My Internet: Sam Kriss

The writer thinks giving up smartphones is completely doable.

Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.

Every other week (or so) we quiz a “very online” person for their essential guide to what’s good on the internet.

Today we welcome Sam Kriss, the author of a cutting, widely discussed recent Harper’s article about the 21-year-old founder of the startup Cluely and his obsession with “high-agency” behavior. Sam has also written for Jacobin, Unherd, and The New York Times and publishes the newsletter Numb at the Lodge. Sam wants more deranged right-wing censorship of TikTok and says Substack hosts a lot of nerds convincing themselves they’re the cool kids’ table. —Nick

“Everyone’s packed into a few hellish gigaplatforms, where they spend all their time screaming like maniacs for attention.”

EMBEDDED: What’s a recent meme or post that made you laugh?

SAM KRISS: I think there’s only one meme that has ever made me actually, genuinely laugh. All the other ones I’ve seen either elicit a weak heh or I just sort of scroll past them having registered their contours in the same way you might vaguely notice the leaves on the pavement. Future generations, if there are any, will think we were pathetic for having pretended to find this shit funny. Anyway the only exception is this one, which had me in a genuinely alarming state, red-cheeked, tears streaming down my face, making unattractive gasping noises. I don’t know why.

EMBEDDED: What do you use Instagram for?

SAM KRISS: About three years ago my girlfriend came up with an idea for a project, which was to cook a meal from every country in the world, from north to south, vaguely following Wikipedia’s list of countries by northernmost point. Three years later and we’ve just got to Myanmar. I use Instagram almost exclusively for posting poorly composed and badly lit pictures of food from around the world. In the description I will paste an enormous and basically unreadable paragraph in which I ramble on about the various dishes, why I chose them, whether they taste good, how tricky they were to make, how they fit into the vague and offensive national stereotypes I have about the countries in question, etc. I have no idea who’s looking at this. Instagram used to show me pictures of my friends going to parties and so on, and now it pretty much exclusively shows me videos of total strangers in the Third World falling into unsanitary-looking pits of filth. Whatever systems govern the feed still keep a very close eye on my interpersonal relationships, because whenever anyone I know is dating someone new they’re all over my feed, right up until the moment I actually meet them in real life, at which point they’re instantly replaced by loads more videos of Bihari military recruits rubbing each other down with cow slurry. To be honest I think this is a good thing. When I was much younger the normal thing was to take loads of blurry overexposed club photos every time you went out, and usually in the middle of the next day’s comedown someone would be badgering you to put the photos up, with up meaning online: everyone needed to have a constantly updated public record of their social lives, and sometimes you got the sense that we were mostly socialising for the purpose of feeding the archive. For a moment we were all pretending to live like celebrities, curating our public image, and it was deranged; it drove millions of people insane. Now there’s absolutely no chance anyone who matters to you will see any of the stuff you post on Instagram, which means we’re free. Social life is social again, it happens entirely in the space and time in which it actually happens. I don’t know why I still feel the need to show strangers my mole poblano on Instagram. To be fair it did take ages to make.

EMBEDDED: What types of videos do you watch on YouTube?

SAM KRISS: Mostly it’s old British comedy shows someone uploaded in 320p a decade and a half ago. That’s about it. I used to watch a lot of entertaining conspiracy theory videos on there but YouTube seems to have clamped down on those, and everything else made specifically for the platform is hideous. I genuinely can’t imagine wanting to sit down and actually watch YouTube. I can barely even comprehend what that would involve. Three hour video essays about how children’s cartoons are insufficiently leftist? Those game shows where a bunch of braying children’s-entertainer types blindfold people and make them say racial slurs? Mr Beast?

The only made-for-YouTube stuff I ever briefly watched was a guy who would phone up scammers pretending to be someone very old and very gullible and string them along. Usually by the end the scammer would be reduced to a screaming heap of mental jelly; it was brief sadistic fun. Nice to see cynical people get some kind of comeuppance. But there was one video where he pretended to be a crusty Wicca psychic type and used a few very basic cold reading techniques to convince the scammers that he was legit. All his prophecies were about the fact that these guys were scamming people, but they barely even noticed; they kept crowding him with questions about their families and their children’s health and happiness, and suddenly it became very hard to ignore that these people all lived in dirt-poor towns in Uttar Pradesh, with lives that involved a level of desperation very few people in the West will ever experience, and while those of us on the receiving end of their cackhanded attempts to steal money might find it infuriating, they have a very different set of concerns once they put down the phone, and frankly if they do manage to con a few swollen golfing Americans out of their pensions then maybe that’s some small measure of cosmic justice. I couldn’t really stomach the scambaiters after that. Some cooking videos are ok.

EMBEDDED: Are you concerned by the claims of censorship that some users have made since TikTok was taken over by investors led by Larry Ellison, an ally of President Trump?

SAM KRISS: Absolutely not. I want more deranged right-wing censorship of TikTok. I don’t ever look at it myself but I have noticed that absolutely everyone who gets any of their political opinions from that app is actively deranged, huge chunks of their brain have simply rotted away and the space left has filled with a kind of black pus of incomprehension and mental illness. One of the things people are worried about is that TikTok is now censoring information about the genocide in Gaza. I’ve been involved in Palestine solidarity for nearly two decades now, and the movement has never been dumber or worse since it was revitalised by large numbers of people who get all their information from TikTok. These people know literally nothing. The think the fact that some Israelis get skin cancer is a devastating argument against Zionism. All their opinions were downloaded from a video that begins “um so ok.” I want every view I agree with to be ruthlessly purged from TikTok. Much better to have many fewer people on your side, as long as they all have functioning brains.

EMBEDDED: Do you watch Twitch, Kick, or any other livestreaming services? If so, which streamers?

SAM KRISS: I had to watch some of the more popular streamers for a piece I wrote. Some utterly tedious gamer with pink hair, a kind of manic imbecile who kept complaining that he wanted ice cream, a few grating political bores; I hated it. I could only stomach this stuff in 20-second increments. I have no idea how people manage to digest it for hours at a time. I would rather take a pair of pliers to my own fingernails than sit through another minute of it again.

EMBEDDED: Where do you tend to get your news?

SAM KRISS: I don’t know. I seem to have a generally pretty good awareness of what’s going on; I can tell you about recent ethnic conflict between Bedouin and Druze in Suwayda Governorate, I’m broadly cognisant of the ideological bent of the new Japanese government, but I have absolutely no idea where any of this information comes from. I barely read news sites. I’ll look at the Guardian front page in the morning, flick through the headlines without really reading anything, sometimes I’ll skim something interesting in the Financial Times, but I don’t really read the news in a way that has any explanatory power. The only possible conclusion is that I must get my news through a powerful form of intuition mysterious even to myself. I see a flock of pigeons rise on the street in London and something in the pattern of their flight allows me to unconsciously peer through the chaotic chain of causes until, without me being aware of it, my background knowledge about the world now includes recent trends in South Korean shipbuilding. I don’t know what would happen if I started actually following the news but it’s probably best for everyone that I don’t.

EMBEDDED: How do you keep up with the online discourse? How important is it to you to do this?

SAM KRISS: I follow like three accounts on Instagram that obsessively seek out Twitter discourse and then screenshot it all. Good for keeping it all at arm’s length, and you only really need to check in every week or so. Most of the stuff is very low-resolution. You can see one or two posts on a topic and pretty much work out the exact contours of the whole dumb discourse from there. I’d ignore it entirely but every so often some idiot comes up with a position so beautiful and strange that I’m genuinely lost in admiration, and this is the stuff I feed on.

EMBEDDED: What’s the last strong opinion you had about a story, topic, or controversy online?

SAM KRISS: After this whole Lindy West thing I’m very close to looping round again and becoming pro-polyamory on purely contrarian grounds.

There are no happy endings on the internet

EMBEDDED: What’s a popular misconception that you see repeated online?

SAM KRISS: Literally everything people say online is wrong. People on the internet think the problem with data centres is that they use too much water. People on the internet think medieval peasants lived lives of leisure and ease. People on the internet have beliefs about food and the proper way to prepare it that are so insane that every time I see them I start circling my jaw like a psychotic slasher. People on the internet will say things like “it’s my birthday.” No it’s not. That’s actually a popular misconception. You haven’t even been born.

EMBEDDED: How would you describe the culture of Substack, in terms of the types of writing and thinking that it has encouraged?

SAM KRISS: Unbearably chummy. There are a lot of people on Substack who seem very infatuated with the platform and all the wonderful new forms of writing it’s producing, and then you read the stuff and it’s cack. The most popular form of Substack writing is the wistful musing on nothing in particular, in which the writer thinks about various topics without ever actually thinking anything in particular. The other is the people who capitalise the b in “beauty.” The site hosts a lot of nerds convincing themselves they’re the cool kids’ table. There are of course plenty of very interesting writers who use Substack too, but one thing all the best of them have in common is that they do things that are entirely and completely theirs, and which would be the same in basically any venue. Anything that feels Substacky, like it’s a Substack essay specifically before it’s the expression of any particular writer, is always terrible. There are too many writers. At any given time there should be a maximum of 50 working writers, and all of them should hate each other.

EMBEDDED: What, if anything, is there to learn from the popularity of the looksmaxxing trend and influencers like Clavicular?

SAM KRISS: If you really want to know I wrote about this at excruciating length.

EMBEDDED: Do you have any advice for people who use sports betting apps or prediction markets?

SAM KRISS: …Don’t?

EMBEDDED: Have you found Claude, ChatGPT, or any other AI tools useful? How so?

SAM KRISS: I’ve found exactly one use for generative AI, aside from the usual Google-substitute work everyone secretly gets it to do now that Google is basically unusable. If I’m stuck on an essay, I’ll explain the topic matter and ask it to generate a Sam Kriss piece on the subject. I can then read the output, see what the most rote and boring and obvious approach would be, and do something else.

EMBEDDED: Do you believe that advances in AI will spawn a new “underclass,” as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has suggested might happen? Or do you believe that the AI bubble about to burst?

SAM KRISS: I did think AI was a bubble initially, and in the slightly longer term I think it still might be. A lot of the bubble believers seem to have this idea that once the bubble pops and all the overvalued AI firms start to deflate, that AI itself will simply go away. This is not going to happen. What will happen is that advances in AI really will create a new underclass. All the people who let AI do their thinking for them are going to die. They’re going to die in the same way that an ant whose brain gets colonised by a parasitic fungus dies. The AI will sprout weird new structures out of their corpses and the world will be inherited by those people who had zero exposure to this stuff, who will mostly be ultra-orthodox Jews and nomadic cattle herders.

EMBEDDED: Are smartphones bad for us? Where do you fall on the Jonathan Haidt-Taylor Lorenz divide?

SAM KRISS: Jonathan Haidt is about 30% of the way to me.

EMBEDDED: Do you try to limit your phone use? If so, what methods have been helpful for this?

SAM KRISS: Literally just don’t have one. I gave up my smartphone for 40 days and it really is completely doable. Draw maps on little pieces of paper. Arrange to meet people at a particular time and place and just turn up. If you don’t like looking at it all the time, it is completely possible to get rid of it.

EMBEDDED: What’s something that you have observed about the online behavior of Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, and/or Boomers?

SAM KRISS: Everyone online is a boomer. There are only boomers on the internet. You think I’m wrong. In four years, have another look at everything you’re posting right now. You’ll see. You were a boomer all along.

EMBEDDED: Who’s the coolest person who follows you?

SAM KRISS: Is Lorde cool? Lorde follows me on Instagram. Is Nick Mullen cool? I don’t know. I’m old. I do have some truly crazy names on my Substack email list though. Cool probably isn’t the right word for those. It’s deeply alarming that these people are reading my nonsense.

EMBEDDED: Which big celebrity has your favorite internet presence, and why?

SAM KRISS: So there were a bunch of questions in the middle of this questionnaire that I thought I may as well answer together. This one, one about what my go-to emoji is, one about the names of my group chats, one about which subscription streaming service I’d keep if I could only keep one, that sort of thing. Every so often in life you encounter something that reminds you that this world is very big, and contains many different types of people, going around in a social reality that’s physically isomorphic with your own but totally different in every other respect, and right now you’re cheek by jowl with people living lives you can barely even imagine. This was one of those encounters. I suppose everyone thinks the way they live is best, and all the other approaches aren’t as good; if they couldn’t think this I suppose they’d have to start living differently. In this I’m not really different to anyone else. But I do think that as a writer it’s my job to not fall into this kind of easy prejudice. One of my maxims is from Terence: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto. I try to live by it. Still, receiving these questions is a bit like being asked by a Bushman of the Kalahari what my favourite spear is for hunting springbok, or what kind of grubs I like to eat, or what dances I perform to the medicine-songs. All I can say is that I belong to a different tribe and live differently. I don’t have a go-to emoji. I’m not in any group chats with funny names, I don’t pay for any streaming services, and I definitely can’t think of any big celebrities whose internet presences I particularly appreciate. I can’t even imagine what that would look like. Actually I guess there’s Azealia Banks. Ignore everything I just said.

EMBEDDED: What’s the last thing that brought you joy online?

SAM KRISS: I think the problem I face with this interview is that it’s basically about the things I like on the internet, and I fundamentally don’t much like the internet. I seem to spend more time on here than I want to so obviously there’s some appeal but whatever it is that’s keeping me screenbound does not involve the parts of the psyche that deal with things like pleasure or joy or emotional attachment, or frankly any part of the conscious rational mind. I think there were previous incarnations of the internet that were a lot more loveable. When the internet was made of websites, a sea of weird personal projects that you could just launch yourself into, bobbing with the flotsam of the world. The internet of Time Cube. Probably the last thing online that really brought me joy was a website in which someone claimed to have discovered the secret name of Rome. As you probably know, the city of Rome had two names: a public name and a secret name. The city’s secret name was also the name of its tutelary deity, but knowing the true name of anything gives you power over that thing, which is why the name was a closely guarded state secret; in the first century BC a tribune called Valerius Soranus was executed for revealing the secret name. Whatever it was, the name is lost now. There’s a deeply annoying tradition in which it’s Amor, which is Roma backwards, and the guardian deity is Venus. But I found someone who thought he’d worked it out, and made a website about it. His reasoning involved dozens of bizarre nuggets of Etruscan history and all of it was impeccable. I’m not going to tell you what the secret name was, or how he got there. That site’s been gone for years. The important thing is that this person only moonlighted as an investigative classicist; the main purpose of his website was for his main gig selling Hawaii real estate. Its tagline was “To boldly sell what has been sold before.” That was a very long time ago. I’m not sure there’s any stuff like that any more. Everyone’s packed into a few hellish gigaplatforms, where they spend all their time screaming like maniacs for attention. Everything’s arranged around constantly updating feeds. Nothing can simply exist. It sucks. The internet sucks. It’s a low-quality product.

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