Hate Mail

Late one night in April 2011 I tweeted ‘I will send a postcard with an offensive message on to the person who replies to this’. I was inundated with replies but the winner was a Jonathan Hopkins from Forest Hill, who replied in 0.2 seconds and was rewarded the next day with a postcard which simply read; ‘Fuck you Jonathan, fuck you and fuck your shit legs’ (accompanied by a drawing of some legs). I don’t know what Jonathan’s legs look like, or even if he has legs. I fired a photograph of Jonathan’s postcard into the pipes of the internet and as a result, began to receive requests from people all over the world, eager to be abused in a similar fashion. A few days later I opened a service online, enabling strangers to pay me to tell them to fuck off, and Hate Mail was born. The service proved so popular in its first week that I couldn’t keep up with demand and had to stop taking orders after a few days. Since its inception, I’ve reopened the service nine times with all editions selling out in minutes. I sent around 1,700 postcards over a period of 5 years or so.

Two books of the project (Hate Mail & Hate Mail - The Definitive Collection) are now out of print but you can occasionally find copies floating around on Ebay.