Le bon coup !
Edwin-Rainer’s Complaint; A Hinternet Summer Reading Group; Language-Automation and the Massification of Authorship; Advertising at The Hinternet; November in Paris; etc.!
We have a number of housekeeping items to share with our loyal readers today. Be sure to read through to the end — if one item is of no relevance or interest to you, the next might well be!
The Return of Prof. Dr. Dr. Balthasar von Cyr (1906-2024)
First, you must go read Edwin-Rainer Grebe’s remarkable piece from a few days ago, “The Angelic Engine”, if you have not done so already. Rightly or wrongly, Edwin-Rainer has long felt underappreciated as a staff member here at The Hinternet. Now that his latest has essentially “fallen stillborn”, as he put it, that perception is only the more aggravated. He’s been sulking around our offices calling us all, and indeed all of you too, “a bunch of philistines”. To be honest we’re getting pretty tired of it.
Seriously though, this piece of metafiction constitutes the most definitive statement to date, albeit here in the vein of imagination rather than of reason, of “our whole philosophy” of artificial intelligence. Read it!
A Hinternet Summer Reading Group!
How hot was it in Paris these past several days? So hot that when JSR attempted to host a one-off livestream on “Reading and Translating Chekhov”, not five minutes in his iPhone gave off a “Temperature Warning” and then, some seconds after that, went completely dead. As is typical with JSR, this initial defeat only caused him to redouble his efforts, and now what had been a one-off reading group has multiplied itself into a multi-week course of sorts.
The aim is, first, to test out the functionalities of Substack livestream as an interactive parapedagogical platform; and, second, for JSR to have an outlet to yammer about some of the great literature he’s been reading and translating and milking for inspiration these past weeks and months.
The sessions will take place over the next five weeks on Wednesdays at 20:00 Paris / 19:00 London / 14:00 New York / 11:00 Rio Linda-Elverta. What follows is a provisional schedule:
Wednesday 1 July — Introduction: Reflections on the Philosophy of Translation
Wednesday 8 July — The most beautiful short story ever written: Anton Chekhov’s “A Day in the Country” (1886)
Wednesday 15 July — Pan-Soviet Chekhovism: Amma Achchygiya’s “Motuo” (1927)
Wednesday 22 July — Madame de Sévigné, Saint-Simon, and the Non-Fiction Sources of Proust’s Masterpiece
Wednesday 29 July — Zola’s Nana (1880) and the Proto-Cinematic Imagination
This schedule, again, is provisional, and subject to modification au fur et à mesure. No knowledge of any language besides English is expected to follow along. This series is for paid subscribers only. There is no plan subsequently to post the recordings, so be present or be peasants, it’s up to you!
Upgrade to a paid subscription now if you plan on participating!
Intermezzo
As you’ve likely already gathered, paid-subscription rates are, as Mary Cadwalladr has taken to putting it, “fucking tanking”. At this rate, the simple fact is that the work we put into The Hinternet will no longer be worth it after another few months of attrition.
There was a tremendous boom period, between, say, 2020 and 2024, when the upward curve of our efforts seemed as if it would never end. That was a mere seeming, it turns out. Three years ago, when we ran direct and explicit fundraising pieces, we would typically get 20-30 new paid subscriptions within the first few hours of their appearance. The last such piece we ran, brought in a total of one new subscription.
We do not blame ourselves. Our writing has not degraded in quality. On the contrary. The world has simply changed. Among other transformations, Substack is simply not the boomtown it used to be. Nor are we ourselves particularly committed to staying put in a ghost-town.
The reasons for the current slump, now, we believe, are several, but the greatest of them is surely the spread of automatically generated writing, which, even if we do not rely on it ourselves —we at The Hinternet are in fact much more likely to try, for our own idiosyncratic reasons, to pass off human writing as if it were machine writing, than to attempt the opposite and more common sort of legerdemain— has nonetheless degraded the whole environment. It is hard to sell tickets to your garden, no matter how meticulously manicured, when you’re living in kudzu-infested country.
We think this great historical transformation is actually rather interesting — even as it is harming us. In fact we have recently developed a habit in our editorial offices of seeking out the very worst Substack operations, and trying to make some sense of what the human factor behind their evidently automated output might be. One thing that strikes us is that many of these sites, while automated, are plainly not intended in a spirit of cynical profiteering or disinformation or anything like that, but rather as the sincere self-expression of people who previously would not have been able to express themselves in written language at all, and are now very happy to do so.
We are reminded of a Wall Street Journal article from 2018 about the elderly people in India who were so overjoyed to be able to take to social media to share those kitsch “Good Morning!” memes with sunsets and coffee and roses and so on that they ended up repeatedly crashing the country’s energy infrastructure. One sweet old villager in Tamil Nadu was quoted as saying something like: “Finally I have a way to express the good cheer and optimism that I feel inside me!”
We don’t know about you, reader, but that old man’s words makes our collective Hinternet heart absolutely melt. And we are inclined to see all the new automatic writing on Substack as a further development of this earlier image-based memetic practice. Here for example is something a fellow wrote recently, or caused to be written, about the choice upon retirement to move from the United States to his ancestral Greece:
So much luggage.
Suitcases.
Bags.
My bike.
A few things we needed.
Many things we probably did not.
And the quiet [!] understanding that this was not a vacation.
This was the rest of our life arriving on a luggage carousel.
And it goes on in that spirit for literally hundreds of lines. Do this man’s readers tear him apart for being a trite and lazy shirker of our solemn duty to be each the master of our own words? Not at all! Instead we discover, again, hundreds of comments, vastly more comments than any Hinternet piece has ever received, encouraging the “author” to keep up the great work: “Loved reading this!”; “A most charming read, and all the more because my husband and I feel the same way”; “I need to let you know how much I enjoy your posts!”; and so on.
This is, for better or worse, just what Substack primarily is now. And it seems to us that while one way of dealing with it, or not dealing with it, is to shrug it off as “slopification”, another way, more rigorously historically informed, is to consider that just as automated printing became the catalyst for aspiration to universal readership over the past centuries, so now automated text-generation might best be understood as having brought about, finally, the conditions for the massification of authorship.
And of course those of us who learned the ancient art of writing the hard way, and whose entire identity is wrapped up in writing as a sort of spiritual practice, are not at all happy to find hoi polloi crashing our venues and, via their mechanical prostheses, telling us of all the different things that are “quietly” taking place in their lives. But what is there really to say? Those who wish, or indeed those who must, will continue to find outlets for the more rarefied and hard-won expression of the condition of their souls and so on. But they’re going to have to adapt, we’re going to have to adapt, and not to suppose that even an ancient practice is necessarily an eternal one.
Bespoke Advertising at The Hinternet!
Anyhow, we’re still trying to make it work, and hope to see The Hinternet turn the profits that will enable it to continue exercising, and expanding, its already significant cultural influence. Our Summer Reading Group is one of the experiments we’re running in the hope of turning things around. Another experiment we are currently exploring, in reflection of the evident failure of the “small contributions from readers” model, is to run creative and as it were “stealth” advertising campaigns for suitable sponsors.
The possibilities, as with everything we do at The Hinternet, really are endless. We recall back in the early 1990s listening to Larry King on the radio. He used to drop in the most incongruous references to a non-FDA-approved dietary supplement called “Garlique”, which we believe was just crushed garlic in a capsule. We always thought it was hilarious, and indeed likely the most memorable thing about his show. More than that, though, however delightful this sponsorship arrangement was as a sort of pop-art absurdism, it also really made us want to go and buy some Garlique, and even decades later we find it still lodged in our collective Hinternet brain.
Surely, our thinking now goes, we could do a far better job still of permanently altering our readers’ brain structure, to make permanent room in there, dear sponsors, for your product or service — all the more given that we already operate in a vein of something like pop-art absurdism, and have creative instincts that Larry King’s crew could never imagine. Product “placement” in the minimal sense is really just the beginning — we could for example work your product into a complicated long-developing metafiction, building it into the Hinternet universe in a way that would not even consciously register as “advertising” to our readers at all. We would simply go straight to work on their understanding of reality itself — and your product would come, we expect, over time, to serve as one of the great pillars of that reality.
We’ve already filed our form, with Substack, for the sponsor partnership program they’re currently developing. But we see no reason, in parallel to this, not to take the idea directly to you, and to encourage you to be in touch if you think we might be able to work together: editor@the-hinternet.com. Serious inquiries only.
For reference, we have 16,741 total subscribers, and our most successful pieces are read by over 45,000 people. And even if the vast majority of our subscribers are unwilling to give us $6 per month, content as they are only to read what we all-too-generously publish without a paywall, it remains the case that a very large number of these subscribers, as we are able to determine from their identity-revealing e-mail addresses, are among the most culturally influential people in the arts, media, science, academia, and entertainment, currently active in the United States and beyond.
Generative Humanity — A Preliminary Program!
The Hinternet Foundation —a California-registered educational nonprofit independent from The Hinternet, but sharing a number of this publication’s deeper theoretical, civic, and moral aims— will be hosting its inaugural summit, at the historic Gaîté Lyrique theater in Paris, on November 23 of this year. We want you all to be there.
An official program will be circulated in early-to-mid-July, but we think now is a good time to share with you a provisional version of it:
Generative Humanity: Writing, Art, and Humanism in the Age of AI
Théâtre Gaîté Lyrique, Paris
23 November 2026
Featuring:
Blaise Agüera y Arcas (Google)
D. Graham Burnett (School of Radical Attention / Princeton)
Yves Citton (Paris VIII)
Natasha Dow-Schüll (NYU)
Justin Smith-Ruiu (Paris Cité / Hinternet Foundation)
Maya Vinokour (NYU)
Xiaowei Wang (Northwestern)
Leif Weatherby (NYU)
And with a special panel discussion on editing and publishing featuring:
Kyle Berlin (SOUVENIR Magazine)
Donovan Hohn (Lapham’s Quarterly)
S. Abbas Raza (3QuarksDaily)
Marco Roth (co-founder of n+1)
Lawrence Weschler (New Yorker, Wondercabinet, etc.)
More participants and details to be announced soon. Please contact Hinternet Foundation Projects Associate Sophia Fiedler with any queries: sophia.fiedler@hinternetfoundation.org.
While we do hope to see you there, please note that the seats are filling up very fast, and you will need to pre-register in order so much as to get through the door. Please click on the image below right away to do just that!
Compte rendu
We received by post an advance copy of Ian Marcus Corbin’s excellent new book, To Arrive Where We Started: Belonging in the Modern World (Yale University Press, 2026). A beautiful exposition of the reasons why inquiry must be grounded in tradition, this book gives us real hope for the prospects of humane letters in the coming years, against the rising tide of the sort of “managerial humanities” that have taken over the humanists’ former home within the universities.
For more on the conflict between these two approaches to the humanities, listen to the recent Lapham’s Quarterly podcast episode featuring D. Graham Burnett, Zena Hitz, and our own JSR.
That’s all for today. Salutations chaleureuses —torrides, même— depuis Quimper.
—HLG
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