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JSR Does Some “Housekeeping” for Once!

0.

We thought we’d shake things up a bit here at The Hinternet, and have me write the semi-regular “Housekeeping” column for a change. As loyal readers will know, in “Housekeeping” mode we do not so much develop an essay-long argument or theme, as simply relate to you the important news of our publication and its sundry satellite projects.

There are two main reasons for this change. One is that Hélène has come to feel that her fulfillment of this role reinforces a gendered ideological division of tasks, to which all of us at The Hinternet are at least in principle opposed. Thus, Hélène: “Do you really want to have the women on our Masthead doing the ‘housekeeping’, so that you can dip in from time to time to hold forth on ‘truth as disconcealment’, or to tell us all for the billionth time how fragile your mental health is? Please.”

The other reason is that my month-long arrêt de travail will soon be coming to an end, and I will of necessity be pulled away from my work here, to attend to my several professional responsibilities as a university professor (in France the most intense period of the annual university calendar is from May to mid-July, after all the teaching is over, and the real work —the work of endless meetings, of new online-platform tutorials, of coinage and propagation of unnecessary acronyms, &c.— begins). For that reason, this will likely be my last opportunity before Bastille Day to address you directly.

There is some real risk of subscription slippage in this, as we know from solid experience by now that our other regular Hinternet writers have significantly weaker metrics than I do — a fact that frustrates me greatly. I want you, readers, to rest assured that all the others are my equals in every respect. Indeed it is even tempting here to collapse equality into the conceptually related notion of identity, but we don’t have to go that far. It is enough for you to know that when they are writing, it is just as good as when I am writing, and the truth is I always know, even if I am elsewhere, and taking care of other things, what they are up to — I know, that is, and I approve. So be generous to Hélène and Edwin-Rainer and all the others, please, in my absence. Accord them all the attention due to any plenipotentiary emissary of myself.

1.

We are thrilled to announce that we have now empaneled our three judges for the inaugural Hinternet Essay Prize Contest. They are:

• Mira Kamdar — acclaimed author and analyst, whose widely translated work examines the intersections of identity, culture, and global politics. A former member of The New York Times editorial board, she draws on a background in philosophy and decades of international reporting and commentary.

• Jason Kehe — senior editor and culture critic at WIRED Magazine, with a particular focus on science-fiction and the philosophy of technology.

• Lawrence Weschler — former director of the NYU Institute for the Humanities and celebrated author of creative nonfiction, whose work spans political reportage and cultural biography. A longtime staff writer at The New Yorker, he is the author of acclaimed books including Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder and Everything That Rises.

We are so grateful to Mira, Jason, and Ren for their willingness to take on this important role.

We remain very eager to get the word out about the Essay Prize Contest as far and as wide as possible. We seek submissions that are original and persuasive enough, perhaps, to change the world — that’s what this is all about.

To read all the details about the contest, please go here. And please be sure to share this announcement with others in your network.

2.

It is not too late to help us raise funds for the great Molly Sweeney’s expenses related to her son’s medical care, by signing up for an annual subscription to The Hinternet through our June 9 essay (you can also contribute directly to the fundraising page that Molly has set up). As we explained in that post, all annual subscriptions raised through it will be contributed, entirely, to the fundraiser. So far we have been able to raise $800 USD for her. That’s pretty good, but the truth is we were hoping to see at least one more zero in that figure.

This effort, unprecedented for us, has triggered lively discussion here at The Hinternet’s offices. Such an undertaking as this is difficult to square with the familiar Christian injunction: “When thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee” (Matthew 6:2-4). We admit it — although our primary interest is to help another human being in need, this is not totally separable from our interest in being seen as having done so. A rationale for this further interest is that it is an effective way —indeed, it is a standard way among a certain set of altruists who explicitly describe themselves as “effective”— to raise funds by generating a shared experience of the joy of giving. And so we pull out the trumpet, and once we have done our work we show you the receipts too.

With all due respect to the apostle, we have even begun thinking about setting up some kind of “Charitable Giving Corner” of The Hinternet, perhaps a dedicated page in the horizontal menu at the top of our publication, to keep this joy going and to get more people in need the money they need. We are sharply aware that this draws us even closer to the EA-infused world of the tech-rationalists than we were before, and so perhaps also further away from the pure and righteous state of the low-key giver of alms. But the world is a messy place.

Perhaps some of you can help us to resolve this particular dilemma in the comments section.

3.

Beyond our effort to break out of gender-stereotyped patterns in the division of labor, we are also striving here at The Hinternet more frequently to sing the praises of all the talented people who compose our Masthead. This includes all of you: Jonah, Sam, Eigil — tell us of your accomplishments, and we will make them better known!

This time around we have only two bits of news to report. The first comes from Associate Editor Thomas Peermohamed Lambert, whose debut novel Shibboleth, “a darkly comic tale that brings the satirical English campus novel into the divided, multicultural, hyperactive present day”, was recently published, and has already garnered significant praise. Writing in The Telegraph, Nikkitha Bakshani calls the novel “whip-smart”, a “splendid debut” that “wryly sends up student activism”. Writing in The Critic, Alexander Larman describes Shibboleth as “magnificent”, and confesses that he read it “with jaw agape”. We expect Thomas to continue receiving similar praise for Shibboleth, and for whatever he does next. We likewise expect you to notice that our Masthead is not entirely made up of late-antique lexicographers and early modern anatomists of melancholy, but also of sharp young people out there doing noteworthy things right now.

Speaking of sharp young people, and indeed of The Telegraph, we are pleased to announce the recent addition of Cal Revely-Calder to our cohort of Associate Editors — further consolidating our unexpected but not undesirable cross-fertility with the established media operations of the United Kingdom. Cal is such an interesting person, with a Ph.D. on Samuel Beckett to his name, and a book forthcoming from Verso on the very idea of “convenience”. (I told him over Zoom recently that when I was a teenager I rode my bike to every single am/pm convenience store in Sacramento County, and with each new one I added a gold star to a county map on my bedroom wall — in other words, like Cal, I know what it is to be “into convenience”).

We are always looking for new, real people —especially talented young people eager to insert themselves in the emerging field of creative digital media— to consider joining our Masthead. In all seriousness, and entirely independently of my ongoing conversations with Hélène, we are particularly interested in recruiting more women. The same goes for guest submissions. Women, men, but especially women: send us your writing, and if it’s good, and we have room for it, we will publish it, and pay you $500 USD.

4.

The planning for our first-ever Hinternet Summer School, on “Scholarly Fabulation: Theory and Methods”, is coming along very nicely. It is scheduled to begin in early August, and we have over 30 confirmed participants (I’ll be sending all of you an information-dense e-mail very soon, I promise). We have confirmed guest appearances from at least two masters of scholarly fabulation, Ken Alder and D. Graham Burnett, with others yet to determine their availability. If you are absolutely dying to join us, please be in touch right away (editor@the-hinternet.com), with a brief summary of your background experience and your reasons for wishing to participate. But hurry — we would like to close the “admissions process” as soon as possible in order to begin proper planning with the participants.

The nuts-and-bolts of the program are still being worked out. We might be able to host it entirely with Substack-based functionalities — or, if necessary, we might end up using Zoom. I discussed this matter briefly with Hamish McKenzie, co-founder of Substack, over lunch here in Paris a few days ago. The lunch was insane — they kept bringing us one amuse-bouche after another, and these were all just like these little shot-glasses of liquid reductions of leek and so on, and each time they talked our ears off with wildly ornate descriptions of the alchemical processes by which they obtained these concoctions, and meanwhile I had like a thousand things I wanted to address with him, and I somehow managed, in spite of the food, and of all the language the food generated around itself, to get to most of these. But I’ll have to follow up, with Hamish or some other associate, about the viability of some kind of “Substack Ed” arrangement, where we might hold a proper seminar-like class. Apparently this is not really possible using the newish “Substack live” option, since that doesn’t fully facilitate frictionless bidirectional communication. But we’ll figure it out somehow. (Thanks again, Hamish, it was all very lovely!)

5.

I’m sorry to all of you who keep waiting for more podcasting from me — either as my guests, or simply as Hinternet followers who have largely converted to the audio medium for the bulk of your “content” consumption. But if I say I have a voice for writing, I mean that somewhat in the same way you might say of someone that they have a “face for radio”. My voice is best read, and not heard. I am convinced of that.

Come to think of it, perhaps apologies should be included as a regular feature of our “Housekeeping” pieces. As you will likely have noticed, I tend not to dwell much on criticisms of my past arguments. It’s not that I don’t appreciate criticism, but only that by the time I finish an essay I am usually so eager to move on to the next thing that I really just don’t have any energy to keep dwelling on or refining whatever I’ve just put out into the world. Perhaps that’s an intellectual shortcoming on my part. I’m hasty, impatient; like an outlaw racing from one horse post to the next, ahead of the sheriff and his men, I too race from post to post.

But let me try at least this once. I received a number of compelling critical remarks about my recent piece on, among other things, Silicon Valley Girardianism. Even before these started coming in, I had been thinking about writing a follow-up “rebuttal of myself”, where I would acknowledge a very important piece of the puzzle that I had left out: namely, that people behave online in a way that appears to confirm Girard’s mimetic theory precisely because the online environment is set up to incentivize that behavior. If you were to put a bunch of people in a cage and tell them you’d throw them scraps of food only once they begin physically fighting with one another, it would be absurd to watch what begins to happen from there and to conclude: “These people just love to fight!” And that’s at least somewhat like what we do when we look at analogous behavior on social media and say: “Just look at these desperate imitative joiners! I guess Girard was right!”

It’s not that I think what I wrote the other day is fully wrong, but only that it’s but half of the story. In a piece of fiction from earlier this year, I attempted to envision a very different sort of social media, such as the world has never seen, which would incentivize dialectical “synthesis of opposites” rather than polarization. Would our information ecosystem look more like a real-time confirmation of the correctness of Marxism, rather than of Girardianism, if we were all forced, for lack of alternatives, to communicate through a platform that delivers likes and reposts and dopamine rushes every time we resolve the apparent antinomies of our dichotomous discourse? Perhaps.

Anyhow I don’t really have much of a grip at this point on what’s happening out there in online discourse. I can’t even stand to look at Substack Notes —to do so immediately makes me start comparing myself to others, whereas, so long as I’m not there, I just blissfully go on doing my own thing, subordinating myself in mimetic prostration to John Milton and Émile Zola, perhaps, but not, at least, to my soon-to-be-forgotten contemporaries—, let alone the more putrid and cynical venues for opinion-mongering.

Someone did recently send me, however, this delightful query from the most putrid venue of them all:

The answer, to this question without a question mark, is of course a big fat “Yes”.

I’ll see you after Bastille Day.

—JSR, Paris