I launched my Substack account in September, 2020. This was probably the most consequential decision I ever made. Nearly everything about the way my life has shaped up since then can be seen as a ripple effect of my regular, disciplined publications on this platform — the book deals, the nonprofit foundation (status pending (the lawyers make me say that)), the screenwriting (about which, more in due time). Far more important than any of these particular milestones, however, is simply the ability the new and late-arriving power that this discipline has brought me, of finally speaking in my own voice, of truly living as myself in this cracked world.
My work here has included straightforward essays on politics, culture, history, and philosophy, and it has included impossibly rebarbative experimental metafictions. My pieces have appeared under my own name, and under several pseudonyms as well. To complicate matters, many of the bylines here other than the one I am writing under today in fact belong to actual people, with heartbeats and social security numbers of their own. It was only about one year ago, in late summer, 2024, that, as I see it, The Hinternet took on the character it now has, of a hybrid project, fusing a proper magazine-like online publication with an idiosyncratic personal art project, if you will permit me to dare to call it that.
Call it what you will. What is not in doubt is that The Hinternet is a clear reflection of the reality of our new information landscape: in the Substack Age, you really can do whatever you want. Anyone who continues not to see that, and who remains loyal to the old mechanisms and conventions of participatory citizenship in our latter-day Republic of Letters, by now has an air of ancien-régime loyalism about them.
Some of you will have already heard The Hinternet’s origin story. It all started with a single word…
