Anyone familiar with what work this is referring to?
In general long meandering semi-factual pieces like this, with odd historical excursions, are one of his things and I don't know anyone else that does it quite the same. (Hmm... oddly enough Scott Alexander, who he cites here, also does some similarly Borgesian stuff, but with a different bent.) One of my favorite writers and I recommend pretty much everything he's done since the early 2010s.
But in general, Sam Kriss tends to weave fiction and nonfiction together in his writing.
https://open.substack.com/pub/samkriss/p/numb-at-burning-man