Warm Holiday Greetings from The Hinternet

Dear Readers,

I find it fitting, this Christmas, to drop character for a moment — for Larvatus prodeo applies to me as well, and typically the narrative voice behind even my non-pseudonymous work is not entirely my “real” one either. I find it needful at least this once to get all “sincere on Main”, and to thank you heartily for your readership and continued support. 2024 has been a great year, for The Hinternet and for me, and I’m expecting 2025 to be even better.

2024 is the year I determined, to be blunt, that The Hinternet, and whatever might evolve out of it, is what I “want to do with my life”. This is the year I finally fully stopped worrying about what so-and-so might think if I were to write this, or how that other so-and-so might roll their eyes if I were to write that, and simply to write in the way that my own internal logic dictates I must.

I have taken to saying recently that it is as if, over the past few years, I came to be aware that I had whole universes pent up inside of me, and that of necessity I was going to have to find a way to release them. Perhaps a more accurate metaphor would be of the cow for whom they keep a syringe locked up in the barn, and which they plunge into that poor bovid’s side when it becomes bloated with methane. The difference between the two images is not as great as might first appear, as galaxies too form from gases. The important thing is that it had to happen — I had to start writing with my full person, if only in order to stave off a more unsightly explosion.

Bicci di Lorenzo, Saint Nicholas Revives the Three Youths (1433-35)

All of that was probably clear already within a few months of launching The Hinternet in August, 2020. But it was in 2024, regular readers will have noticed, that our publication really went “next level”. I do not need to tally all of this year’s several innovations; The Hinternet itself is the tally. It will be enough to say that this is the year we transformed into something somewhat resembling a magazine, if a thoroughly unconventional one.

We’ve confessed repeatedly here that most (though not all) the pseudonymous pieces are in fact written by me or some variant of me, but we’ve also brought on board a small staff of real editorial assistants, and grown ourselves a proper Masthead. We’ve begun accepting guest pieces with some regularity (though our standards for acceptance remain high, and our rate of acceptance low), and we’ve become much more adept at summarizing, in easy-to-parse language, just what it is we think we are doing here. This year is also the year I’ve seen the first signs of a group of younger —what should we call them?— disciples? mentees? Anhänger? like-minded youth? taking shape around The Hinternet. I honestly never had any intention to faire école, as the French say. But now that some kind of “school” is plainly forming, I confess I find it extremely gratifying, another of those strange pleasures of maturation one typically is unable to anticipate in one’s own youth.

The “official” line on The Hinternet is this:

The Hinternet remains a cross between a personal art project of its Founding Editor Justin Smith-Ruiu, and a legitimate media operation, of however modest a scale, in the broad “arts and culture” category. It often deploys pseudonymy and metafiction to engage with difficult concepts and with the pressing issues of the day.

And here is how ChatGPT recommends we simplify the same pitch if we ever find ourselves in an elevator beside a filthy rich person with an extremely short attention span but a keen desire to invest in new projects on the cultural scene:

The Hinternet is both a personal art project of its founder, Justin Smith-Ruiu, and a small but real media operation in the “arts and culture” field. It often uses invented characters and fictional devices to explore complex ideas and current issues.

We’ll be unveiling some of our big new plans for 2025 with a piece from Managing Editor Hélène Le Goff early in January. It will suffice to say, for now, that they are big, big indeed. Our readership is growing fast — since August of this year, the curve of the line tracking our total number of subscribers looks rather like a global population chart since the Industrial Revolution.

However, we still need a good number more paid subscribers in order to realize all the plans we have for 2025, which include not only paying guest contributors, but also such unlikely endeavors as producing Hörspiele and sponsoring “real”-world events. As we’ve explained before, so far we have found ourselves no rich guys in elevators to help us realize our ambitions, and the truth is we would prefer, if possible, to avoid them, and the veto power we fear they might dare to exercise if they were to take a financial interest in our doings. It is far better to operate on a budget amassed entirely from small monthly or annual subscriptions.

The common wisdom about how to raise money dictates that one be short and sweet about it, yet here I am going on and on as usual. So let me try to wrap now by saying, once again, we love having you reading us, and we would also love seeing significant growth in the ratio of paid subscribers to free subscribers. In the coming year The Hinternet experience will be vastly richer, with several deeper levels of access, for subscribers of the former sort — that’s one reason to upgrade. But the best reason to upgrade is simply to help this project fully to fructify, leaving none of its many hopeful buds to die on the vine.

This is also, I might remind you, the best time of year to consider giving someone you love, or perhaps someone you want annoyingly to impress or to improve, a gift subscription. I personally would love it if I were to receive a “dematerialized” gift such as this, one that I could now call “mine”, yet without any need of hauling it around in my suitcase.

Finally, you may know that, even now, if you attempt the secret “back door” strategy and write to us asking for a comp, you are very likely to receive one. (Merry Christmas!) Even if your financial situation compels you to make this request, as the only possible way for you to get past our ever-more-fortified paywalls, you can still help The Hinternet to grow simply by spreading the word about the work we are doing here. Almost all of our growth over the past four years has been organic, by word of mouth, and if you are reading these words now you are in a position to join up with that organism and to help us grow more.

Seriously though, what a lovely holiday Christmas is — the omnidirectional generosity of all towards all; the slight lingering signs of a naughtier stratum of Saturnalia; the first detectible shift of the gnomon’s shadow four days after the winter solstice; the miracle at Bethlehem, and the weary ox and ass looking on in wonder at the radiant newborn babe. It’s all so dazzling!

Merry Christmas, friends. We’ll be back early in 2025 with more hard work and creativity, which is to say that The Hinternet will probably go silent for the next ten days or so, though it’s possible some of our elves and sylphs and brownies might reappear here to make some small obscene gestures, as they do, to tide you over until then. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, I have several urgent deadlines to meet in other domains of my career; I have family and loved ones to visit; and I have Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe (1849) to read — such a beautiful and sensitive writer, with the power, I think, to make anyone feel, if only while reading him, the melancholy of the conservative spirit in an age of revolutionary vandalism (not because conservatives are “right”, but because it’s hard, hard, to see our beloved past subducted into oblivion, as it is no doubt for every generation, but for some more than others). More on him, perhaps, in 2025. For now, much love, and warm wishes and blessings for the New Year.

—JSR