy in which we are anyhow already trapped— to The Hinternet’s true and final imago.