Keeping House
Essay Prize Contest Winner Announced; Livestream Tomorrow; Salvaged TypePad Bit-Rot; &c.
This irregular mid-week missive is to share with you a few very important items of Hinternet news.
Item! Please note that there will be a Hinternet livestream tomorrow, Thursday, October 16, 20:00 Paris | 19:00 London | 14:00 New York | 11:00 Rio Linda / Elverta / Del Paso Heights. JSR will be speaking with filmmaker and author Alyssa Loh about Attensity, the new collectively authored manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement. Click the image below to sign up for the event via the Instagram page of the Institute for Sustained Attention, or click here to get the link to the livestream from us directly.
Item! We are thrilled to announce the winner of the 2025 Inaugural Hinternet Essay Prize Contest. As you will recall, the theme of the contest was: “How might current and emerging technologies be mobilized to help secure perpetual peace?” Our winner is Carlyn Zwarenstein, a Canadian independent journalist, science writer, as well as author, curiously, of a book entitled On Opium: Pain, Pleasure, and Matters of Substance. We will be honored to publish Carlyn’s essay in early November, and will also be featuring her in a Hinternet Symposion podcast around that same time. We will not be handing her an enormous novelty check, but will take care of the financial side of the operation by discrete wire transfer.
We are very so grateful to our panel of judges,
, Jason Kehe, and . And we are also very grateful to all of who participated in the contest. Under the term “participant” we certainly do not include those people who submitted AI-generated “white paper”-style texts. You all ought to be ashamed of yourselves. The next time around we will have to come up with a more ingenious method for filtering out impostors like you. It was particularly hard to bear the influx of counterfeit work of this sort, since plainly none of those who submitted it had any connection to the Hinternet universe at all, did not bother to do even a second of due diligence or to familiarize themselves with our idiom, and never considered that grammatically perfect yet perfectly lifeless prose might not cut it around here.As for you real writers: stay tuned! Next year we will be running the Essay Prize Contest again, in a similar if modified form. We expect to announce the 2026 Prize Question in March. If this turns out to be a question that interests you, please consider submitting an essay for your chance to win $10,000 USD.
And stay tuned, also, for more from Carlyn Zwarenstein in the next few weeks.
Item! As you may have heard, TypePad has gone and illustrated Douglas Coupland’s “bit-rot” thesis —that digital media can never be trusted as a reliably durable archive—, by ceasing to exist, and by taking everything that had been stored on its servers with it. In JSR’s case, this meant 15 years’ worth of essays, from 2005-2020.
This is all work that JSR himself holds to be of little value — “juvenilia”, he calls it. When we remind him that in 2020 he was in fact 48 years old, he only laughs: “We’re all on different timelines, baby!”
Because the deletion of the servers, scheduled for October 1, was such a low priority for him, JSR waited until about September 28 to begin transferring his work stored there into a different medium. He went about this in the only way he knew how: hastily, sloppily cutting and pasting into three enormous Word files. Next he converted those into pdf’s, and sent them to us.
We are uploading them here, since we know that of course unlike TypePad, Substack is here for the ages. Just in case, however, if one among you would kindly print these out, and move the paper documents to a vault somewhere beneath the Greenland ice cap, we would be most grateful.
Item! We tried again to do the conventional round-up, among Hinternet staff members, of what they’ve all been reading, listening to, thinking, etc. But heavens what low morale pervades our ranks these days! Edwin-Rainer Grebe, as you’ll know, had to be let go. Kenny is still, we believe, in FBI custody. When asked what music charms her ears these days, Mary would only answer with one word: “Bing!” We believe that’s a reference to the legendary crooner, and speculate that she must be planning another installment of her Universal Musurgy on the topic of Mr. Crosby, though it may just be some sort of internally meaningful onomatopoeia. Hélène is too busy getting ready for Samhain to be of much use around here (though she does extend “a joyous holiday season to those who celebrate”).
As for JSR, we had hoped at least he would tell us what he’s doing, or at least where in the world he is, but all we got from him instead was a very peculiar e-mail. “Pls forward the message below,” he writes, “to Hélène”:
Dear Justin Smith-Ruiu,
Allow me to introduce myself. I am Kent Buttrick, and I want to tell you a little bit about the Organisation I have helmed for the past twenty years.
We here at Great Game are, as I like to put it, passionate about the human capacity for creative play. Every year my collaborators and I stage a newly conceived Game, entirely different from one year to the next. Each Game is an exercise in strength, endurance, and wit, played by a handful of carefully selected competitors, all of whom come from that class of people who are used to asking the most of themselves, and who dare to demand the most of the world, in riches and acclaim, when they triumph. Each year’s Game, moreover, is kept a perfect secret, known only to its players, and recorded in our logs.
Next year’s Game promises to be the most intense, and the most rewarding, yet. Six different players will be given a preparation period, in which they will choose from among any of the world’s remote mountain towns with between 3,000 and 5,000 inhabitants. On the official start day (March 1, 2026), each contestant will show up in their chosen town, at dawn, completely naked, with no possessions in tow. Each player will then be free to tell the inhabitants whatever story they wish about themselves — except, of course, for the truth.
And so here now is the Game: The first player to get elected as the town’s mayor will be declared winner, and will receive a significant monetary reward (so significant in fact that to divulge it here would be, we think, indiscrete). There is no time-limit to the duration of play — the Game ends when the first town gets its new mayor. Simple as that.
Two of our invited contestants have already selected as their bases of operations towns in the Peruvian Andes and the Bhutanese Himalayas, respectively. We were somewhat hoping you might dare to represent the Pyrenees for us, though of course you are free to select the region or the range you believe you will be best able to navigate. We can give you until November 1 to confirm participation, and until the beginning of the new year to tell us the name of your chosen town.
In the meantime, we remind you that this invitation must remain strictly confidential. Any leak to the public would significantly compromise our operations, and would not be looked upon at all favorably by the entities behind them.
Warm best,
Kent
JSR then adds: “Hélène, pls advise. This looks legit. Thinking of saying yes. I could use the money.”
Believe it or not I actually went over to your old blog a week or so ago as it seemed that there had been no JSR missive in a while. When I discovered that it wasn’t there I was shocked and dismayed, and I made do with an old n+1 article you wrote about renting an apartment in Berlin with an Arnold Schwarzenegger pinball machine. I realize this is getting extremely parasocial, but the loss of your work from your blog would’ve been a disaster, so thank you for putting this up. Substack readers probably don’t realize it but JSR has been putting out quality work on the internet for around 20 years.
What a treat, JSR 'juvenilia' in bulk, and for free! Yay, thanks!