Me
I am a writer and your enemy.
You can read some of my previous work at Idiot Joy Showland.
I write for money. If you have money, I will probably write for you. My essays have appeared in publications including The Atlantic, The Baffler, Current Affairs, Damage, Even, First Things, Full Stop, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, Harper’s, The Huffington Post, Jacobin, The New Inquiry, The New York Times, The Outline, Plinth, Politico, Roads and Kingdoms, Salon, Salvage, Slate, The Spectator, Spike Art Magazine, The Telegraph, Verso, Vice, Viewpoint, The Washington Post, and Wired.
You can email me at samrkriss [at] gmail dot com, or by replying to any newsletters in your inbox.
You can ambush me outside my home in London, with weapons, if you like.
This
There are a set of handy best practices for this particular region of the machine: have regular open threads, chitchat with your subscribers, post humanising updates about your life. Form a community. I’m told that the most successful writing on here is friendly, frequent, and fast. Apparently, readers should know exactly what you’re getting at within the first three sentences. I do not plan on doing any of these things.
I would like to see if, in the belly of the dying internet, it’s possible to create something that is not like the internet. I want to see if I can poke at the outlines of whatever is coming next. I wonder if it’s possible to talk about things differently. Not rationally or calmly, away from the cheap point-scoring of online discourse—that would also be boring—but with a better, less sterile kind of derangement. I’m interested in the forms of writing that were here long before the internet, and which will be here long after it’s gone. Not thinkpieces or blogs, but the essay, the manifesto, the satyr, and the screed. Ludibria, pseudepigrapha, quodlibets. Or folktales. Prophecy. Dreams.
You
You can give me money to salve your conscience and read a few extra posts. In doing so you will not ‘be part of a community of people who share your interests.’ You will be alone, looking at a screen. But I’ll try to make it worth your while. Most posts will be free, but I hope to have something exclusive for subscribers every month. Paywalled essays are more likely to touch on political or ‘culture war’ issues, because I firmly believe that 1) nobody should have to be exposed to that sort of thing unless they actively want it, and 2) if you’re the kind of pervert that does actively want it, there should be some kind of tax involved. If there’s one particular paywalled piece that you really want to read but you can’t afford the expense, get in touch and I’ll probably give you a month or so free.
Comment guidelines are that you are not allowed to make comments. This is not me being mean. This is me trying to preserve your dignity. I have seen what comment sections are like. You people clamber over each other to automatically repeat whatever dumb mishmash has curdled together inside your brain, barely reading the piece you’re notionally responding to, and certainly not reading any of the other comments that are getting you so livid—because who actually reads comments? I cannot imagine how little you would have to think of yourself to want to make these scuttling little comments underneath something someone else has written. Write your own thing. Have some self-respect.
