The Universal Mirror

Friends! Please remember that The Hinternet will be going paid-subscription-only as of January 1. We sincerely want to bring as many of you as possible into the semi-exclusive and self-sequestering community of readers that can really only exist beneath a paywall. For that reason, between now and the end of the year we are offering a massive discount on paid subscriptions. It is in your interest to get in now!

You will also be aware, no doubt, that we are entering the season of giving. Some readers have found at Christmases past that a Hinternet subscription has the power to warm its recipient’s hearts, which sometimes triggers an escalatory spiral of quid-pro-quo generosity that can have no real end. So please consider giving a subscription to your friends or loved ones as a gift, and get ready for the boons to redound back upon you in turn.

(Unfortunately there does not seem to be a way to configure the gift subscription offer so as to include the massive discount, but what can we say? Do it anyway? This is about giving, after all.)

On our side, we need a high percentage of paid subscriptions in order to maintain the Hinternet as a viable operation — to pay our guest contributors, to pursue larger-scale cultural initiatives, to pay our (real, human) assistants and collaborators, to maintain all the various monthly subscriptions for all the apps and tools that enable us to do what we do, etc. On your side, the simple fact is that the only Hinternet experience worth having at all is the one made possible by a paid subscription. Everything else is loitering in the parking-lot.

You should also buy my book, both for yourself and as a gift for your friends and loved ones. The critics, so far, are unanimous: they deem it great. But in order to be allowed to write more “great” books (I’ve got one cooking up on love right now), this one has to make back the money paid to its author as an advance, and in order for that to happen, you all need to start clicking “purchase” in greater numbers, adopting it for your book clubs, your school curricula, your indices librorum prohibitorum (in which case you are invited, nay encouraged, to buy all copies in existence, and to burn them).

“How,” you might be asking now, “is all the writing going? You, Justin, sure seem to be doing an awful lot of it!”

That’s true, but I admit that this frenzy of output generally has for me the character of a swan-song: get that beauty out while you still can, while there are still other human beings out there for whom it is at all legible!

I am not optimistic about the fate of writing, mine or anyone else’s, in the coming years. It is plain as can be by now that Substack, however pure its intentions, is not so much a platform for writing as for fetishization of the accoutrements and practices —fountain-pens, typewriters, cozy writing nooks, 30-day first-draft “challenges”— that are associated skeuomorphically with the writing lifestyle. And most of this symbolic commerce is now carried out in the form not of essays, but of tweet-length platitudes, and accompanying stock-photo visual aesthetics, on Substack Notes. I might be tempted to describe this as yet another instance of the universal law of enshittification, were that barbarous neologism —which I place in a dead tie with “himpathy” as the worst new word of the past decade— itself not such a clear sign that we are indeed living in an “enshittified” age.

Regular readers will know by now that as far as I’m concerned, when it comes to the writing life, there is simply nothing to see, and nothing to say. There is only an infinite universe of entities, processes, facts, states of affairs, that need to be chronicled, interpreted, riffed upon, decomposed and recombined without end. Thus over the past five years The Hinternet has concerned itself, just to cite a few examples, with Steamboat Willie, Paleolithic menstrual-trackers, Leland Junius Wheat’s Cortico-Mimetic Association Engine, Thomas Edison’s Black Maria studio, Chateaubriand’s conservatism, Sammy Davis Jr., Rickrolling and hauntology, Sanskrit grammar and the periodic table of elements, the internet if it had been made out of wood, Descartes’s daughter Francine, who was made out of wood, whether there are more eyes or more legs in the world, &c.

You might look at this list and think: Well, I suppose The Hinternet can start wrapping things up now; how much more ground could any one operation hope to cover? But in fact we are just beginning, as it remains our intention to cover every single thing, to give at least passing mention to every entity, event, fact, and state of affairs that has any claim to existence, occurrence, or truth. It is only in this way that The Hinternet will have finally realized its true purpose — to serve as a true and perfect mirror of the universe. And we still have a long way to go. We have never yet so much as mentioned, for example, the Moravian origins of Inuit literature, Oliphant Chuckerbutty, the mysteries of Osiris, the ice-plant that grows inside the on-ramp cloverleafs of the California interstate and that was memorably remarked upon by Bill Cosby in his “Cool Cos” phase, or Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been to Me” (1982), or the Fibonacci sequence, or any variety of Hungry-Man dinner, really, besides Salisbury steak. And while we have repeatedly addressed the question of love in this space over the past five years, we can hardly claim yet to have sounded its limits.

Prosper-Étienne de Vautivière (right), the first Quimper-based Managing Editor of The Hinternet, April, 1961. The identity of the man to his left is unknown (© Hinternet Archives).

And beyond all this, in turn, our larger ambition is likewise to register every entity, event, fact, and state of affairs that has no claim to existence, occurrence, or truth at all, for as Aristotle said, poetry is a grander pursuit than history to the extent that it ranges over all possibilia. We’ve tried to go even further here at The Hinternet and to cover at least some of the impossibilia as well, but we admit we may never be able to make much progress in that domain, if only because there really is an astoundingly great number of impossible entities, events, facts, and states of affairs available to the imagination, and it’s important for us, as finite intellects, to maintain a healthy sense of realism about what our actual capabilities are.

One problem in knowing what to do with The Hinternet, how to use it to its greatest advantage, is that you all read as individuals, but I am only able to read you as a statistical composite. I see, number-wise, that “you” prefer straightforward political take-mongering, anchored to the news-cycle, in perfect harmony with the other voices in that day’s or week’s round of publicly approved discourse (the “harmony” is produced not by agreement on the substance of any given matter, but by a deeper agreement —which almost always goes unacknowledged— that that matter, along with a very short list of others, is what’s on the day’s discourse menu). When something related to the culture wars is in the title, a piece does numbers; when the Roman de Renart is in the title, rather less so.

“You” do not like the metafictions, the pseudonymies, or really anything at all that is less than hyper-literal and explicit from the very beginning about what it intends to do. “You”, I generally conclude, do not really want to see an end to the culture wars; for there is a way out of them, and you’re free to take it at any time. And “you” don’t really like writing either; “you” like exchanging signifiers associated with the writing life. But please, do not write in response and say “I for one do not match that description; I am not one of the ‘you’.” I get comments and DMs like that every time I point out this steady and unchanging and thoroughly data-based fact about the way people read today. The best thing to do, instead, if you disagree with what I have said about “you”, is to prove me wrong in a way that actually comes across in the raw numbers.

On a more personal note, this week, December 2, will be the fifth anniversary of my sobriety — well, “California sober” haha, but whatever, it works for me. As I’ve written here before, it was only when I quit drinking that it became at all possible to move beyond a crippling self-hatred that had stalked me since adolescence, and to find the confidence required really to start being myself, to start speaking in my own voice, in public, rather than always trying to be someone else in the impossible hope of satisfying some mostly imaginary idea of what other people were expecting from me. What a beautiful turn of events, and so unexpected!

It was also only in this same period that I finally found myself enjoying deep, meaningful friendships with like-minded people, in a feedback-driven dynamic of mutual encouragement and buoying. I simply never knew before, and now I find I can not possibly overstress, how vitally important it is to have friends who are made happy by our achievements and who encourage us in those things we have not yet achieved.

And parallel to all this friendship and all this non-drinking, there has been the writing, which I see now could not possibly have begun to flow as it does these days if these other two pillars had not moved into place. A common bit of wisdom among authors on the trade-publishing circuit says that the only genre of writing left that Americans want to read is self-help. I bristled and fought against this for a long time, and indeed my editors and advisors still often tell me that my frequently haughty, prickly, self-distancing style is one that hardly announces its belonging within the mainstream of the last remaining genre.

Trying to warm up to this brute fact about the American reading public, at times I have told myself that many of the greatest works of philosophy have in the end been works of high-level self-help. What is Spinoza’s Ethics, for example, if not: follow along with my demonstration of the fundamental structure of reality, in order then to be happy?

What I’m thinking now anyhow is that self-help is perhaps not the worst thing to be engaged in. Read, indeed, whatever helps you —The Hinternet, the Ethics, Who Moved My Cheese?—; and write too, and have friends, and be your truest selves: that, beyond all the Wizard of Oz effects and the baroque sub-plots and the convention-defying horseplay, is really what The Hinternet is all about.

Let’s see, what else? I wrote a very personal essay for Compact Magazine on psychedelics and religious faith. I was pleased for this opportunity, but I also think it will be the last time, at least for a long while, that I write on the topic. As in every other area of life, I should not be surprised to discover that in matters of established religion there are —of course there are!— many enforcers out there of what they take to be a “correct” line, who have little patience to hear from someone who is, by his own admission, simply finding his way, and being honest about his doubts, hesitations, and misprisions. I mean, I had to write at least a bit, over these past few years, just to be able to get clear, to the extent that propositional form allows, on what I in fact believe. But in the future I don’t really want to be a Catholic writer at all, even if I’m a Catholic and a writer. I take the great Australian poet Les Murray as a model here — who is far more at home in Aboriginal song-cycles or in the small bloody miracle of a new lambing at a sheep-station, than he is holding forth on matters of dogma, and who, when pressed on his faith, would simply say of it that, well, “it’s the greatest poem of them all” (or something to that effect; I’m paraphrasing).

I’m sorry to everyone I will not see in London. I will be there, but only very briefly, December 2-4, and I’m just not able to squeeze in any more engagements, notwithstanding my earlier expression of an interest in organizing some sort of salon-style meet-up. Oh well, perhaps next time. I will however be in New York at the tail end of the month, likely December 29 - January 3, where I will be dealing with several items of Hinternet-related business, and where I hope to have at least a bit more time to be able to see everyone I know and love, as perhaps also some people I don’t yet know I love.

Thank you to everyone who wrote asking us to send you a t-shirt. We will do so, but likely not before the tail-end of the year — and thus, regrettably, after Christmas. Do let us know if you would like one (again: editor@the-hinternet.com), and if so what your mailing address is, what size you wear, and, given that we have a limited supply, perhaps also a few words about the sort of social settings you anticipate wearing it in. We’re giving these things away for free, and in exchange we do expect a bit of publicity work!

Finally, before you go: a very valuable member of The Hinternet’s editorial team, New York-based, is looking for a new day-job in the marketing/comms field. He comes with a proven record of accomplishment in that domain, and also, if it should be requested, a raving recommendation from me. Please be in touch by DM or e-mail (editor@the-hinternet.com) if you are looking for such a person.