Dear Readers, Dear Friends,
As you know, over the past 15 years I have regularly posted long-form essays on art, culture, politics, history, and philosophy here on my website (if you need your memory refreshed, here is a small sample of some of my essays from the past years: on algorithms, on cultural appropriation, on whether trees exist, on the harmony of languages, on the social history of beavers).
Like many people, I am trying to keep up with new developments in media and technology, and I have finally decided to move from the open blog to the newsletter format, a new sort of platform that, I believe, offers a number of advantages for writers who wish to cultivate and maintain an intimate and organic relationship with readers, as opposed to what often feels like the message-in-a-bottle experience of the blog.
To this end I am inviting you to subscribe to my new Substack newsletter, “The Hinternet”. You may do so simply by clicking here:
Some additional comments are in order, though I'll try to be brief.
Most importantly, this subscription is entirely free of charge. Nonetheless, you have the option of purchasing a paid subscription if you wish to do so. I confess this is part of the reason why I am switching over to the newsletter format. I am ever on the lookout for new ways to do work that is luciferous and luchriferous at once. This is a hard thing to achieve in our low world. Over the years I have found it particularly tiring to write articles for magazines and newspapers, dealing with editors who are often more interested in clickability than in ideas expressed truthfully and elegantly, only then to spend the next several months harassing their billing departments with invoices for what is in the end rather small change.
Moving to the newsletter format, withdrawing somewhat from the structures of traditional media, I and many others have come to hope, may be a way out of that dreary old predicament.
So, I will write whatever I wish to write in my newsletter --as I have long done here-- and my readers will pay me whatever they wish to pay me. If you find this arrangement suitable, please do sign up for a subscription, and please also share the news with your friends and acquaintances.
