What’s Going On at The Hinternet?!

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Well goodness, what a time to début my column at The Hinternet, in the midst of what must be the greatest shake-up this fine publication has ever been through! I suppose I should begin by telling you a bit about myself. I’m a holistic healer working broadly in the folk tradition of my people, and absolutely loving village life not too far from Quimper in my native Brittany. I live with my investment-banker husband, Jim (he’s really a sweetheart, don’t judge him!), two goats who love to wear hand-knit sweaters, and a portly hen named Annabelle. My dad is Breton and my mom’s American, and that’s how I ended up spending some of my teen years in Westchester County and later going to Bryn Mawr, then to Yale for a useless MFA, where, you guessed it, I met my beau. I’m just a typical bilingual, bicultural brat, I admit it! Hélène is brat lmao.

I’m also, seriously, like best best friends with Justin Smith-Ruiu. We talk all the time, or just exchange our own secret language of emojis (different animal species stand for different emotions, and we find that this language is fairly exhaustive even if it is only emotions that are ever denoted in it). So naturally I could only give him an enthusiastic “yes!” when he invited me to join the Hinternet team as Managing Editor (admittedly, for that he had to resort to actual words).

Now as I see it my purpose today is to give you the real “State of the ‘Stack” address that JSR failed to deliver a few weeks ago. You may recall that he posted a video podcast under that heading, said some rather extreme things in it, gave us a lot of tough talk about his plans for the near future. Yet he told us precious little, if we’re being honest, about what is actually happening here at what we now call not “the ‘stack”, but “the magazine”. As usual with him, it was all just a bunch of “me, me, me” — I’m sorry JSR, but you know it’s true! The good news is we managed to get him safely back to the Old World, calmed him down a bit, fed him some slow-food, which he griped about to no end but which you could tell, deep down, he appreciated.

After I became Managing Editor, on his encouragement and with his explicit authorization, I made a number of what can only be called “executive decisions”. For one thing, I deleted that failed “State of the ‘Stack” video podcast. We’ve got to look after the dear boy, and see to it that he not land in any trouble. For another thing, I have convinced him to take a step back from writing here so intensively, to let his newly appointed team take over, for the most part, so that he can focus on his real job as a professor. He will continue to write his magnificent essays and fictions for us, every few weeks or so, but it is the editorial team that will see to the site’s day-to-day running, and it is mostly the featured columnists, including myself, the great Mary Cadwalladr, the whacky (sp. ?) Kenny Koontz, and others, as well as occasional guest contributors, who will be doing the great bulk of the writing here going forward.

I’ve been mulling this over a lot, and I’ve come to think that the most effective way for me to fulfill my task today is to do something I really should not do… at least according to Jim. You see, as a couple he and I have fallen into a real “Darrin and Samantha” dynamic. He has expressly “forbidden” me —ha!— from using what he likes to call “that old Breton woo”, by which of course he means my distinctive suite of supernatural powers. OK, maybe I introduced this whole aspect of my work a bit too abruptly, but look, I don’t know any other way than just to come right out and say it. I’m a witch. I mean a good witch. I am firmly rooted in the matrilineal tradition of Celtic natural magic —in my case it’s actually my paternal grandmother who gifted me with it—, which places me in direct continuity with the pre-Roman Mothers of our Land.

I mean I don’t mean to exaggerate here. Jim certainly encourages me to “be myself”. He just doesn’t want me using my “woo” for mundane business purposes. But then again he never reads anything I do in collaboration with JSR. He thinks JSR’s a bit of a kook, in fact. JSR, for his part, doesn’t want to hear anything at all about my special powers, especially after his rather spirited, and evidently sincere, return to the Church a year ago. But as I’ve said JSR is busy at work right now. So let’s just have a bit of fun, shall we?

One of my specialities is summoning objects, including documents, from the future. I cannot myself time-travel, but I can at least obtain information about what’s on its way by accessing internet-based media that will in fact only appear in the next five years or so (for some reason beyond the five-year boundary everything gets too blurry for me to interpret with any accuracy). So what I thought I’d do today is just give you a straight transcript of part of an interview that JSR did, or will do, on Ezra Klein’s podcast, on February 24, 2027. I can only give you the first minutes of it, and I cannot be entirely certain I am receiving it in the way it originally appeared, or will appear. So take it all with a grain of salt, but nonetheless as providing at least some general idea of the shape The Hinternet will take, indeed must take —this is proper divination here, not mere guess-work— in the next few years:

EK: Hey, JSR, welcome back! Love the Willie Nelson braids you’re sporting these days. Are you going to be keeping those?

JSR: Yeah, probably. We’ll see.

EK: Well look, let’s get right into it. I mean, The Hinternet. It’s huge these days. You’ve got, what, 8 million readers, and listeners and watchers, now?

JSR: Yeah something like that. I don’t look at the stats.

EK: It’s still a weekly? Or have you gone daily?

JSR: Daily, pretty much. Well, bi-daily.

EK: Bi-daily? Does that mean twice a day, or once every two days?

JSR: Sorry, it’s more the latter. Maybe I should have said “quasi-quotidian”.

EK: [laughs] Well look, it’s been a skyrocketing success ever since you transformed it into a proper magazine in, what was it, late 2024?

JSR: Yeah, around then.

EK: There’ve been rumors circulating ever since then that the big change came with, let’s say politely, a little help from Thiel Capital. I’m sure you’ve heard these?

JSR: Yeah, it’s come up.

EK: What’s your response?

JSR: I deny it of course. And if I ever see Peter Thiel I’ll sock him right in the jaw.

EK: [laughs awkwardly] You’ve surely also heard some of the other criticisms. There are a lot of people out there who say the essays you’re still writing, alongside all the other regular contributors, just flow from your unconscious, with no structure at all. What do you say to that?

JSR: Well if they have no structure at all, then Freud is disproven and I have no unconscious.

EK: [laughs] Good point. But let’s get back to the big changes in 2024. You were going through a pretty rough period back then, weren’t you?

JSR: Yeah.

EK: You want to say more about that?

JSR: No, no. [pause]. Just yeah.

EK: It looks like you’re tearing up behind your sunglasses there.

JSR: No. I’m fine.

EK: Well, what made you decide to switch it up like that? I mean to make it more of a proper magazine and less of a JSR-centered personal project?

JSR: I mean it’s true, for the first four years or so I think The Hinternet was essentially my version of an OnlyFans account. I put way too much of myself out there, irreversibly. Maybe that was necessary, for a time, but things just couldn’t go on like that forever. What was I going to do? Keep carrying on about my struggles with depression and anxiety and alienation week after week until I was like 80? Sooner or later everyone would have been, like: “Boo-hoo. Get over it old man.” And they would have been right to do so. The world belongs to the next generations, and it’s our duty as we age to make it as beautiful for them as we can, rather than to remain so absorbed in our own infinitesimal lives, which are in any case en train de disparaître. So it was really either grow or fizzle out. Get really big, or just keep churning out raw emotion for a few perverted dead-enders who for some reason loved that stuff.

EK: What do you say to the common accusation that a good number of the people in your Masthead, as far as anyone can tell, are entirely fictional?

JSR: Well now, I never denied after the “switch-up” in 2024 that The Hinternet would continue to occupy this strange and undefined position somewhere between a proper review of arts and culture and a personal and idiosyncratic art project of its founder. That’s just how we roll. But look, all of the names on the Masthead are the names of what we can fairly call “persons”. It’s just that some of these persons are, shall we say, more metaphysically robust than the others. Or at least they’re more legally robust than the others, in that they have their own social security numbers and so on, while the ones you call “fictitious” are persons in the sense of personae. But the longer we all work together, the less this distinction seems to matter. So for example, Blaise Agüera y Arcas is plainly a robust metaphysical subject, even if he himself may deny that in view of his thoroughgoing naturalism about the mind. And all the Sams involved are very much persons with their own discrete bodies too, easily locatable in spacetime (unless they’re hiding haha). Our communications director David Lamb, likewise, whom I had initially wanted to call our “propaganda minister”, is a hard-working young man with a LinkedIn account and everything, which I have trouble accessing because I don’t myself have an account there, but still, look, I’ve talked to him on Zoom countless times and I know he exists. For some of the others on the team it’s honestly become a bit hard for me to say. I mean Kenny Koontz, who does the wonderful “Item!” feature for us is obviously one of my own alter-egos. But take, say, Hélène Le Goff. That’s a tough one. At this point I honestly don’t know if I made her up or not. But whatever, she’s a great writer, so I’m not going to look into the matter too closely. Just as long as she doesn’t try any of that satanic Wicca stuff on me, we’ll just keep working together like peas and carrots.

EK: What do you say to the criticism that with this project you’re just feeding our massive disinformation problem, which, even if G**** and the others have started this impressive new campaign to mitigate, is still a real danger in our contemporary world?

JSR: We’ve been explicit from the beginning that it is precisely our intention to dive right into the disinformation river, rather than to try to put our tiny little thumbs in the ever-branching cracks of the mega-dam they’re building to hold it back. We see this vein of work paradoxically as the only one that is adequate to, that is honest about, our contemporary moment. The responsibility to distinguish sharply between fact and fiction was one that made sense throughout the entirety of the print era. These were the norms that shaped the genres that were particular to a certain chapter of the history of technology. But that is all over now, and the arts and literature need to start reflecting our new reality far more boldly than they do. Or at least more boldly than they did until we came along.

EK: No one ever accused you of modesty, JSR.

JSR: Why should I be modest?

EK: We can maybe get back to the ethics of all of this later in our conversation, but tell me a bit about how you think technology shapes this new emerging literary form?

JSR: Well as I’ve often said, as I see it we’re repeating something that’s already occurred in previous technological eras, which might best be illustrated by the example of George Martin and the Beatles’ discovery of the “studio-as-instrument” approach to recording. There are just so many new ways to use the functionalities of the internet, particularly the humble hyperlink, as well as all the possibilities for creating sections and subsections and imaginary authors and multimedia mystifications and all the other stuff we’ve innovated over the past years. All these things that you just couldn’t do with books, that make it as if we had something like a book that nonetheless has the power to overflow itself, to spill out into reality in seemingly impossible ways. It’s just amazing.

EK: Can you give me some examples?

JSR: Well, we have what I like to think of as new possibilities of level-looping self-reference that just weren’t there before. I mean I can address myself directly, right now, to Hélène, who’s writing this in 2024.

EK: You could probably do something like that in a book, too, if you wanted to. Couldn’t you?

JSR: Or say I’m working on this new thing where the reader clicks on a link and it takes you, yes you, reader, to a new page where it displays your name, yes, yours in particular… Did it work? My stats show that it works only about 90% of the time, and admittedly for those of you in that remaining 10% you’re probably sitting there going like, What?! That was the lamest trick ever! But you know, I’m working on it.

EK: I thought you didn’t look at your stats.

JSR: [laughs] Caught me!

EK: You know, in spite of all of your revolutionary talk, The Hinternet also shows a deep love of media from the print era. You’ve said before, and I quote, that your earliest “internet-like” experiences were had standing at the supermarket check-out counter with your mom, circa 1980, looking at “the covers of Soap Opera Digest and People and TV Guide”. Is that true?

JSR: Well not quite. You see, we just got our ancestry.com results back — huge thanks to Skip Gates for sending us a complimentary test by mail! It turns out we’re 40% descended from The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 20% from Cabinet Magazine, 10% from 1990s Onion, and 20% from Minotaure. That’s a French Surrealist ‘zine from the 1930s. But the really surprising thing to learn was that somehow we’ve got 5% of our DNA from Heavy Metal, 3% from Jet, and —most unexpected of all— a full 2% from Cat Fancy.

EK: [laughs timidly] So no TV Guide in there?

JSR: No TV Guide. Though I am still thinking about adding Gary Coleman to the list of “Eternal Editors”.

EK: [laughs] So in the end really what you’re saying is that The Hinternet remains very much an expression of JSR’s unique sensibilities, in spite of the fact that it has grown so much over recent years and largely been taken over by a whole editorial team of persons with varying degrees of metaphysical robustness?

JSR: Yeah. That’s right.

EK: Well then tell us again how it all got started. I mean what is it that planted the seed from which all this grew?

JSR: I suppose it was gradual. From 2020 until sometime in mid-2024, I found myself very slowly but surely transmuting my alienation, my inability to share in the norms of any existing institutions, not least academia —which is of course no longer a problem now that the academic humanities simply do not exist at all— from a feeling of despair into a feeling of something like joyous liberation, and an occasion for self-discovery. One of the consequences of this personal transformation is that I simply had to start writing in a way that was more reflective of the actual depths and richness of my inner life. I honestly didn’t have a choice, even if I knew there would likely be consequences. I’m not the first person to go through this of course. It really boils down to what LL Cool J said around the time we were beginning our expansion.

EK: You have that quote here? From LL Cool J?

JSR: Yes, he said, and I quote: “The reality is, in order to win, you have to risk being criticized… If you want to win a championship, you got to be willing to lose a championship.”

EK: Straight facts, from LL Cool J.

JSR: Indeed. I’m just so happy to have learned that lesson in time. To start speaking in my own voice. Most people never do…

And I’m afraid the conversation cuts off there, dear readers. I promise in the future I will not “disobey” my husband, and will avoid pulling media items from the future, by which I mean the future’s future… unless it’s really important ha!

In subsequent installments of my “Adequate Housekeeping” column I’ll be doing much more low-voltage work, i.e., actual “housekeeping”, giving short notices of books received here at The Hinternet’s offices, and things like that.

For now, I just want to thank you for the trust you’ve placed in me, kind readers, as I commence my tenure as primary helmsperson at this fine publication. I’m very grateful for this opportunity.

And please subscribe, if you have not done so already. And don’t forget to follow us on the socials!

Yours, for now,

—HLG