Sam Kriss examines the concept of survival in a world that seems to be constantly changing. Drawing from ancient philosophy and contemporary trends, they challenge the idea of novelty itself and explore how everything, whether it's something we hope for or despise, is destined to fail. With a mix of skepticism and dark humor, they contemplate our obsession with staying relevant in an ever-evolving society.

The internet is already over

Sam Kriss paints a dystopian picture of a state funeral for Queen Elizabeth II. The streets are filled with mourners, shops are empty, and even the smartphone apps have turned funeral black. As the protagonist navigates the never-ending queue that stretches through buildings and across London, the sense of surrealism and mourning intensifies. With vivid descriptions and a touch of dark humor, this piece by Sam Kriss delves into themes of grief, societal expectations, and the cult of celebrity. 

You don’t have any particular desire to file past the Queen’s coffin as it lies in state at Westminster Hall, but you don’t really have any choice in the matter either. One morning, you pop out to the shops for a few cans of cold, refreshing gravy, and find that the street outside is full of people with coloured wristbands, standing patiently on both sides of the road. A few cops in yellow jackets pace up and down the line as it shuffles slowly forwards. Volunteers hand out bottled water. There’s a bank of Portaloos by your front gate. It’s the first bright, slightly chilly day of autumn, and all the shelves at the supermarket are empty. A friendly sign by the entrance tells you that as a gesture of respect following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, we will not be stocking any products today. We invite you to wander these empty aisles in a spirit of mournful reflection. Something else is doing your grieving for you; every app on your phone has turned funeral black. In the windows of chicken shops, where they usually advertise the price of six wings and a Coke, screens show the late monarch’s dignified beak instead.

So you walk back to your flat, only to discover that the stairwell is full of stoic standing figures too, and so is the hallway, and so is your flat. The steward by your door shrugs a miniature apology. The streets are full, she explains, the whole of London’s been backed up. The queue now stretches down every street in the capital, and it’s expanding into the Home Counties at an alarming rate. To prevent the entire country being consumed, they had to start routing it through buildings. There are ten people jammed into your kitchen. Mourners make a ring around your bed. Across the street, silhouettes stand black on the rooftops, waiting. Nowhere to put yourself that is not, in some sense, part of the line. So when it shuffles forwards, you shuffle with it. You have joined the queue.

Overhead, the RAF are spraying London with a chemical defoliant, so all the trees stand gaunt and spindly to match the national mood. You have been given a wristband. The queue carries you by steady inches in and out of the other flats in your building, through schools, shops, over the rattling walkways of the electrical substation hunched over the banks of the canal. Sometimes a truck grunts past on the road, its bed piled high with dead swans. Those long necks lolling, slit, a darkening red gash ripped through white feathers just above the breastbone, like a cross of St George. Gone to join their mistress. You file through sewage treatment plants and pissy underpasses. The queue is taking you deeper into the shambling backlands of London. Rusty tracts, chain-link fences enclosing scaly wastes of gravel and brackish puddles fringed with slime. Low white warehouses: M HUSSAIN IMPORTS LTD. Behold this kingdom! The queue tramps in and out of retail parks. WORLD OF DOILIES. GANGRENEMART. Shouldn’t you be headed in, converging on the city’s crunchy photogenic core? Not yet, the wardens explain. The queue is too long; you’ve been placed in a holding pattern, spiralling anticlockwise around the edges of London, against the sun.

One-third of the British population have, at some point in their lives, encountered the Queen. In the flesh, they say. She opened their local shopping centre or visited their kids’ school. Twenty million people have seen it: grey strings, flesh, tubed in grey skin. Everyone around you in the queue seems to be one of the twenty million; now they want to stand in the presence of that flesh one last time. Mark had seen her scattering breadcrumbs by the railway tracks in Dollis Hill. Gregor had seen her shoplifting a pint of semi-skimmed milk and a copy of Take a Break from the Nisa Local down the end of his road. She doesn’t carry money, he explains. Penny, with her blue-tinged teeth, says that the Queen was her neighbour for a few years when she lived in Eastbourne. She was quiet, kept herself to herself, but sometimes she’d put her rubbish in Penny’s bins, even though there was a low brick wall between their cottages and it should have been obvious which bins belonged to which property. Penny would open her bin to find it full of empty cans of Pedigree Chum. For the corgis, you see. Once they’d had an argument about it on the street. Yasmin says she’d wandered blearily into her own kitchen late at night to find the Queen in her cupboards, nibbling at Hobnob crumbs. Oh, Yasmin had said, I’m sorry, your majesty. The Queen had smiled; she was totally disarming. It’s quite alright, she’d said, and scurried away with a swish of her furry tail.

It’s all very British, this queue. This is how we Brits respond to a moment of national crisis, by standing in an orderly queue. Sharing our sandwiches. Making small talk. Waiting our turn. We hardly need policing; the cops seem to be just as much in the gentle tide of it all as everyone else. Nobody thinks to complain; there’s just one sound several miles down the line, a baby’s crimson scream. Most of the houses you wander into have already been ransacked. By the time your section of the queue files through the back door the sofas have been reduced to heaps of synthetic stuffing, the TV’s been smashed, books ripped down the spine, clothes shredded, paper torn from the walls like sodden bandages. There’s always more to do; the cops, trying to be helpful, point out whichever objects are still intact. In one home, you watch as a plastic kettle is slammed against the kitchen counter until it splinters into limescale-scratchy shards. Or you can still rip up the carpets. Gnaw out reams of polypropylene fluff, maul at the carpet with your teeth. Someone takes a hammer to a toilet bowl and pisses in the tank, to quick silent congratulatory nods. You file through homes flooded, lit by sparking wires. Shit-smeared walls, cumglobs bejewelling doorknobs, doors kicked in. Then the vandals sip tea from their thermoses and wait. The same thing has probably already happened to your flat, but you discover that you don’t much care any more. Homes: we no longer need them. We live in the queue, are the queue, its patient wending, its democratic plod.

The line doesn’t stop when it gets dark. Dawn catches you soldiering through the wreckage of a dentists’ surgery, trying to eat the plastic model of some well-aligned teeth, trying to eat all their nice pink slimy putty. You are not feeling quite right. You keep touching your neck, and it’s all tender, swollen. When you loop past another segment of the same queue, heading in the opposite direction, you see it on them too. The mourners wave limp British flags and take turns pushing the pram with angry bulbs on the sides of their necks. Some blossom into lesions. Ragged petals of diseased skin, corpse-pale, surround each open sore. Cervical tuberculous lymphadenitis: scrofula. Edward the Confessor was the first to stroke the scrofulous: the touch of a trueborn English sovereign is the magic cure for his evil. You have to get there, to the palace. Bound up the catafalque, wrench open the coffin, and rub your feverish skin against her hands. Then you’ll be well again. You have to reach her before they put her in the ground, and afterwards you’ll queue for something else.

When the day of the funeral comes, you’ve still not made it to Westminster. You have arrived in some desert region of the world, where sands sparkle sharp in the morning heat. You keep walking. Everyone holds their phones out in front of them, watching the ceremony as they plod. Such lovely music: we can still do gravity in this country. I am the resurrection and the life. They place the Queen on a gun carriage, and the queue marches on. She’d planned every detail of this: she wanted to be mounted like a piece of artillery. Maybe, once the procession’s over, the soldiers might tilt the coffin upwards and fire her remains off into the sky.

You’re walking six abreast now, an endless train snaking through endless empty space, all in time to the drums sounding from everyone’s phones. As the queue files over the dunes it sets off small cascades of dust, revealing the deeper strata beneath. Layers of purple sand, the purple of deep viscera, of wombs. Turquoise lizards dart bowlegged into the newly excavated heaps and come out again with big beetles in their mouths. The cops and the stewards have vanished, but here and there the bleached remnants of a Portaloo still rise out of the wasteland. Rusted old security barriers. Flakes of masonry: Portland stone. The procession marches down the Mall and you march through the desert. Ranks and ranks of military men walking without any particular destination. Horns blare, Big Ben bongs, and maybe it’s the heat, but you’re no longer sure which sluggish crawl is which. You are wearing a bearskin. You are wearing a gilded Albert helmet with white plumes. You are wearing a heavy jacket embroidered with the Royal Standard in gold thread, and the sun above you feels unfamiliar, bigger, more bloated, burning a bloodier red than the one you once knew. Far away, they carry her coffin to St George’s Chapel. Stately gothic filigree in its green green gardens. Elizabeth II is lowered, slowly, under its stones.

It’s hard not to feel pride, even as the lesions on your neck seep milky discharge, even with your feet burning and your legs made of wood. You don’t know where it is you’re marching now, or what could possibly be over the horizon, but you’re glad. The body of England cries out to welcome its Queen. A nation drawn from every corner of the earth, of every faith, of every speech, bound by oven chips and spitting rain and you, my liege, great sovereign of our furrowed fields, warbling hedgerows, dusty lanes— of the pylon-lands, where steel giants march the ley lines and threnodies crackle on the wires between— dread empress of our laybys, pebbledash suburbs, our naked estates, stripped of their plastic cladding, lady of the rot, of the big Tesco outside town— victorious, glorious, holder of the orb, of all that lies from the farthest outcrops to Dover’s final ragged tooth… This tomb, this England! This realm, this earth, this soil, this mulch, this England! This ground receives you! Put it in! Deeper! In!

Scenes from the state funeral

Sam Kriss explores the story of the Gerasene Demoniac and delves into the power of parables used by Jesus. Through vivid imagery and compelling storytelling, the author takes us on a journey of understanding the art of parable and the secrets of the Kingdom of Heaven. Prepare to be captivated by this exploration of the profound lessons hidden within ancient scriptures and the impact of Jesus' teachings on the souls of men.

Legion

Sam Kriss dives into the politics of pronouns, exploring their significance and the underlying ideological structures at play. With examples ranging from historical anecdotes to contemporary gender debates, the author challenges our assumptions about these seemingly insignificant words. They argue that pronouns are intrinsically political and reveal how we describe ourselves and relate to others. Prepare to have your perspective on language and identity challenged as you delve into this fascinating exploration of pronouns and their larger societal implications. 

Me, me, me, me, me


Author Sam Kriss delves into a lesser-explored aspect of Nazi Germany as Beradt, after being banned from political writing, begins recording people's dreams. Through these dreams, we witness the anxious reality of living under a totalitarian regime, where even a cushion or mirror can become an informant. But what's truly intriguing are the dreams of complicity, where women find themselves erotically involved with Hitler. In this gripping essay, Kriss explores the depths of human psychology in one of history's darkest times.

In 1933, the journalist Charlotte Beradt started reporting from the other world.

For nearly a decade, Beradt had been a writer for the Weltbühne, a weekly magazine based in Potsdam. It had started out in 1905 printing mostly theatre reviews and gossip, but grown steadily more political since. During the First World War, its mostly pacifist writers had struggled against state censorship; afterwards it started publishing proletarian manifestos. In the late 1920s it exposed the Reichswehr’s secret rearmament, for which its journalists were tried and sentenced to eighteen months in prison; the editor, Carl von Ossietzky, later received the Nobel Peace Prize. After the Reichstag fire, the Weltbühne was banned. Its final issue had already been printed; every copy was burned, and the plates melted down. Von Ossietzky was arrested; so was Beradt. She was released after a few days. He died of tuberculosis in 1938 after five years of torture in a concentration camp.

Beradt was released into a very hostile world. She was a woman, a socialist, and a Jew. There were no more left-wing magazines that might employ her, but she didn’t leave Germany. It was impossible for her to keep writing dispatches on the political situation, but she didn’t stop reporting. She started writing down people’s dreams.

Those notes were published after the war as Third Reich of Dreams. Most of the dreams she reports are anxious. Not long after the Nazis came to power, a doctor dreamed that all the walls in his apartment had suddenly vanished, with a loudspeaker announcing ‘the decree of the 17th of this month on the Abolition of Walls.’ Quite a few people dreamed similar bureaucratic instruments: other dreams featured the ‘Regulation Prohibiting Residual Bourgeois Tendencies Among Municipal Employees’ and the ‘Training Centre for the Wall-Installation of Listening Devices.’ A man dreamed that one of the cushions on his sofa denounced him to the authorities: it had heard him comment that Göring was getting fatter by the day. Other people were turned in by ‘a mirror, a desk, a desk clock, an Easter egg.’

A woman dreamed that all the street signs in her town had been replaced with lists of the words it was now forbidden to speak aloud. The first was Lord, in English; the last was I. An elderly maths teacher dreamed that the government was executing anyone who wrote down any mathematical formula, so she hid herself in a rowdy nightclub full of brawling drunks and half-naked women, and scribbled equations on a piece of tissue paper in invisible ink, like a spy, terrified all the while that someone would find out.

One of Berandt’s sources dreamed that she was on a peaceful family outing with her mother, eating cake by the banks of the Havel. Her mother carried a folder containing their genealogical documents: proof that they were fully Aryan and had nothing to worry about.

Suddenly a shout: they’re coming. Everyone knew who ‘they’ were and what our crime was. Run, run, run. I looked about for a hiding place high up. Perhaps up the trees? Atop a cupboard in the restaurant? All at once I found myself lying at the bottom of a pile of corpses with no idea how it got there—at least I had a good hiding place. Pure bliss under my pile of bodies, clutching my papers in their folder.

Years before the death camps, before the actual piles of bodies under which the survivors tried to hide, that future was already building itself within Germany’s dreams. And her dream contained not just the slaughter, but the deliberate ignorance too. ‘Pure bliss under my pile of bodies.’

But the most interesting dreams in the collection might be the ones that aren’t about subjugation, but complicity. Many women had erotic dreams about Hitler: the Führer would stroke their backs, dance with them, pinch their arses; he turned out to be a much nicer man than they’d thought. Most of the women who had these dreams did not support the Nazis; more than a few had a Jewish parent or grandparent. But Hitler would whisper to them that he didn’t mind that they weren’t in the Party, and he didn’t care about their Grandmother Recha or their big nose. I like this one; keep this one safe.

A woman who was born into a Jewish family, but who had been baptised as a child, dreamed that she was strolling with two handsome blond naval officers when they came across a fat, hideous Jew lying sprawled out on the street. ‘I think they’re absolutely awful, too,’ she blurted out. ‘I just can't stand the look in their eyes. But you've forced me, literally beat me into being one of them. I'm still not one of them, though.’ Then she turned to the naval officers. ‘Except that I might go to bed with one of you,’ she said.

Maybe the most revealing dream takes the form of a small fable. A man dreamed that he’d been instructed to collect money for the Nazis outside Berlin Zoo. He decided that he couldn’t be bothered, so he left his collection box at home, and brought along a pillow and a blanket instead. While he was relaxing outside the zoo, Hitler suddenly appeared, wearing ‘a pair of wrinkled but very conspicuous purple satin trousers like a circus clown.’ He starts performing for the crowds: making funny faces for small children, sternly lecturing the teenagers, flirting with old women.

‘I began to feel uncomfortable under my blanket and grew afraid he would come over to me as a representative of the group of those who pretend to sleep and would notice that I had no collection box. Meanwhile I was imagining what sort of heroic answer I’d have ready—something like: I may have to be here, but I do know about the concentration camps and I am against them.’

But Hitler doesn’t approach him. He simply sings a few strains from an imaginary opera called Magika, and the crowd applauds.

‘I thought, maybe he's not so bad after all… Maybe I needn’t take the trouble to oppose him. All at once I realized that instead of pillow and blanket, I was carrying a collection box.’

Third Reich of Dreams might be the most complete account we have of what it actually felt like to live in Nazi Germany. You could read a historian’s depiction, you could listen to first-hand stories from people who were around during those years, you could even leaf through their diaries. But nothing from the daylit world will ever express the feeling of living under a dictatorship so directly as these dreams. To find the truth of this world, you have to cross over into the other one.

What is it like to live in the present?

Lately, I’ve been having dreams about Liz Truss. Not long after our new prime minister blew a deliberate hole in the British economy, I dreamed I was at an orgy in an Italian villa carved into a high cliffside. This place didn’t have rooms, exactly, just a series of interlinked courtyards, colonnades, fountains, marble wreathed in ivy, staircases down to little grottoes where you could hear the roaring of the sea. Young people were lounging around in various stages of undress, smoking cigarettes, making eyes at each other, waiting for the party to begin—but Liz Truss was there too, disquietingly nude, with a camera crew in tow. (I remember that there were two of them; they both carried heavy TV cameras, and both wore head-to-toe PVC gimp suits.) She wandered through the courtyards, barging into people’s conversations with a microphone and a wonky grin, asking them to comment for the cameras on what a wonderful job she was doing as prime minister. Desperation glittered in her eyes. Most people shrugged or said fine, but when she cornered me down in one of the grottoes, pleading for me to like her, I said that actually I didn’t like her at all, and she was ruining this whole thing for everyone, and would she please just leave? The prime minister was utterly crestfallen. She ran away in tears, and I chased after her. I hadn’t said enough; I had to really twist the knife, let her know exactly how much she disgusted me. At least, that’s how I was justifying it. But I lost sight of her on the cold dark stairs, and as I kept running up I couldn’t find a way back into the villa either. Eventually I emerged at the top of the cliff. There was a high plateau up there, and a little town: a post office, a small church, a children’s playground. It was all in ruins. Hundreds of baboons had overtaken this place, a shrieking fury of apes with bared teeth and swollen red anuses. There was no way down. I searched for the naked white cowering form of Liz Truss. She was not there.

A friend had another Liz Truss dream. He’d been given a box with a large red button, and told that all he had to do was push the button, and the Conservative leadership election would be instantly undone; Rishi Sunak would be our prime minister instead. He didn’t need to think for a second: he pushed the button. What he didn’t realise was that this meant Liz Truss would now have to live in his home. She bedded down in a sleeping bag in his kitchen and ate all his jam. She filled his bathroom with her various hair care products. She wandered round the flat in a towel, leaving wet footprints on the floor. She was too friendly and too cheerful; she kept ordering big pizzas he didn’t want and suggesting they watch a film together. In the end he cycled down to Downing Street with Liz Truss stuffed in his bike bag, folded in half with her feet sticking out the top, waving and smiling like a moron at all the people on the street. He demanded to talk to Rishi Sunak, but the huge bearded cops outside the door of No 10 wouldn’t let him through. You made your choice, they said. You love her really.

Everyone else I know has been dreaming about disasters. One friend dreamed that she was idly eating a handful of thumbtacks, enjoying the slightly scratchy sensation as they passed down her throat, until a Victorian messenger in coat-tails rushed in to warn her that these were actually ‘thumbtack nukes,’ a terrifying new weapon developed by the Kremlin to be used in Ukraine. Everywhere she went, a crowd of attendants in formal dress followed, clearing the streets with their warnings. ‘Walking nuke! Walking nuke!’ Another dreamed, shortly after the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline, that he was sailing a catamaran over the calm flat waters of the Baltic, when he received a text telling him that the entire sea was being experimentally replaced with a new substance called ‘water 2.’ Water 2 has a thick, jellylike consistency, and the boat couldn’t move through it, but he found that it would support his weight just enough for him to be able to walk back to shore. When he arrived, he found that there’d been a terrible mistake: water 2 is highly combustible when it comes into contact with the land. The whole of Europe was on fire: thick jellylike flames that wobbled high into the sky. He wandered through scorched cities, streets littered with bones crumbling into ash; he was the only one who didn’t burn.

My girlfriend had a dream in which the entire country was devastated by a terrible earthquake, the source of which had been traced to an ordinary semi-detached house somewhere in the suburbs of London. She raced to the house, trying to prevent the carnage. The house was still in one piece; all the streets were exactly as they should be, as if the earthquake had never happened. The aftermath of the disaster was indistinguishable from normal life. Inside that house, there were a small group of plotters about to push the button on their earthquake machine, and she suddenly realised that there was nothing she could do to stop them. They fired the machine. The world crumbled.

A friend is recently single. He dreamed that he’d given his number to a girl at the bar where he works, and she’d called him as he was walking home. Immediately, she started talking to him as if they’d already been together for years: telling him all about her day, about her arguments with her friends, some bullshit she’d had to deal with at work… My friend wanted to ask why she was saying all this stuff, but he couldn’t get a word in edgeways. When he looked up, the moon was unusually bright, glowing huge in the sky. He tried to tell the girl about the enormous moon, but she wasn’t listening. Looking up again, he realised that it wasn’t the moon at all—the moon was on the other side of the sky, the same size as always—but an entirely unfamiliar planet, and it was growing. This planet was about to collide with Earth. He kept telling the girl that they were all about to die, and she kept telling him about how everyone else at the office was secretly jealous of her. He gave up. These are my last moments, he thought: this inane drivel is what I’ll be experiencing in my final precious seconds of life. Then the planet struck, and he died.

My sources for these dreams come from the same general social group as Charlotte Beradt’s, the broadly liberal-minded urban middle classes—but our dreams are not the same. We do not live under the Nazis. There is no figure like Hitler to inspire the fear and hatred that, in dreams, can turn into a kind of desperate love. Our head of government becomes a slightly pathetic figure: Liz Truss is currently hashing out an austerity regime that will probably silently kill thousands of people, very soon, but in the dreamworld she’s merely annoying. We want her out of our orgies. We want her out of our house.

There is still something giving orders, but no Party to issue decrees or set up its fantastic bureaucracies. In my friend’s dream with the thumbtack nukes, the weapon had been built by the Russians—but who supplied the crowd of liveried servants that followed her around? Who decided to replace the Baltic with water 2, and who sent the text message? Who built the button that replaces our government? We are still not free, but the power commanding our lives has become distributed and invisible. These dreams emerge out of an order that is not a democracy, but not anything else either. There’s only the vague, distant, nameless fog that runs and ruins the world.

I had my own disaster dream: I dreamed that I got a new tattoo. Across my forehead, in neatly spaced Times New Roman, I’d permanently marked myself with the phrase GRAB A LARGE BOWL OF OLIVES. I stopped in front of a mirror, grinning, to admire the results, and suddenly thought: why the fuck did I just do that?

Last week was Yom Kippur, so I went to shul. My family find this very funny; they think I’m turning frum. I don’t think it’s that, exactly; I’m not going to stop eating treyf or operating a light switch on Saturdays, but something has changed. In 2014, instead of going to Kol Nidre, I snorted a good lungful of coke, had sex in a park in south London, and tweeted is it breaking fast to eat pussy on yom kippur. (It is.) This time, I fasted for the regulation twenty-five hours, and wore white, and repented of my sins before the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

Kol Nidre is a strange ritual. We open the Yom Kippur service by repudiating all vows and promises we’ve made over the last year, and which we might make over the next. ‘Our vows are no longer vows, and our prohibitions are no longer prohibitions, and our oaths are no longer oaths.’ (At my shul, it was preceded by another invocation, in English. ‘All vows, prohibitions, and oaths that we have made, from the previous Yom Kippur to this Yom Kippur—may we have the courage to keep them.’) Nobody knows exactly why we do this; it might have once been a way of renouncing a forced conversion to Christianity or Islam. For Christian societies, though, the existence of Kol Nidre seemed to indicate that Jews couldn’t be trusted to keep our promises. Once, Jews testifying against a Christian in court had to swear special oaths designed to overcome our inherent mendaciousness. Sometimes this was merely humiliating: in medieval Germany, the Jew had to stand on the hide of a pig, and say that if he lied, ‘may that sulphur and pitch flow down upon my neck that flowed over Sodom and Gomorrah.’ Sometimes it was outright torture. In France, any Jew making his case had to do so while a branch of thorns was pulled between his loins.

When I was younger, I couldn’t really understand why my ancestors had suffered all of this. Just convert! Why die? Why be tortured? Why not just drop that weird pedantic religion and live like everyone else? That’s what I was doing, eating pussy on Yom Kippur. I didn’t want to be a Jew, trapped in my ‘specific perversity, private whimsy, and arbitrariness.’ I wanted to be part of the world: to fuck under the open sky, to dig my fingernails into the dirt.

In the Talmud, tractate Berakhot 57b, in the middle of a section on prophetic dreams, it is written: ‘Three things are microcosms of the Olam Ha-Ba, and they are Shabbat, sexual intercourse, and the Sun.’

Last week, I took the Tube up to Finchley for Kol Nidre, and then I had to walk back. I live in central London, so it was a long walk. By the time I made it home, I was parched; my mouth was gummed up, tacky and sour. The law says that you can drink water on Yom Kippur, but only a cheekful. I took a big gulp from the tap, spat out half, and tried to swish what remained around my mouth, sluicing it through my teeth, trying to scrub out the rankness. It didn’t do much. One of the things you are permitted to do on Yom Kippur is reading for pleasure, so I read. I was midway through Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, which concerns a heretical Jewish sect that emerged in eighteenth-century Poland. I liked Tokarczuk’s heretics. The ordinary Jews in the novel are hidebound, stuck in the shtetl with their mud floors and their long serious beards. But the heretics are smart, smarter than everyone around them; they crack jokes, they travel the world, they get in various funny escapades. They don’t care too much about convention: they gorge themselves on fast days and swap wives after dark. They are intellectuals; they love to argue and dispute; it’s a game, it’s fun. They’re not averse to incorporating elements of Christianity into their doctrine. They remind me of myself: good secular perverts. The other Jews hate them, which feels familiar too: I’m reminded of everyone who ever called me a self-loathing Jew for my objections to Israeli apartheid or the hysterical Labour antisemitism canard. Their leader tells them that to reach the truth, they must first pass through the false religions. They will be baptised as Christians; they will shave their beards and take Polish names. And then, as the mainstream Jewish community start to denounce them with more and more fury, they claim that the other Jews have been murdering Christian children and drinking their blood.

That night, I dreamed that I’d been invited to read from the Torah for a Peter Thiel-funded think tank. I wasn’t sure why I’d accepted, but it was too late to back out now. A bimah had been set up in the middle of a park in south London, and the audience were already assembled on folding chairs in the grass, all wearing animal masks, goats and stags and elk. I had to carry the heavy Torah out of its ark, and when I opened it up and tried to sing, the words wouldn’t come out. My mouth was too dry. My teeth had turned black: mouldy rotten pegs. The animal faces stared as I stepped down from the bimah and collapsed onto the ground. With my hands fixed rigid by my sides, I dug in, desperately chomping at the soil, swallowing mouthful after mouthful of cold, damp earth.

Strange News from Another Star, No. 1: Reality


Sam Kriss delves into the enigmatic allure of Alex Jones, the controversial figure known for his conspiracy theories. Kriss explores Jones' transformation from an ordinary-looking conspiracy theorist to a captivating and magnetic personality. Despite the falsehoods he often spreads, Jones taps into a shared belief that the world is under the control of a destructive power. Dive into this thought-provoking essay that delves into the complex character that is Alex Jones.

Alex Jones is a beautiful woman. He is magnetic. He fascinates. When he speaks, everything else disappears: all that matters is contained in the cadences of his beautiful voice, the low grunt rising, heaving, swelling up to that gorgeous thick naked yell. He bares his flesh for the cameras and he is not ashamed to be seen. When he goes outside people beg his name. They reach out their hands to touch him, just to brush for a moment against his rich red leathery skin. Every camera swivels around to face him, like a flower in love with the Sun. Sometimes people will yell obscenities at him on the street, which is also a kind of adoration: they need to see this beautiful woman hurt and humiliated. His beauty is unbearable. This punctum, this rare glory, this bird of paradise.

Most people either have it or they don’t, but Alex Jones managed to create himself as a beautiful woman. You can watch footage of from the 1990s: back then, he was just another conspiracy theorist; pedantic, rambling, self-important, deliberately ordinary-looking in his suit and tie. That white-hot presence isn’t there. But at some point in the second Bush administration, he burst out of what he had been and became something new. Maybe he couldn’t become a beautiful woman until he’d first become a fatter, older, uglier man, closer to death.

You could never hope to do what Alex Jones does. For four or five hours a day, every day, he sits and talks into a camera, without a script, without any ums or ahs or you knows, without losing track of his train of thought or getting tongue-tied and having to start again. Not just that: in those four of five hours Alex Jones cycles through the full range of all possible human emotion. You would bore your listeners to death in ten minutes; so would I. But Alex Jones shines with the light of a more beautiful world, and millions of people bask in its glow. So he sits behind a swooping desk and, like every professionally beautiful woman, he hawks scam health products. Infowars store dot com, he says, new Scrotum Force 12-X ballsack hardening serum. It’s got all natural ingredients, it’s fortified with critical vitamins and amino acids that work on a cellular level… Let me tell you, these globalists, they want you weak! They want you to be—and now his voice jumps up several octaves, and he starts flapping his hands around—hee hee hee, we’re so soft, we’re so dainty, from all the crud you shove down our throats that’s disrupting our hormones, nobody’s coming to castrate us with a cleaver… His voice drops again. THEY’RE COMING! I’ve seen them! Literal demons with cleavers in their hands and fiery eyes, like—a deep Satanic growl now—yeees, yeees, surrender your gonads to the New World Order, you don’t need your guns, you don’t need Infowars store dot com Scrotum Force 12-X ballsack hardening serum, give over your pretty flesh to meee… I’m SICK OF THIS CRAP! My scrotum is RIGID! I’ve got balls jangling around in there like a pair of church bells! I’ve got these HUGE RED BRUISES on the inside of my thighs, because I’m a PATRIOT! Protect yourself! Protect your family! Infowars store dot com! HARDEN YOUR BALLSACK! AAAAH!

Alex Jones is an American and a patriot. But birds of paradise were killed for their feathers, and America is where the beautiful women die.

Most of the things that Alex Jones says are false, but not all of them. He is, in a sense, the last living hippie; he believes in a kind of mushy spiritual cosmic consciousness. I do not. Still, it’s not untrue that chemical pollutants have been disrupting amphibian endocrine systems; it’s not untrue that the interests of rich and powerful people do not always align with the interests of everyone else. At the lowest possible resolution, what Alex Jones claims is this: firstly, that the world is increasingly subject to a total administration that is broadly inimical to the full flowering of human life; and secondly, that everything you experience in our social and political order is a performance, a fiction, a show put on for your amusement, and that this show is killing you. Is he wrong?

The Spanish exterminated, the British enslaved; the American empire entertains. The wig-wearing liberals who founded this country thought they were creating a republic of free citizens, pioneers, enlightened and informed, governing themselves according to the dictates of reason. What they actually built was Disneyland. A total bureaucracy, controlling the flows of vast populations, and keeping them entertained. It couldn’t have gone any other way. Look who they modelled their new society on: the Romans, who put an arena in every city they conquered. The games were the primary instrument of Roman rule: you can keep your local gods, keep your puppet kings, even farm out tax-collection to the highest bidder, but you will enjoy our circus. So America defoliated the jungles and burned people alive with nuclear bombs for a free society in which you could be entertained. In which you’re so exhausted at the end of the day that you just wander glassy-eyed around Whole Foods, shovelling various forms of nutritious slop into your cardboard box to eat alone in front of Netflix and be entertained. And the people you walk past on your way home, hunched and stinking in doorways with track marks up their arms, are also slowly killing themselves with their small enjoyments, are also dying to be entertained.

In Rome, the entertainers died for your amusement. They had the gladius and the fuscina. America has the camera and the screen.

In Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, Ana de Armas plays two characters: the glamorous Hollywood sex symbol Marilyn Monroe, and Norma Jeane Baker, the detritus left behind when the cameras stop rolling. Marilyn is intensely watchable, but watching Norma Jeane is agony. That breathy, fluttering, voice, that frantic indecision, all her buttery attempts at sanity: like nails on a chalkboard. When she goes to the cinema to see herself in Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend, she keeps mumbling: ‘That thing up on the screen, it isn’t me.’

We were not meant to see ourselves like this, from the outside. Our first ancestors would boil the flesh off the bones when one of the tribe died, and rub them with red ochre. They painted vast herds of animals in their caves, flowing and alive, but they never depicted human beings except as scrawny stick-figures: they knew that a depiction can be fatal to the person depicted. Even now, the front-facing camera on your phone automatically flips the image, so it looks like the familiar creature you see in the mirror, and not like the strange uncomfortable thing you actually are.

Everyone I know who became famous, even with the pissy half-fame of social-media notoriety, went insane. It even happened to me. Your sense of self is overwhelmed by the image that your audience sees; eventually it shrivels into nothing. Being insane is the last dying spasm of your inner life; you try to fuck things up in such a way that the thing up on the screen dies, and you can live again. But these days, madness is less effective than it was. The more advanced the technology involved, the bigger the image becomes, and the more easily it consumes you. This monster, this enemy you have to keep building out of your own corpse.

Critics did not like Blonde. It’s not accurate: it invents whole episodes from Marilyn Monroe’s life, and doesn’t even tell you which bits are untrue. A forced abortion, a three-way love affair, domestic violence, abuse. None of it happened the way it’s shown. Why lie? In the New York Times, Manohla Dargis asks why the film doesn’t tell us the truth about ‘Monroe’s personality and inner life, her intelligence, her wit and savvy and tenacity; her interest in—and knowledge of—politics; the work that she put in as an actress and the true depth of her professional ambitions.’ Only Paul Schrader halfway got it: ‘Dominick made a great film, but it wasn’t about Marilyn Monroe. Critics say he did Marilyn no favours. I think it’s the other way around. MM did him no favours.’ But only halfway. The critics wanted a film about the inner life of Norma Jeane Baker, the real person behind the myth. But Blonde is a film about Marilyn Monroe, and only Marilyn Monroe—and the meaning of Marilyn has changed since her death. She’s no longer a vague carefree sexpot; her story is a tragedy. A beautiful woman who was exploited and killed by Hollywood, all for our entertainment. This is the great American epic, in which the beautiful women die. Norma Jeane, the ‘real person’ behind the scenes, is part of that myth: a hologram, a fiction, a helplessly mediated society’s fantasy of the remnants of unmediated life. She’s only a character played by Marilyn, who is ontologically prior and infinitely more real.

The other complaint critics had was that while the film might look beautiful, while it was all gorgeously shot, it still felt deeply ugly. All we see is a woman being exploited and victimised by everyone she encounters, over and over again. Roll up, roll up! Watch her suffer! Watch her die! Richard Brody in the New Yorker: ‘The character endures an overwhelming series of relentless torments that, far from arousing fear and pity, reflect a special kind of directorial sadism… The very subject of the film is the deformation of Monroe’s personality and artistry by Hollywood studio executives and artists; in order to tell that story, Dominik replicates it in practice.’ Other writers are more succinct. ‘Dull trauma porn,’ ‘misogynistic trauma porn,’ ‘trauma and misery porn,’ ‘thinly veiled trauma porn.’ If Salò were released today, these people would have lynched Pasolini before the fascists even got a chance. Blonde is not particularly subtle with its themes, but they’ve somehow convinced themselves that simply noticing what it’s doing constitutes some kind of incisive critique. This is a film about how the camera is a weapon: when you point it towards someone and shoot, that person dies. To watch a movie for your evening’s entertainment is to participate in a murder. But Blonde is also a movie, also shot on a camera, also playing on a screen. Did you think Dominik was kidding? Why would you expect his camera to be anything other than a weapon? Why would you expect this film to be nice?

Alex Jones and Marilyn Monroe are both beautiful women, they both revealed their naked chest to the cameras, and they are both mad. They both destroyed their own private lives to feed the image of themselves. They both came undone when they got into bed with the President of the United States. The only real difference is that Marilyn had JFK, while Alex Jones got Donald Trump.

The most boring question people ask about Alex Jones is this: does he really mean it? Does he actually believe all the things he says, or is it just an act? There’s a very simple answer if you’re into that sort of thing: no, he doesn’t believe it. This was what his lawyers confirmed in 2017. His ex-wife had sued for custody of their children; she wanted to use footage of his show to demonstrate that he was unstable and an unfit father. The lawyers wanted to prevent this. ‘He’s playing a character. He is a performance artist.’ That thing up on the screen, it isn’t me. Alex Jones described his work as ‘art performance,’ and the court agreed. Infowars would not be shown to jurors; they were judging the ‘real’ Alex Jones, and not the character he played.

If this answer isn’t satisfying, it’s because the question is based on false premises. There is no ‘real’ Alex Jones to believe or not believe the things he says, any more than there was a ‘real’ Marilyn Monroe. There is only the character. He is the beauty of his own image, and nothing more.

In 2012, a single gunman killed twenty schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, all of them under eight years old, along with six school staff, his mother, and himself. Soon afterwards, Alex Jones started claiming that nobody had been killed; the grieving parents were all actors; the whole thing had been a fraud, put on to manufacture consent for tighter gun control. He released the addresses of the murdered children’s families, and some of his listeners started contacting them with insults and accusations and terrible threats. ‘Did you hide your imaginary son in the attic? Are you still fucking him? You fucking Jew bastard. Look behind you. Death is coming to you, real soon.’ Graves were defaced. The survivors had to move from town to town like criminals on the run, hounded all the way by dogbrained lunatics. Alex Jones now publicly accepts that the massacre was real; now his line is that the response was a terrible, isolated mistake. He messed up. He called it wrong. His judgement was impaired. But this was not an isolated mistake; it was the summation of his entire career. In the glowing deadly nexus of entertainment, Alex Jones saw that everything is a show put on for our watching pleasure. This unreal creature made of media and light had gone so deep in its own depthlessness that it became impossible to imagine that anything might actually happen, or that there is anything outside the spectacle, not even the murder of twenty children.

This month, in the most recent round of lawsuits, a court in Connecticut ordered Alex Jones to pay damages of nearly $1 billion to the families of the Sandy Hook victims. Maybe you could quibble over the figure, but this strikes me as fair. This is why we have civil courts: so that when this kind of damage occurs, there’s an institution that can try to work things out as objectively as possible, decide who’s at fault and who’s been victimised, and penalise or compensate them accordingly. The system isn’t perfect; nothing is. But it’s the best we have.

Judicial punishments, though, are not the only ones available. The legal system is for ordinary breathing human beings; it’s part of the eighteenth-century fantasy of a liberal society, and not enough to kill a god. On a single day, the 6th of August, 2018, Alex Jones was banned from Facebook, Apple, YouTube, Spotify, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. All these supposedly competing firms suddenly acting in concert, as if there were some hidden hand pulling the strings, as if these were all just faces for the faceless NWO Satanic Big Brother corporate state, as if every event were planned, determined in advance by the secret masters of the world… Alex Jones, the last of the hippies, became the first person to meet the full power of this new, abstract, unaccountable system of control. It could only have been him: he was the unacceptable object that forced the system into finding a new way to destroy this beautiful image, tear down every screen on which it appears, and trap it in its ugly prison of flesh and blood. After a lifetime spent screaming about an imaginary New World Order, this might be the final legacy of Alex Jones: he was the man who gave birth to it.

Alex Lee Moyer’s documentary Alex’s War bills itself as a character study. ‘Who is Alex Jones? Is he a dangerous lunatic or a patriotic hero? Does he even believe the things he says?’ Since there is no character to study, it’s setting itself up for failure—but in fact, it doesn’t really attempt to answer any of these questions at all. The film has two strands: one follows Alex Jones from his talk-radio beginnings to his current worldwide infamy; the other follows him from the 2020 US election to the riot on January 6th. There are a few good moments—the scene in which Alex Jones has a kind of prophetic fit in front of the Georgia Guidestones is particularly great—but there’s nothing here that can account for the man’s sheer livid charisma. At the film’s climax, we learn that Alex Jones was not responsible for the storming of the Capitol, that he urged the crowds to protest peacefully and obey the law, but I simply do not care. I am so utterly bored of January 6th, this act of petty trespassing that people will still not feigning horror over nearly two years later. Really, the only thing it reveals is how much shabbier and worse Alex Jones became after he devoted himself to Donald Trump. Now he has to pretend that there’s a good side in American politics; now he has to pretend that while every other US president was a child-eating NWO stooge, this one is somehow ok. In Blonde, with her mouth full of JFK’s dick, Marilyn wonders: ‘Who brought me here, to this place?’ Kennedy groans. ‘Dirty slut. Oh you dirty slut.’

The problem with Alex’s War is that Alex Lee Moyer quite likes her namesake. She doesn’t love him, like some of his followers do; she’s too smart for that. But she’s sympathetic, and she wants her film to be a sympathetic, humanising look at the man and his life. But a camera is a weapon, which destroys human beings and replaces them with something else, and there’s no such thing as a sympathetic look.

Alex’s War is part of the machine that is killing Alex Jones. Lately, his defenders have come up with a new line: what about all the other media lies? Which falsehood caused more human suffering—Alex Jones saying Sandy Hook was staged, or every major American media outlet saying Iraq had WMD? How much should they be fined? And it’s true: Infowars is of a piece with the rest of the American media; it just happens to have a more beautiful woman presenting the show. Alex Jones is an American, speaking America back into itself, emptying his life into this great graveyard, the bonepit of everyone who ever wanted to be a star. This empire is built on entertainment and death, entertainment and death. Death is everywhere. It will come for your children in their schools. It will radiate outwards to every corner of the world. But you will be entertained. You will always, always be entertained.

Alex Jones is a beautiful woman


We're all perverts now


Step into the depths of Twitter and witness the unfolding chaos, as Sam Kriss delves into the phenomenon of the hellsite in this captivating essay. Kriss explores the twisted allure of this virtual realm where punishment, embarrassment, and suffering are the currency of entertainment. Is Twitter truly a glimpse into Hell, where self-inflicted torture reigns supreme? Drawing on historical and religious perspectives, Kriss offers thought-provoking insights into the nature of our digital existence and the ironic punishments that unfold in this abyss. Brace yourself for a journey into the depths of social media's dark underbelly.

It’s been five years since I spent any amount of time on Twitter, but back then everyone kept affectionately calling the place a hellsite. It was one of those obligatory phrases. Normal day on the hellsite! you’d say, as the churning psychic pressures of the hellsite snapped something small but important in the brain of one of your enemies, causing them to post multiple photos of their own shrivelled and abnormal genitalia, followed by vague undirected death threats, followed by a video of themselves crying and begging for mercy. Just twitter doing its thing! you’d say, as you flocked like harpies to impose your unlimited punishments for the crime of being embarrassing. So much entertainment—and this website is free! Ha ha ha! Another normal day on the hellsite, where all of us are devils and all of us are damned, condemned to torture ourselves to death! Who will break next? Maybe me! Apparently, they’re still at it. We’re in Hell! they squeal, rolling around giddy in the filth of it all. We’re dead! We hate every second of existence! We are empty husks whose only joy is to witness the same sufferings we endure, lol lol lol, and we’re literally in Hell!

Are they right? Bede tells us that the Irish monk St Furseus witnessed a vision of Hell in the seventh century: during a trance, he saw angels carrying him into the sky, and once they were up there the angels ordered him to look down on the earth. He saw a deep, dark crevasse at its centre, lit by four floating spheres of fire; one day, the angels told him, those fires would spread to consume the entire world. The first fire was the fire of falsehood, ‘when we do not fulfil what we promised,’ the second the fire of avarice, ‘when we place our love of worldly riches before the riches of Heaven,’ the third the fire of discord, ‘when we do not fear to offend the souls of our neighbours even in superficial matters,’ and the fourth the fire of irreverence, ‘when we think it nothing to despoil and defraud those weaker than ourselves.’ Sound familiar?

Enter the Pit

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But it’s deeper than that. Among Christians who believe in Hell, there are two main approaches. The first says that God chooses to punish those who have sinned against him by consigning them to an eternity of suffering. Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, insists that the blessed in Heaven will be able to see, at all times, their sinful friends and neighbours writhing in agony forever. Not just that; they will enjoy it. ‘The saints will rejoice in the punishment of the wicked, by considering therein the order of divine justice and their own deliverance, which will fill them with joy.’ All this feels unpalatable today. A God who would impose infinite punishment for a finite transgression is not a God worth believing in. A Heaven that comes with Hell-o-vision, where you are constantly assaulted by the sight of human souls trapped in trenches of burning-hot shit, would not be any kind of Heaven: it would itself be Hell. Only in Hell could you look at that suffering and feel joy.

The second version is more subtle. This was Emmanuel Swedenbourg’s thought: that ‘God never turns away his face from man, and never casts man away from himself, that he casts no one into Hell and is angry with no one.’ Hell still exists, but we make it ourselves when we ‘turn away from the Lord toward the densely dark body.’ Even the fire of Hell ‘springs from a like origin as heavenly fire.’ Hellfire is simply the overflowing love of God, but it burns those who cannot return it.

This might be why visions of Hell seem to feature so many ironic punishments. In Dante, the lustful, who were carried helplessly by their own appetites, are blown from precipice to precipice in ‘the infernal hurricane that never rests.’ This is what they chose. The wrathful mud-wrestle for eternity in a boiling swamp. ‘They smote each other not alone with hands, but with the head and with the breast and feet, tearing each other piecemeal with their teeth.’ They could stop, if they wanted to, but they do not want to. In some sense, they are here because they enjoy it. After grappling with the problem of Hell, CS Lewis concludes: ‘I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside.’ In The Great Divorce, he imagines the inferno as an endless, dreary English town, spread over tens of millions of miles, always twilight, always raining. Napoleon has a house there, fifteen thousand years’ walk from any other human being, its lights just visible through a telescope. He marches up and down for all eternity, muttering. ‘It was Soult’s fault. It was Ney’s fault. It was Josephine’s fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English.’ Lewis is onto something: this punishment that is no more and no less than your own failings. But the damned in his Hell are only resigned to their suffering, and in the real Hell they love it. CS Lewis had never seen Twitter.

The Hells in Buddhism are of the second type. There is no judge that sends you there; your soul simply sinks to the realm where it belongs. ‘The god of death questions us, but we are punished by our own deeds.’ There is the Hell of Oil Cauldrons, the Hell of the Pool of Blood, the Hell of Tongue-Ripping, the Hell of the Mountain of Knives, and the Hell of Maggots. Chinese sources place these Hells under a kind of infernal counterpart to the Imperial bureaucracy; funerary inscriptions demand safe passage for the dead in the name of the Yellow Emperor, addressed to ‘the Aide of the Mound and the Earl of the Tomb, the Sub-terrestrial Two Thousand Bushel Officials, the Marquis of the Eastern Sepulchre, the Earl of the Western Sepulchre, the Official of Underneath.’ (Recall the Ars Goetia, with all its Dukes and Counts and Marquises of Hell.) In Thailand and Sri Lanka you can see vivid sculptural depictions of Hell, where grinning demons tear human bodies apart by the legs, or slowly force giant screws through their chests, or dunk them into pots of livid diarrhoea. But what’s most horrifying about Buddhist Hell is not the punishments; it’s the duration.

In Christianity, the torture is infinite—but as Lewis saw, the infinity outside of time might be the same thing as no time at all. ‘That the lost soul is eternally fixed in its diabolical attitude we cannot doubt: but whether this eternal fixity implies endless duration—or duration at all—we cannot say.’ In Buddhism, every Hell is only a Purgatory; you are in there for a set amount of time, and then once you’ve paid for your bad karma you can be reincarnated back into the sublunary world. But ancient Indian civilisation had access to decimal numbers, and the Mediterranean world did not; they could conjure up arbitrarily long periods of time just by adding zeroes. If you spend only a week or so in Hell, your punishment is tongue-ripping or maggots. But you might very easily spend a million years there, or a hundred million, or a billion, or a hundred billion. The number itself is your punishment, and you will have to endue it in one second after another of ordinary durational time. More terrifying than the pool of blood or the mountain of knives. More terrifying than infinity. This Hell is the malignancy of the countable.

Borges wrote that the ‘first truly atrocious Hell in literature’ is found in William Beckford’s 1786 novel Vathek. The Inferno in Dante ‘is not an atrocious place, it is a place where atrocious things happen.’ In the end, the Divine Comedy simply ‘magnifies the notion of a jail.’ Dante shows us something to be feared, but Vathek desires his Hell. He spends the novel desperately searching out the palace of fire; he commits terrible slaughters to attain it. ‘There shalt thou behold, in immense depositories, the treasures which the stars have promised thee, and the talismans that control the world.’ And he does behold it. In the palace of fire the floors are strewn with gold and saffron, and the tables are filled with food; there are pleasant-smelling woods burning in every corner, and djinn of both sexes dance to phantasmic music. But for the people who have been sent there, none of it means anything. ‘Every reservoir of riches was disclosed to their view, but they no longer felt the incentives of curiosity, pride, or avarice.’ A voice from the Abyss of Death announces that ‘ALL IS ACCOMPLISHED,’ and all hope is lost.

Twitter is not a place where atrocious things happen; it is an atrocious place. Not boiling oil and not spheres of fire: its evil is abstract and countable: the numbers that must always go up. The system keeps rewarding you, and this is your punishment. You are not being tortured by the things you hate about this website; you are being tortured by the things you like.

The people who live their lives on Twitter know this, but they don’t admit it. Half of them pretend that the problem with Twitter is that it’s full of bad people saying bad things, harassing, abusing, being Nazis. The other half pretend that the problem with Twitter is that it has too much censorship, too many libs in the boardroom, and it’s not being governed according to the dictates of truth and beauty. Everyone acts as if the problem with Twitter is the other people, and the agony of having to look at their terrible opinions, but they keep saying the truth. Hellsite hellsite hellsite. The problem is you. The problem with Twitter is that you are a demon in Hell.

Remember that this gate is locked from the inside. Elon Musk has taken over the site, and he’s already set about accidentally destroying it. All the last dregs of prestige are vanishing from the place, now that it looks set to become Elon’s very own based meme hugbox. Advertisers are pulling out. The walls are caving in. This is something to celebrate! This unwitting Jesus has descended to harrow Hell and set you free. You can leave! But instead, you’re appalled. I’m going to stay, and mount the resistance to Elon Musk, because otherwise this site will be flooded with fascists. This vital communications tool must never be surrendered to our enemies. And why do you hate Elon Musk? Because he has your face, this unbearable fifty-year-old who thinks memes are dope, who developed all his political positions by being yelled at, who keeps trying to be funny and always, always, fails. He loves it! He loves being insane and trying to make other people suffer. Because despite being the richest person in the world he’s still battling, like the rest of you, to reign in Hell.

In the end, I think Borges was wrong, and there is a part of Dante’s Inferno that could be called a properly atrocious place. In the thirteenth canto, we come to the Forest of the Suicides. This is the place for the people who are not condemned to Hell, but who have chosen to come here. This forest, we’re told, is full of harpies; they punish the suicides with their sharp and terrible claws. Dante hears ‘on all sides lamentations uttered,’ the suicides moaning, but there’s no one to be seen. Only branches, an endless trackless mat of branches, ‘gnarled and intertangled,’ in the forest’s dense dusky gloom. Virgil tells Dante to break off a twig from the nearest branch, and he does. The tree bleeds red human blood. It cries: ‘Why dost thou rend me? Hast thou no spirit of pity whatsoever?’ The suicides have been turned into trees, and the harpies torture them by clawing at their branches. But the harpies are also invisible. We never see a harpy; we never hear them scream. The only person who deliberately wounds the trees is Dante himself. The true Hell is the place you cannot go without yourself becoming a demon.

A harpy is a creature from the wide blue sea. It mimics a human face, but it has the body and feathers of a bird.

Welcome to Hell

Sam Kriss explores the intriguing world of dreams in his series, "Strange News from Another Star." In his latest edition, he delves into the theme of death and the messages that dreams can hold. From prophetic dreams to receiving messages encoded in unusual ways, Kriss invites readers to share their own intriguing dreams or messages. Discover the fascinating connection between dreams and the waking world, and join thousands of others captivated by the exploration of the dream realm. Click to read more and contribute your own experiences to this thought-provoking series.

Strange News from Another Star, No. 2: Death


Sam Kriss delves into the mysterious history of Wakanda, a hidden kingdom that holds a special place in the imagination of both Africa and Europe. Drawing from ancient texts like Pliny the Elder's Natural History, Kriss uncovers the myths and fantasies that have shaped our understanding of Wakanda. From flying chariots to libraries filled with boundless knowledge, explore the enigmatic history of this mythical African Utopia. Discover the origins of these tales and the intriguing connections they may hold to ancient Greek legends. Prepare for a journey that will challenge your perceptions and expand your understanding of Wakanda's hidden depths.

The secret history of Wakanda

Sam Kriss

The Cacophony

Strange News from Another Star, No. 4: Other lands

Numb in China, part 4: 施氏食獅史

Sam Kriss takes us on a wild ride exploring the capabilities and limitations of ChatGPT, OpenAI's language model. From inventing a language to accessing a simulated version of Jeffrey Epstein's laptop, people have pushed the boundaries. But Kriss, with his passion for art, harnesses the power of ChatGPT to craft combinations of words that are deeply beautiful, moving, and profound. Dive into this thought-provoking article as Kriss delves into the joy, mischief, and creativity that comes from tapping into the machine's endless possibilities. Get ready for a captivating exploration of art in the age of AI.

A user's guide to the zairja of the world

Join Sam Kriss as he delves into the rise and fall of the notorious downtown scene in New York City. In this captivating essay, Kriss explores the allure of being part of a cultural moment and the fleeting nature of scenes that once defined an era. With his sharp wit and insightful observations, he brings to life the vibrant characters and gritty atmosphere of downtown New York, reflecting on the nostalgia for a bygone era. Don't miss out on this thought-provoking exploration of art, culture, and the transience of scenes.

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