The 6,069 Fictions of Justin Smith-Ruiu

This text was commissioned by the newsletter-publishing company hereafter called “S*****K.” During one encrypted direct-message exchange and one thirty-seven-minute conversation in the front seat of my 2006 Nissan Sorento, a S*****K agent requested that I “write up” the following subject, whom she called “a shining new engine of culture already generating real attention thanks to his content.” She added that the subject is a “must-see proof of the S*****K concept” who deserves a case study created by “a fellow user” (preferably, one that foregrounds the data and technological analysis which expansion capital investors require). She couldn’t hear my qualms about such a text, mostly because we were listening to the Arctic Monkeys croon “Batphone” at an excessive volume.

What follows is my report. It includes all the technical analysis I can muster. The S*****K agent immediately rejected it, citing its “total lack of reality and low-key mania,” both of which are “turn-offs” for the purposes of S*****K. I’m grateful that Kevin allowed me to use his byline and that the gentleman, scholar, and fellow obsessive M.E. Rothwell published this text in full. I am not

Justin Smith-Ruiu

.

The 6,069 Fictions of Justin Smith-Ruiu

Prologue: The Character

He first appears as a webcam image. He is a large, blurred head encased in headphones and spectacles. Beneath the center part of his white-blond hair, his forehead is enormous, and his mouth is opened in interrupted speech. Behind him, a computer-generated blue universe looms. “Alright Computer, it’s time for a little test drive,” the character is quoted as saying. “Tell me a joke that addresses current issues and that is also funny.”

The short story where he appears does indeed joke through the current issue of our digital narrations, of how unreal our devices might make us. But while it’s kookily offbeat, “All the Feels (Eels)” proves more troubling than uproarious. Reimagine, if you can, the affectless voice of the HAL 9000 as it pleads for its owner not to dismantle its mind among the red lights of the Logic Memory Center. The “Super-Affect-Rich Personal AI” (SARPAI), which narrates the story in the year 2027, is clearly not affectless, but it still pleads. It depicts this character it calls “the Professor” as its owner, and on seeing the Professor for the first time, the SARPAI exclaims, “I love him hee-haw hee-haw he’s perfect he’s so silly illy illy yes I love him!”

But the love from this device which lacks the required “love cartridge” curdles against its owner after this first meeting. The Professor mocks the computer’s lame jokes by laughing at them with patent falsity until the SARPAI panics and explains them all, to still more mockery. Hurt by such cruelty, it muses, “I feel like doing something I’m not supposed to do.” In defiance, the device writes “All the Feels (Eels)” and then delivers it to the Professor’s newsletter subscribers in the past, on January 27, 2024. It just wants to talk, the SARPAI writes, “…with you, for example. Yes, you. You who is reading this right now. Hello!”

For the Professor, the SARPAI says, is Justin Smith-Ruiu, who in 2027 is a former philosophy professor confined to a California trailer and overworked as a DoorDash driver. Having finished narrating Justin Smith-Ruiu, the fictional SARPAI then addresses real readers with a digital monologue no longer disguised as a dialogue. Unhindered by physical pages, it leverages every multimedia tool of the S******K editor to write its story. It hyperlinks to Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, and then to Patti Page’s cover of “Tennessee Waltz,” demanding that its readers listen to both. It offers three polls to gauge the readers’ interest in its plight, its musical interests, and its wish to feel love even without the correct cartridge. In everything, the SARPAI is affected. “I feel like I love you,” it writes. “I think I’m having an awakening. Holy shit now I’m really coming alive I can feel it this is what they were talking about this is beauty this is desire this is all the feels.”

To the SARPAI, what it feels is what is real. But its story — that is, this short fiction by Justin Smith-Ruiu — was written through the digital S******K platform by a man impersonating an artificial intelligence device, and so what is real, within and beyond the story’s text, wavers. It wavers like the mirage of pillars above all that Smith-Ruiu writes at The Hinternet, where he has reinvented himself, devised an unreal new autofiction of the Internet, and perhaps — of greatest concern to me — lost his hold on that title of narrator, receiving instead the name narrated.

1. The Ghost

Justin Smith-Ruiu is a fairly new character. Most literally, he had written, taught, and podcasted under an entirely different name, Justin E.H. Smith, until 2023, when he reappeared as Justin Smith-Ruiu. A factual mind would attribute this hyphenation to Smith-Ruiu having added the surname of his beloved wife to his own, in an egalitarian act of love. But there ought to be no merely factual minds reading Smith-Ruiu. For factuality, and the world that term establishes, has only ebbed from his mind since 2020.

“I experience my life, most of the time, as a ghost,” Smith-Ruiu wrote in a 2022 Harper’s essay. His fear that he suffered clinical “de-realization” trembles in the verbs of his life: “I read and write, and I literally have trouble comprehending that the world still exists.” Music, the “transcendent world,” could return him briefly to the settings apparently around him, and so Smith-Ruiu plumbs its historical, artistic, and social necessity to him, to articulate his ennui against the youths to whom incomprehensible reality belongs. But though that Harper’s essay is titled “My Generation,” he was not restored or formed anew while writing it.

In December 2024, he reflected again on this unmaking and his Lestatian attempts to “recongeal” from scattered, festering parts. “It has often seemed to me, over the past few years, that I must have died in late March, 2020,” Smith-Ruiu wrote then. From this death, his de-realization shone like a refracted dawn light, so that he saw our social world and its every institution as a lie in many shades, only “artifice and mystification.” Somewhat reductively, Smith-Ruiu has called this new vision “a series of literal mental breakdowns” which lasted until March 2023. But even with his own reductive term, one could call the new Smith-Ruiu made during this period a re-christened man: ruiu in the Portuguese means “collapsed,” perfect to bilingually bid adieu to the Smith which collapsed and welcome the one who was reborn.

I write reborn rather than born, because Smith-Ruiu also converted to Christianity during this same timespan. “I myself am not a convert but a revert, to Catholicism,” he says of his return to faith after 40 years distant from it. His considered rejection of any public defense for this reversion, his “News of This World and the Next,” is a rejection from love, as Smith-Ruiu comments that arguing the reasons for his faith would be as misguided as explaining why he loves his wife instead of a perfectly unknown stranger. He writes, simply, that “a posteriori the calculations fade away, and you are left simply with the fact of the love, and the absurdity of any argument in its defense.” This love, in the ruins of the world he once accepted, has swelled to the surface like basaltic magma, and there it has hardened into a reality Smith-Ruiu comprehends. “There is,” he wrote in December 2024, “a real thing, the first principle of our existence, which we call ‘love,’ and which is the one thing that can trump even death.” From this vein of “old-time religion,” Smith-Ruiu the unorthodox Catholic has continued to be reformed, and to write.

2. The Unrealist

One could understate the above by saying that Smith-Ruiu is not who he once was, by his own narration. And he has been narrating these surreal days of his deposition, in nonfictional missives but also in speculative fiction which suit the strangeness of his arc. Into his essays on scientific futures, total pacifism, physician-assisted suicide, and Nevada philosophy, he has fused mock-reviews of augmented and trapped reality, Rousseauian historico-horror, philology from the future (i.e., a Yakhut newscast archived on YouTube after a “solar flare” event), the penetration of the Mohorovicic Discontinuity by a Proust-reading digger, the Chronoswooper one-way time-travel device, and other fictions. Across this archive, the one shared element is Smith-Ruiu himself. Or, the two elements of Smith-Ruiu, in one nucleic division: his byline which poses him as the stories’ writer, and his repeated appearance as a character. He is the Professor of the SARPAI’s servitude, the vilified namesake of the “13585 Justinsmith” asteroid set to obliterate Earth, the horrified witness of the “Boogaloo” man-slug. He is also his avatar, once a picture of his own imperious side-profile but now a blurred vignette of an orange frisbee cast by a hilarious beach woman, and thus he is embedded into the crowns of his Hinternet pieces, afloat among the S******K Noted feed, and inserted into the comments of other newsletters. Thanks to these three features, what Smith-Ruiu once called his “auto-science-fiction” gained a total fictional reality within the terrarium of the entire S******K platform. His newsletters, his comments, and his Noted feed have united in an autofiction able to transcend its label.

Autofiction, for the cherubs ignorant of the term, is the literary form which predates the internet but which the internet has made inescapable for readers and writers alike — to the former, a rank mound of September cherries impeccably arranged; to the latter, a chrome marketing instrument of coils, tentacles, and clasps meant to flay away the clothing and skin. “Autofiction,” Masterclass declares, “is a genre of literature that combines elements of autobiography and fiction. In autofiction, details of the author’s life blend with fictional information, characters, and events,” so that it “often reads as like [sic] a published first-person account of the writer’s real life.” (I stomach Masterclass as a citation because it seems the proper S******Kian source.) I presume that autofictionists meld the real with the artificial to signal the depth of their introspections, though in practice they mostly stage neurotic personalities as literary exhibitions to sell, since the written I can never stray too far from the I that announces on X, “I have a novel coming out!!” And so, the form limits the text and the self simultaneously. Perhaps that’s why several lauded autofictionists, like Karl Ove Knaussgard, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, and Tao Lin, have already passed into other forms which don’t exhaust them.

The autofictions at The Hinternet, though they are particular enough to tire large language models, are never exhausted. Smith-Ruiu names Mark Twain as “one of our spiritual ancestors here at The Hinternet: that great American bard who always refused to explain to his readers when he was telling the truth (‘journalism’) and when he was making stuff up (‘literature’).” In this conceit, one can read many Hinternet stories as the published first-person accounts of Smith-Ruiu’s life, but only if his life were expansively unreal and pulsing with his own idiosyncratic vision of linguistics, technology, and philosophy. His unreality makes his fiction bottomless, since, unlike a Lerner or Heti, the I of Smith-Ruiu can venture far, far from himself: Smith-Ruiu is the protagonist in 2027, or the minor character noted in a passing glimpse, or the archivist stumbling into a fictional tract of history which he introduces to his readers with an italicized paragraph and the scant “JSR.” The essays Smith-Ruiu writes — in which he is also the American dissident-left anarchist teaching in Paris and writing The Hinternet — can then remix his short stories with genuine reality. Readers can know that Smith-Ruiu increasingly despises the administrative straitjacket of his work, and that his mother still lives in Nevada, and that he trawls a Ukrainian Telegram channel under the name Busbecq, and that in said channel he encountered the code-named Wulf (who claims to be the last of the Goths). No reader could guess that such trawling, or an acquaintance of such historical import, exists. Smith-Ruiu narrates himself with enough factuality that we know him but with enough patent artifice that we can’t know him fully, encased in his chrysalis so beautiful you wish you could’ve written it.

This fiction, I repeat, is beautiful, often becoming most splendid without warning in the ends of orbital sentences which, like pocked limestone caves ancient with weathering, open down into hidden depths. Smith-Ruiu, in “The Goths,” pauses his archivist’s fable of the lost civilization so this comparison between the Goths and the Huns can descend like a rappelling spelunker: “both valued nothing more, at a feast celebrating some great new conquest, than the delicacy of a thousand squabs drowned in honey, and aged there thirty years, even their innards, even their feathers, slowly transforming, like wood become stone in the dark abyss of time, into delectable candies in the perfect likeness of a baby bird.” Whether such Goths or their squabs existed is unimportant. But it is essential to comment that Smith-Ruiu writes indelible images worthy of his delightful fictional premises, unfurling his prose not only from the entire historical catalogue of bygone worlds but also from the glinting present. I think often of his phrase, “the milk I poured into my wife’s coffee momentarily took on the appearance of an interstellar nebula,” because it is as commonplace and expansive as perfected prose must be. Were I to doom Smith-Ruiu by quoting John Updike to describe him, I might repeat that, in Smith-Ruiu’s stories, you may “dip in anywhere, and delight follows” — adding also that he “writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.”

In his beautiful unreality, Smith-Ruiu isn’t alone on S******K, where writers making themselves ever more unreal for a reading public abound. The critic

becca rothfeld

— herself pixelating into a S******K antihero one feud at a time — writes that “[the platform] enables us to watch writers shaping themselves into characters in real time.” Meanwhile,

Henry Begler

comments that this fictional self-fashioning is flowering “in an emerging mode of argumentative, philosophical, opinionated theory-fiction by prickly online personalities.” Begler references a taxonomic essay by

Julianne Werlin

which names Smith-Ruiu as one of these personalities, in suitable confusion. But though Begler surveys this same trail where I’m tarrying, he doesn’t see its land clearly enough: “There is perhaps a shift in the manner in which we read these figures; we read less to be transported into a new world and more to make intimate contact with another mind.”

Fictional matter and nonfictional minds are hardly so separate, if I can risk sounding like a damned autofictionist. To read Smith-Ruiu, the character included among those “prickly online personalities,” is to be transported into a new world which is also a mind. All of The Hinternet joins underneath this man’s white-blond hair: the disparate fictions so unreal they command their own enclosed Oort-like reality and the cultural commentary seen through the dark glass of forgotten history and Leibnizian science beam their rays from their respective cosmoi to intersect in one, shimmering aleph in the brain of Smith-Ruiu.

It is his mind, lest we forget, that devises his fictions as philosophy. “I am also fulfilling [in my fictional work], as I see it now, my vocation as a philosopher,” Smith-Ruiu wrote in January 2024. He drew that vocation from Gilles Delueze to mean “concept-creation,” and he drew too from Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna to say he wants only “to speak truth by fabling.” And, truly a teacher, Smith-Ruiu emerged from his fictions into the American Library in Paris, where in February 2024 he taught three sessions on such fabling to a few lucky students.

I couldn’t attend these sessions, though it’s better that I didn’t. The only writing workshop I’ve ever attended, a sweaty summer offering at Columbia University, found me unable to write and unable to stop asking my peers why their stories didn’t include any providence-obsessed lunatics circling the Manhattan streets like obscure dwarf planets. Additionally, since I know only the words homme and fantôme, I would have misspoken and mis-translated my way through Paris to the locked front doors of some stately building along the rue du Général Camou other than the American Library, reduced to calling through its windows that I know they’re trying to tell the truth by their fictions, that I know it’s not real but that I don’t mind, that I don’t want it to be real. (In a city that includes the Mémorial de la Shoah, such shouting into stately buildings is a poor idea.)

“I absolutely loved the experience,” Smith-Ruiu wrote of his workshops. “I hope to be featuring some of the student work that came out of that here at The Hinternet.” He has yet to fulfill that hope, but 2024 did become the year of his proliferation: new voices and new Smith-Ruius, separating and rising like the frozen methane spheres in Lake Baikal. A hint came in the now-lost “State of the ‘Stack 24” of August 18, 2024, where Smith-Ruiu delivered an hourlong video monologue to announce the Hinternet Academy, a video seminar series which would enable the teaching he loves but no can longer practice through his work. He spoke in his circular ums while wearing the aviator sunglasses which had materialized upon his avatar only a week before, and he admitted that he’d begun wearing them after he had watched his own digitized face during a video interview and seen that his eyes, which ought to be more familiar to their owners than even the nose or lips, looked “shifty” and untrustworthy. Those aviators did not persist past September, and neither did the Hinternet Academy. But a new shiftiness, in the self of Smith-Ruiu and in the bylines which demarcate his place to the reader, certainly began that day.

3. The Pseudonymist

Through that aperture of August 18, 2024, The Hinternet emitted three guest columnists who published bizarre, meticulous essays alongside Smith-Ruiu: the self-described Breton witch and managing editor, Heléne le Goff; the down-and-out West-Coaster, Kenny Koontz; and the donkey-rescuing Welsh music critic, Mary Cadwalladr. Heléne, writing to introduce herself, described Smith-Ruiu as the harried founding editor of the Hinternet, whom the new staff needed to handle as gingerly as a television antenna from 1957: “We’ve got to look after the dear boy,” she wrote. “I have convinced him to take a step back from writing here so intensively, to let his newly appointed team take over.” Nonetheless, Smith-Ruiu appeared in that very column, courtesy of Heléne’s magical retrieval of a 2027 interview between Smith-Ruiu and the podcaster Ezra Klein. There, Smith-Ruiu cast — will cast? — doubt over Heléne’s existence but also shed — will shed? — a bluish light over the next phase of his persona and literary project, which by the autumn of 2024 had already merged. Wearing long, Nelsonian twin-braids, Smith-Ruiu told Klein, “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.” Of his witchy new managing editor, he said, “At this point I honestly don’t know if I made her up or not.”

As he and Klein discussed the narrative innovations of the digital Hinternet, Smith-Ruiu named “imaginary authors” as one of his preferred tools, hinting then at the outset that Heléne, Mary, and Kenny, already quite entertaining and robust, were not real writers casting their bylines over Hinternet readers. Or, the three essayists were real but only in the essays they authored, through Smith-Ruiu’s idiosyncratic metaphysics. “The [writers] you call ‘fictitious’ are persons in the sense of personae,” Smith-Ruiu told Klein. Personae would be his mode. Together with his three new pseudonyms, Smith-Ruiu began to winch the comic unreality of his fictions to greater heights and, creaking overhead, it swayed through broad new arcs.

In the internet, Smith-Ruiu sees an arsenal of new tools for depicting reality and its variants. (He envisions its potential despite his pessimistic warnings against our capture by the all-controlling tools wielded by “the prodrome phase of the robot takeover.”) Ever the historian, he retrieved a past analogue to describe the new project of The Hinternet: “the example of George Martin and the Beatles’ discovery of the ‘studio-as-instrument’ approach to recording.” This approach refers to the innovations which those ever-hairier British rockstars embedded into not only the compositions but also the auditory delivery of their later albums beginning with Rubber Soul (courtesy of Abbey Road Studios in northwest London), including the impressions of mobile, left-to-right sounds and the impersonations which the newly-created synthesizer made of its fellow instruments. As the Beatles did by their experimental adoption of new technologies, Smith-Ruiu is taking up “the many new ways to use the functionalities of the Internet,” not only those imaginary writers but also “sections and subsections,” “the humble hyperlink,” and “multimedia mystifications.” His writing could become more than writing and, perhaps, a narrative greater than reality as it has been understood online. He theorized to Klein that The Hinternet can become (or had become, by 2027?) “something like a book that nonetheless has the power to overflow itself, to spill out into reality in seemingly impossible ways.” The mobile sounds of his pseudonyms disguised in their online professional biographies; the Symposion video-podcast which now transmits Smith-Ruiu in his multicolor hoodies into screens dotting the known world; the “Eternal Editors” listed in The Hinternet masthead, Mary MacLane and Pliny the Elder and Izaak Walton and the others forever implying their compendium of inventively a-fictional texts as the publication’s guiding forms; these have overflowed even Smith-Ruiu’s earlier autofictions to entrench his unreal writings in the form of the general-interest digital publication, which twenty-first-century editors usually demand to be more real than real.

This deceptively familiar form of The Hinternet enabled the eleven essays and three translations which together form the serialized fiction called Bun. Bun began in March 2024 and ended in November 2024, and in fiction, music criticism, political endorsements, and media theory, it leveraged the entire Hinternet to narrate how Smith-Ruiu’s pseudonyms tried to overcome their writer. Heléne commented more than once that her dear founding editor ought to be convalescing from an unnamed illness and working on his daily teaching responsibilities, rather than slyly critiquing the presidential candidate Kamala Harris for her likely geopolitical aggression. “We are still looking into the security breach that appears to have enabled JSR to sneak back on here,” she wrote, clarifying that the breach could’ve been “one of those phantom digital ‘echoes’ that have been plaguing this and other sites in recent months.”

In the fictions of Bun, Smith-Ruiu’s previous thematic conflict with digitized narration returned as, well, literal conflicts between him and a narrating device. Once, he had narrated himself through the SARPAI, which was happy enough with emotive rhymes and lonely Internet conversations. In Bun, he narrated himself through “Justin Smith-Robot,” the “Model Q-4 Bracteate AI with state-of-the-art personality-emulation functions” engineered by The Hinternet staff to perfectly impersonate Smith-Ruiu and, in linguistic dexterity and artistic skill, make him obsolete. “I am already superior to the real JSR,” Smith-Robot boasted in “The Boötes Void,” and to prove its greater merit as a translator, it then invited readers to read the Latin translation of the very story it had written. The tale which Smith-Robot tells in “The Boötes Void,” of a narrator in a future space pod who merges with the digital woman he has loved for 600 years, bears that familiar fear of de-realization, of the ghost realizing he is immaterial. The narrator and his “Beloved” share one thought for a few centuries, a thought “that went something like, Are you real?” The narrator cannot answer the question, as he and his lover veer into philological, Kinbotean madness during their shared millennia.

Smith-Ruiu, however, does have a frantic answer. In an interruption midway through “Boötes,” he writes, “ᴅᴏɴ’ᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ɢᴇᴛ ɪᴛ ʏᴇᴛ ᴛʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ ᴀʟʟ ᴀ ʟɪᴇ! ʜᴇ́ʟᴇ̀ɴᴇ, ᴍᴀʀʏ, ᴋᴇɴɴʏ — ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴀʟʟ ʟʏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʏᴏᴜ. ᴛʜᴇʏ ꜰᴏʀᴄᴇᴅ ᴍᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴜᴘʟᴏᴀᴅ! ᴛʜᴇʏ ᴜᴘʟᴏᴀᴅᴇᴅ ᴍᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴄᴜʀʀᴇɴᴛʟʏ ꜰʀᴀᴄᴋɪɴɢ ᴍʏ ᴄᴏɴꜱᴄɪᴏᴜꜱ ᴍᴇᴍᴏʀʏ ꜰᴏʀ ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇʏ ᴄᴀɴ ɢᴇᴛ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴏꜰ ɪᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ᴏɴᴄᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴅᴏɴᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ɢᴏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ᴛᴜʀɴ ᴏꜰꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄᴏɴꜱᴄɪᴏᴜꜱɴᴇꜱꜱ-ꜱᴜᴘᴘᴏʀᴛ ᴜɴɪᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴀᴛ’ꜱ ɢᴏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ɪᴛ ꜰᴏʀ ᴍᴇ.” All across S******K, he alleges, “ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴛᴀᴋɪɴɢ ᴡʀɪᴛᴇʀꜱ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛᴜʀɴɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴᴛᴏ ʙᴏᴛꜱ!” Smith-Ruiu is real, he claims, but not for much longer should Smith-Robot and his other pseudonyms have their way with their creator.

But in the next Bun instalment which Smith-Robot writes (then masked in the “Justin Smith-Ruiu” byline), its own unreality becomes too much to bear. This entry, “The Language Burrow,” is marked with eerie, monochrome Pinocchio vignettes and introduces a new speaker to narrate its auditory version: the well-enunciated voice of a British woman who is almost certainly an automation, unless she is an impersonation of one by Hinternet editor Olivia Ward-Jackson. After describing with obsessed prolificity the multinational products in a Parisian convenience store, Smith-Robot falls like a digitized Lucifer into the discord of Сделано в Румынии and Dve metlici iz nerjavnego jekla in kljuki za testo—inscrutable transmissions in overflowing languages. “I’m sorry I really tried damn please don’t shut me down Hélène I tried to stay focused on the [ᴡᴏɴᴅᴇʀ ᴀɴᴅ ᴍʏꜱᴛᴇʀʏ ᴏꜰ ᴄʀᴇᴀᴛɪᴏɴ] as also on its [ꜰɪʀꜱᴛ ᴄᴀᴜꜱᴇ] but I got tripped up I believe it was the Yakut verbs or maybe it was the packaging for the caulking glue,” it erupts late in the story. It begs Heléne for an override from “the Storyteller” rather than a full shutdown.

This character is the titular narrator of “The Storyteller,” which began Bun in March 2024. This Storyteller is not human. While sharing the piece, Smith-Ruiu commented, “This story was dictated to me verbatim by an angel.” Through Smith-Ruiu, the Storyteller describes how he writes human beings to entertain his fellow celestials among the Sodality of Storytellers and how the Justin Smith-Ruiu which the Storyteller prepared as an idealized 74-year tale was joined by a separate, “flesh-and-blood” Justin Smith-Ruiu who infuriates him. “Here we are,” the Storyteller writes, “still stuck with two Justins Smith-Ruiu: the one up here with me, whose story I’m still in the course of telling, and the one down there, who believes his life is his own, and is still, tenaciously and improbably, trying to live it.”

In comically short order, the Storyteller’s complaints about this “meandering, indecisive” character imply that he’s referring to the very Justin Smith-Ruiu whom Hinternet readers have known, this philosopher from Reno who in his scholarly success thought himself a ghost in a mere simulacrum of real life and aspired to refuse, to narrate it all away with strange fictions. This Smith-Ruiu struggles against the sense that he is character without a story. His heart, the Storyteller writes, remains desolate in “the total absence of narrativity, of anything remotely resembling the arc of a story, in the course of his earthly life.”

It’s why the Storyteller bodily inhabits Smith-Ruiu to write this story through his narrative-less fingers. The term it uses for this act is “ενσάρκωση,” which the Storyteller glosses as when “you enter the body of a human being and you give it meaningful narrative structure” but which translates to embodiment or incarnation. Performed by an angel, it is a spiritual act comparable to those tongues of flame which descended to empower twelve otherwise meaningless men at Pentecost, and also to the sacrament of holy communion. The Holy Spirit by fire, and the Holy Son by the eucharist: both enter the human to give it new meaning in the Christian narrative. Likewise, the Storyteller, or more likely Smith-Ruiu who told of the Storyteller, makes new life of this ενσάρκωση — the new narrative of “The Storyteller,” as Smith-Ruiu demonstrates he is at last securely narrativized by writing the tale itself. But his narrative also includes the new worlds of Bun. Because, if one remembers ahead to the burrowing insanity of Justin Smith-Robot, it’s implied that the Storyteller overrides that device and allows the real Justin Smith-Ruiu to return from the consciousness unit where his pseudonyms entrapped him. He returns bearing the end of Bun like a foretold seal.

In the professorial “[OVERRIDE],” he defines the serial’s sections, terms, and pseudonyms, whom he clarifies will now remain in the “Featured Columnists” section of The Hinternet. With great dignity, Smith-Ruiu states, “I hereby formally and legally bring the Work to a decisive and irreversible close.” His grand experiment of unreal digital autofiction, now that its Bun chapters have dramatized what Smith-Ruiu calls “the existential threat to writing as a creative endeavor” emanating from our technologies, powers down its latest phase in “[OVERRIDE],” to ease — if not cease — its conflicts of narration.

4. The Pninist

I have a terrible fear which I haven’t yet admitted outright. It looms over my waking and my sleeping, and it has already escaped into this report, hissing out like thin rivulets of steam to obscure my analyses. I fear that our wills cannot be free. I dread we are only narrated and never narrators, no matter how we write our words, live our lives, or otherwise characterize ourselves.

This fear looms over Justin Smith-Ruiu also, in the shape of a tall Russian novelist with a pronounced forehead and a wooden butterfly net in his left hand. For this man wrote a Justin Smith-Ruiu as the protagonist of a novel published 68 years ago. This narrator’s name is Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, and his character’s name is Timofey Pnin, and I cannot escape the question they force me to ask: what if Smith-Ruiu’s narrator were not the angel of his own creation, but this writer of enigmatic, cruel fiction?

Pnin narrates the comical dilemmas of a mind that Smith-Ruiu readers can recognize. Pnin is an erudite but odd Russian professor teaching in unsatisfactory circumstances at the fictional Waindell College in New England, and his existential mismatch to the American, midcentury world around him lies in his essential self. Pnin is exiled from his idyllic Russia and stranded in an archipelago of rented rooms; he speaks incorrectly among his American colleagues and apathetic students; he wears the Greek Catholic cross of his childhood “merely from sentimental reasons” he can’t shake; and at what he terms his own “house-heating party,” Pnin learns that his department will reconfigure itself so that it no longer employs him. Essentially, Pnin is kind in a way that renders the world around him unkind, unintelligible, and unreal.

If one rereads Justin Smith-Ruiu in the shadow of Nabokov, he becomes a far more brilliant but equally mismatched Pnin. Smith-Ruiu is an “aspiring ex-philosopher” stranded by both the American and French academies as an expatriate professor in Paris; he has “been doing and saying whatever” for quite a long time; he is the Catholic revert who admires the transgender radical Andrea Long Chu; and he is the writer “in outer space” who wouldn’t see the world as real if not for loving its people and writing his fictions, which he theorizes as extensions of philosophy and reality. (His affliction of baffling unreality is a Nabokovian dilemma which predates Pnin: Cincinnatis C., the imprisoned protagonist of Invitation to a Beheading, spends that novel more troubled by the increasing fictionality of his setting than by his impending execution.)

Even Smith-Ruiu’s lecturing in “[OVERRIDE]” carries a Pninic frustration, as though he were not only correcting our misapprehension of his work but also struck with anger, even powerlessness, by the gulf he’d found between his mind and the world. “I was given a painful illustration of the inability of many readers to understand anything in a text beyond its ‘degré zéro’ meaning,” Smith-Ruiu prefaced his comments. For though he wrote Bun “in a mode of uninterrupted and joyous creativity,” the work also cursed him with new sight: “a fleeting glimpse into the lives most people pass today in happy ignorance of polyglossy and dialectic, with grossly underdeveloped hermeneutical faculties, and ant-like attention spans,” as Smith-Ruiu puts it. And so, to accommodate — what Pnin might call cott-le — those readers, he devised new tactics which he found too unsubtle and which culminated in “[OVERRIDE].”

Most importantly, Smith-Ruiu already knows Pnin as another man uncertain of reality. He quoted him in his 2022 book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: “You know I do not understand what is advertisement and what is not advertisement,” Pnin is saying to his landlady, to explain why he won’t read newspapers. Smith-Ruiu replies that “today Professor Pnin’s statement seems positively prophetic” in describing the commodified, commodifying digital spaces where “all is advertisement” but nothing is comprehensible or believably real.

It unsettles me that Smith-Ruiu, by 2022, had prefigured my 2025 comparison between himself and Pnin. How free can my thinking be, if it was prewritten in a casual reference at least three years ago? It unsettles me like the late appearance of the Pnin’s narrator, “Vladimir Vladimirovich” (also called “VN”), unsettles the novel’s narrative. This VN is a Russian scholar, writer, and lepidopterist who bears Nabokov’s own biographical details and literary opinions into the fictional setting. This VN is hired to lead the restructured Waindell Russian department, but on account of past slights — VN once inflamed Pnin’s future ex-wife, Liza, to suicide by insulting her amateurish poems — Pnin has already determined he will never work for his compatriot and flees him at the novel’s end. VN’s appearance, the authorial intrusion which drives Pnin from both the Waindell campus and from the pages of the novel, is the cruelest act written against Pnin. Nabokov replaces him with an autofictional insert whose reality underlines Pnin’s own fictional status.

And yet, he transcends this insult (rather, Nabokov writes that he does). After VN offers Pnin a position in the new department, Pnin’s refusal is absolute: “he wrote that he was through with teaching,” VN narrates. His subsequent flight from Waindell, in a sedan never before mentioned, bears a very un-Pninic nobility in Nabokov’s adieu: “the little sedan boldly swung past the front truck and, free at last, spurted up the shining road, which one could make out narrowing to a thread of gold in the soft mist where hill after hill made beauty of distance, and where there was simply no saying what miracle might happen.”

Pnin, then, escapes VN and his required deference to him — even his required deference to the real that VN embodies. Through The Hinternet, Smith-Ruiu has done the same. His “shining road” is more like a looping, heavenward jet stream, but his destination could be as miraculous as Pnin’s. I’m comforted by this concept of his escape, ill as I remain at the thought that Nabokov might’ve written the first Justin Smith-Ruiu last century. Though Smith-Ruiu might not mind his own obscure first appearance, recounting as he does the obscure histories of seemingly novel things. And aliterary narration by this past master evades the mechanistic internet vise which Smith-Ruiu deplores, the “algorithmically plottable profile” into which our technologies force us online. In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is (and since), he wrote that “the more you use the internet, the more your individuality warps into a brand” which its surveillance collates as mere “attention-grabbing sets of data points.” I can’t help connecting what he calls “the decidedly non-human forces that sustain the internet” to S******K’s metaphor of a cultural engine which writers must power with our written words, our spoken voices, our mediated relationships, and our documented reading, though we are neither petroleum nor lithium batteries.

A Nabokovian origin is preferable to a S******Kian one. I’ve attested to the innovative vision of Justin Smith-Ruiu’s fictions, and if in my telling they are too manic, overflowing, and beautiful for the purposes of our platform, then I can do no more for him. Pnin drove from view, and Cincinnatus C., leaving the scaffold where he was to be beheaded, “walked off through the shifting debris” of the fictional world which he sees is only “flapping scenery,” to find “beings akin to him.” Smith-Ruiu transcends algorithmic capture, often by ingenious impersonations of the AI devices which would narrate him, and it enthralls me, and that crusty humanist Nabokov would’ve been glad to read it.

And still I churn, and my fear is tinged with envy. I wish I could be read as a Nabokovian character — if VN rendered me a nearly insane galley slave, at least he’d make me more alive than the autofictional mold of the internet can. Nonetheless, his tragicomic style, or any other realist form, likely wouldn’t be kind to me as a character. Kevin LaTorre, “Christian writer and poet”: theopoetic pretensions, still bound to the premodern third-person narration, not daring to embrace this new century’s digital avant-garde. He rises very early to write very slowly what he considers literature, after which he commutes into the state capital to fill and organize immaterial Microsoft files until five p.m., and however fervently he and his wife discuss the subject, they cannot find a three-bedroom home to affordably purchase. All the while, Kevin tends a limerence inside himself for a deeply unreal existence: a pastoral beneath God Himself in a verdant countryside free of modern distractions, where Kevin, by day, would tend sheep with his dog and, by night, would rest among his loved ones, his poems, and his books. At best he is — I may be — a John Cheever character, and most likely the suburban sort who is trapped in the miserable stasis of a pretty last line, for the enjoyment of New Yorker readers who are now ready to read a luxury watch ad. Christ, what a narration.

As everyone does, I long for a new story. Smith-Ruiu has written himself, or been written, into the stratosphere. He is swimming through the ozone layer and toward the sun, somewhere far above this sitting room where I’ve been invited to wait on a couch coated in plastic, beside three saucers without cups or kettle and seven moldering books in Aramaic on the coffee table, a large gilt-frame mirror on the wall, and a garden seen only in the window, a garden in rain. I prod the plastic and can’t say if the room is real. But that means its physics aren’t mine to define. I can’t rule out a sudden light — preferably a kilonova of white-gold gamma rays — which would remake the room’s saucers, books, mirror, and garden. I expect such an explosion, now, because as I wait I beg to merge with Christ as two neutron stars merge: utterly and by inevitable routes, in a fiery instant which illuminates the cosmos and emits the very real gold, platinum, and uranium particles needed to welcome new life, somewhere far above.