I Hate the Internet
Jarrett Kobek
[We Heard You Like Books]
Written through gritted teeth, I Hate the Internet does not stop at hating the internet. The book levels its vast reserves of hate at the New York Times, the Google bus, the apostles of Ayn Rand, at Dr. Who cosplayers, DARPA, literary fiction and Janey Smith’s forgotten ‘Fuck List’. The plot follows Adaline, a forty-something comic book artist with MILF looks and a voice like a “drugged-out Dianna Vreeland”. But the author, Jarett Kobek, turns the internet’s flippant, algorithmically arbitrary tone against itself by writing in tangents: he circles Adaline’s story with episodes illustrating how the internet ruins lives, and the dark origins of capitalist cyberspace.
But to hate technology could never be a simple thing. I Hate the Internet is a book about foundational violence – Kobek claws at the dark, aggrieved heart of entertainment, the platforms which make products of their users. He reminds us how the Paris Review was founded by the CIA, how the New York Times argued for the Iraq invasion. For several pages his narrative devolves into a Buzzfeed listicle. The internet is on trial here, and evidence is damning. The Arab Spring was a lie. Peter Thiel, Paypal founder and venture capitalist, is a “billionaire weapons profiteer”. The internet does not care about women. And everything we do there ends up making money for someone else. To quote a neologism this novel has invented, truly we are terrofucked, but Kobek has a great deal of fun making his case. The tone is playful and knowingly flippant: tweet-length aphorisms echo through the text, respawning like heads on a hydra, or keywords used in SEO. To read I Hate the Internet is to wade headlong into cybernetic slime, to confront the crude biases of online life and to feel powerless against them. Because without the internet, I Hate the Internet could not exist, nor could it find readers.
Words: Róisín Kiberd
