King of the Weird: An Interview With Zero HP Lovecraft
Art by Ben Saucier
Zero HP Lovecraft. Most of us who spend too much time on the Internet have stumbled across this strange but intuitive name. Many know him as the author of three experimental novellas and multiple stories uploaded onto a Wordpress site; others enjoy him through his neoreactionary Twitter account (whose garbled handle, @0x49fa98, is code for a heinous shade of green); still more have enjoyed his interview series with DC Miller; a few have surely admired his recent online art exhibition, a curation of modern photographs paired with their corresponding Greek myth. Author Delicious Tacos says he loves Zero HP Lovecraft “because he attempts insane shit and pulls it off.” Athwart calls him the “the most important fiction writer on Weird Right Twitter.”
Lovecraft’s stories deal in his namesake’s brand of cosmic horror with a technological twist—slowly revealing mythic terrors behind technologies like virtual reality or Neuralink. Each of his books also attempts to use technology in a new or interesting way. “The Gig Economy” is peppered with screenshots of Tweets, 4Chan posts, and Reddit comments. “God-Shaped Hole” is filled with hyperlinks that are fictive rabbit holes. “Don’t Make Me Think” is painstakingly translated into emojis. Lovecraft’s most recent work, the hardcover They Had No Deepness of Earth, was released as an NFT. A fervent desire lies in the depths of Lovecraft’s creative oeuvre: “nothing less,” in his own words, "than a total replacement for the reigning epistemology. We will create a new history, a new aesthetic, and a new religion—even that.”
We at Countere caught up with Lovecraft and asked him about life as a bizarre, prolific, and influential pseudonymous writer.
Thanks for speaking to Countere, Zero. Are people in your personal life aware of your writing?
Some are, but very few. Only the ones I trust, and there are a few reasons for that. It is a secret and it must stay a secret, but even the people I trust a lot, my closest friends, they don’t value the secret the way I value it; it never will have the same eminence or salience, so I want to keep the surface area of the knowledge as small as possible or else the secret has no chance of staying a secret at all.
There are certain people I’ve told, and this was back when I was looser with my identity and would say, “I’m a writing a story,” but if I had known how that’d turn out, I would have told no one. There’s a famous saying that Twitter has a new main character everyday, but you don’t want to be the main character, and if you don’t use your real name, you won’t ever need to become one.
How has being anonymous impacted your work?
When I first started I didn’t consider myself a writer at all. Online was always supposed to be an anonymous space to me; more and more, we’ve moved to a world where everyone has an online presence and we expect that presence to be continuous with their real life.
…But on old forums online, people had screen names and there was no expectation that it was your real name. People felt it was corny to connect the two. So when I started, it never even occurred to me to use my real name. I was using Twitter as a confession box, I didn’t think people would care who I was, I just wanted to express things to myself, so it was shocking to me that my writings started to find an audience. It was only really months later, when I started posting more often, that I started saying to myself, “I’m a writer,” but even now I don’t see it as a big part of my personality, even though it's become one.
Musicians and painters feel a need to associate themselves with their work, but writers have often separated themselves from it. You say writing isn’t a big part of your identity; what else drives you besides writing?
The same things everyone else is doing. Spending time with my family, walking. I live in an urban environment so I do mundane things, I have a 9-5, I tell extremely politically correct jokes to my colleagues. The tension of being a normie in real life versus having this secret based life actually fuels my writing in some ways, because it’s more interesting to me to have a secret—a labyrinth in the structure of my life to add texture.
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Do you do most of your writing, then, on the weekend?
I like to do a little bit throughout the week, but I’ve been cutting out a chunk of time on the weekends. Some things in my process are constant—I’m someone who likes to write on my phone. Usually I’ll go for a walk and write as I go, but every project is different and I’m always sort of learning how to write.
Did you write one of your most recent stories, the emoji-heavy “Don’t Make Me Think,” on your phone?
Yes, but not for the emoji aspect of it. There is nothing, as far as tools or word processors, that is meant to make the process of writing a story with [thousands of] emojis easy. Nothing is designed for this. They didn’t anticipate that someone would try it. Half the time when the story was trying to load on my phone, it wouldn’t work. So I had to add the emojis in with a laptop. There was no other way.
What are your thoughts on James Joyce and his work Finnegans Wake? Did you draw any influence from him in “Don’t Make Me Think”?
I wouldn’t say so. I’m not a James Joyce enthusiast, but I do ask quite a lot of my readers in the story. It contains language that is often trying to invent new words or new images that represent words with a primitive and limited character set. There are far more characters in simplified Chinese than there are emojis. So if there was a concept I was trying to express in the story, I would put together several emojis, but when I started using three or four together, I realized no one would be able to fully latch on to my train of weird thought.
Did you have to initiate yourself with the ever-growing amount of emojis? Or were you already using them in your day-to-day life?
I hardly ever used them, and at the risk of sounding snooty, they’re a low-level form of expression. What I would compare it to is classical composers who would take folk melodies and bar songs. I thought it would interesting to take this style that, in many ways, is a hallmark of uneducated speech, or low culture, and try to see if I could use it in a more sophisticated manner. But I became a virtuoso of emojis. I knew what nearly all the characters looked like on different platforms and got to understand their obscurities and why they were designed in certain ways. It's really a fascinating subject on its own.
Emojis are being used by presidents, technology companies, songs, books, everywhere basically.
If you want to express agreement—“you hit the nail on the head”—people will use the 🎯 emoji to express this. I see people, not just teenage girls, use it, and it makes sense; it's one character and something that only needs one character, it's a noise of assent. So the emojis are good at expressing those quick messages in a succinct way that makes speech more effective.
Are you a religious person? Do you see yourself as supportive of Abrahamic religions?
I grew up in the Christian church. My parents taught me the Bible, we were Protestants. I myself no longer attend church. I continue reading the Bible, but I don’t quite believe that most Christians would see my personal views as Christian per se. I have interest and sympathy for the Christian worldview, and I think that its ideas are inextricable from American culture or Western culture, and that it’s a heritage of inestimable worth—even if people don’t believe it, they should value it and transmit it.
I like Christianity, but the fact it has lost the culture war speaks to the need for the church to reexamine what is really essential. Most Christians don’t draw the line correctly, they rely on heads of church to their own detriment.
A lot is made of the “crisis of men” in the media—that they are lonely, radicalized, and effeminate. Does this issue exist?
It does exist, but it is overstated. Men have so many of their interactions online—we do so many things in the virtual world—that we don’t have the opportunity for intimacy. Before online gaming, if I spent time with my friends, we were probably in a public place and face to face, and it was possible to meet people and have more incidental contact. But now because everything is online, it makes it unlikely for men to naturally meet women.
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What are your thoughts on the role memes had in shaping the past two elections: 2016 & 2020?
2016 memes had a disproportionate impact on society. I don’t know if you’re on Facebook, but memes propagate down into the worst social networks. Millions and millions of people saw certain memes by authors like Ricky Vaughn or campaigns like #draftourdaughters that in my opinion had a sizable impact on the way people perceived Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Recently, Biden actually sent a proposal to send women to active service, so the meme wasn’t that off the mark. But in 2020, I don’t think they were nearly as impactful. There’s a famous scene in the first book of the Ender’s Game series where Ender realizes you have to win the game by getting to the soldiers’ gate, not by taking them out. In 2016, the enemy gate was down. No one realized what the internet could do or how it could spread. It let the shitposters rule the discourse, but afterwards the algorithms and engines were changed so it could never happen again.
This space, in particular, can be disrupted by certain blockchain technology. The theory is if we can build an open internet again, a social media blockchain service is un-censorable—once it's written on the blockchain, it's there forever for anyone who wants to read it. We’re not there yet, but I think if we do it, the world can change really rapidly.
How do you think technology is broadly impacting society today, given where we’re heading?
There's an accelerationist question we need to answer first, and that’s the idea that it takes bio-capital—human intelligence and human cooperation towards a sophisticated goal—in order to keep building technology, anything from a moon rocket to artificial intelligence. Those things require human capital, bio-capital, to be made and maintained.
The accelerationist question [posits] that as we build more technology, more industry, we’re exhausting our bio-capitol. Because these intellectual people who are building technology aren’t passing their intelligence genes to future generations; the opposite is true, it’s being sucked out of them. Look at Singapore, it’s a place with advanced technology and highly intelligent people and they don’t have kids. The same is becoming true of America. Middle-class people aren’t having kids. Is there enough human capital to fuel the techno-capital takeoff where technology actually does replace us and becomes a self-sustaining engine of development? All the AI I’ve encountered is terrible and not close to human performance. There will need to be a paradigm shift that happens before we can get to a place where we’re really worried about technology phasing humans out.
People have characterized your views as “alt-right,” where do you feel you are on the political spectrum?
I tend to avoid labels. If there is one I’m sort of comfortable with, it would be neoreactionary, which certain people say is dead. I use the word dissident, but even that is loaded with implications, because to use that word is to other yourself and put yourself outside the Overton window. I would say I am probably quite far to the right of most people, but depending on how we conceive of right and left, as everyone has their own way of doing it. I generally consider myself pro-market and don’t care for people who oppose them.
What are your thoughts on cryptocurrency and its utility?
There are fundamental issues with it succeeding as a form of money. But I’m hesitant to comment here, because every person in crypto has holy convictions about which coins are the right coins, the wrong coins, and why someone is a moron for finding a stack interesting. The space moves so fast that it's very hard to keep up with the innovations. If you have conviction though, you can put your money where your mouth is and people will get rich doing so, and that’s positive.
You recently put out an NFT book, They Had No Deepness of Earth, what was that like?
My book dovetails nicely with the cryptocurrency question, because this first NFT release is only 200 copies. You buy an NFT through my publisher’s website, but the technology is tremendously powerful and has a lot of implications beyond buying a JPEG. It’s special because you also get a physical copy sent to your house. I wanted to do something precious and rare and we will do a larger release later on.
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