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Eeling Like The Internet

Kobek's new novel I Hate the Internet is summarized in three sentences: The novel follows writer J. Karacehennem and his friend Adeline as their lives are disrupted when a video of Adeline goes viral online. While engaging and funny like Kurt Vonnegut, the novel uses its plot to deliver fragmentary disquisitions expressing a progressive hatred of the internet, capitalism, racism, and human awfulness amplified online. I Hate the Internet stands as a landmark work commenting on the condition of literature in the age of self-publishing online.

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Rafael Moreno
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69 views

Eeling Like The Internet

Kobek's new novel I Hate the Internet is summarized in three sentences: The novel follows writer J. Karacehennem and his friend Adeline as their lives are disrupted when a video of Adeline goes viral online. While engaging and funny like Kurt Vonnegut, the novel uses its plot to deliver fragmentary disquisitions expressing a progressive hatred of the internet, capitalism, racism, and human awfulness amplified online. I Hate the Internet stands as a landmark work commenting on the condition of literature in the age of self-publishing online.

Uploaded by

Rafael Moreno
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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W hat has the advent of the internet meant for the novel?

Apart, that is, from its having opened a gaping time-sucking sinkhole at
the center of culture? The sweet drip-feed of sentiment and savagery
downloading to our devices is absorbing attention that might otherwise
have been poured into books, but the effects of the internet on literary
life have not been purely negative. Start with the fact that the internet
now accounts, via transactions on Amazon, for more than half of the
current US sales of books. Add to that the array of opportunities it
provides to discuss novels and to get them noticed, whether on
Goodreads, the Amazon-owned social media site for readers, or literary
Twitter, or any one of the many web-based publications focused on
culture. The adaptation of screen technology, via the Kindle and
smartphone, to the needs of internet-connected readers has also been
impressive, even as the printed book continues to hold its own.
Then there are the novels one suspects would not exist if not for
the internet. They include works like Matt Beaumont’s e: a novel and
its sequels, in which the epistolary tradition is reborn as a long email
chain; Dave Eggers’s dystopia of lost privacy, The Circle; M. T.
Anderson’s wonderful updating of A Clockwork Orange for the digital
age, Feed; and more than a few mass-market thrillers that take a newly
volatile networked world as their premise. Even more significant than
these direct registrations of the internet as form and theme, however,
are the countless thousands of self-published novels of various kinds
that issue from Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing apparatus,
Smashwords, LuLu.com, and other purveyors of download- or print-
on-demand literature. This is where works like Fifty Shades of
Grey came from, vaulting from the precincts of online fan fiction into
global ubiquity. Together these enterprises have lowered the up-front
monetary cost of book publication and distribution to almost nothing,
inaugurating an era of literary hyper-abundance whose ultimate import
for the life of literature has yet to be determined.
Jarett Kobek’s I Hate the Internet is one of these self-published
novels, having been put out by a microscopic LA-based publishing
entity the author founded for that purpose called We Heard You Like
Books. Approaching life in the age of social media analytically, it differs
strikingly from the generic zombie novels, alpha billionaire romances,
and vampire erotica that dominate sales among Amazon’s KDP
offerings. And yet the boundary between “direct” publishing, as
Amazon euphemistically calls it, and being published by others has
always been blurry in the literary avant-garde, whose market is often
not large enough to sustain the kind of impersonal relations we think of
as underlying the feat of “getting published.” Avant-gardes are among
other things groups of acquaintances, friends, and lovers who publish
each other and themselves.
The age of Kindle Direct Publishing has simply confused things
further, making it difficult to separate the various meanings of
“independence”: from having the right to total delusion about your
actual literary talents, to being free to misconstrue your dependent
relationship to the giant corporation, Amazon, which saves you from
exploitation (or more likely rejection) by traditional publishers, to
staking out a space of genuine opposition to the reigning taste.
Kobek’s novel, whose full title is I Hate the Internet: A Useful
Novel Against Men, Money, and the Filth of Instagram, enters this
interesting point in literary history firmly in the last camp, trailing a
blurb from Jonathan Lethem. Kobek’s previous works include Atta,
brought out by the distinguished publisher of experimental writing
Semiotext(e) in 2011, and a strange 2012 chapbook called If You Won’t
Read, Then Why Should I Write? The former inhabits the mind of the
9/11 terrorist ringleader up to the very moment of his collision with the
North Tower, refusing to moralize about his murderous delusions,
while the latter is a hard-to-describe collection of fragmentary
transcripts of moments from the ordinary lives of celebrities, bound
with cardboard inserts detailing the trouble they have had with the law.
You know, the usual avant-garde stuff.
Both of these works, especially the first, have their virtues, but
the new novel is far more engaging than its predecessors. In fact, it is
really good, which the reader of the novel soon learns is actually a
grievous insult against it. But it is good, and even when it’s not good it’s
interesting, a minor landmark in the field of contemporary literature, if
only for the rare energy of its attempt to speak back to and against
what is nonetheless admitted to be the condition of possibility of its
own existence: the same capitalist world that gave us the internet it
hates.
I Hate the Internet is often very funny, wending its way forward
with the punchy rhythm of a stand-up routine, following a group of
friends living in the supremely annoying San Francisco of 2013. In its
humor and casually quick pacing it reads somewhat like Kurt
Vonnegut, Kobek’s acknowledged model, although without the
dangerously cute dorkiness that leavened his predecessor’s pitch-black
assessment of our place in the universe. I Hate the Internet has no Billy
Pilgrim figure, no holy innocent who throws the cruel absurdity of the
world into relief, unless it is this novel’s Ellen Flitcraft, a minor
character whose life is arbitrarily destroyed when lewd pictures of her
are posted online. What it does have is inexhaustible comic rage at the
sea of “intolerable bullshit” in which its urbanely ironic characters are
forced to swim.

KOBEK’S NEW NOVEL IS REALLY


GOOD, WHICH THE READER SOON
LEARNS IS ACTUALLY A GRIEVOUS
INSULT AGAINST IT.

At the novel’s center is the friendship between a writer called J.


Karacehennem, a last name we are told more than once is “Turkish for
Black Hell,” and his droll older friend Adeline, who was once a
successful indie comic book artist working under a male pseudonym.
Her connection to comics gives Kobek an opening to dilate on the
history of corporate exploitation of individual artists in the comics
industry, who earned almost nothing from their now multi-billion-
dollar intellectual properties. A presumably milder version of this
exploitation is what this book avoids by being self-published. It also
enables Kobek to declare the symbolic alliance of his novel with gaudy
popular culture over and against the dubious refinements of more
respectable literature, the kind published by the likes of Farrar, Straus
& Giroux, even as he stays well within the familiar bounds of social
realism (no Tralfamadorians here, just techies).
When Adeline is recorded saying some outrageous things during
a visit to a class taught by Kevin Killian (an actual person, one of the
great avant-garde poets of our time) and those things are posted to
YouTube and go viral, the internet suddenly gets personal. Having
lived in lofty contempt of its incessant chatter, Adeline can’t help
herself—she opens a Twitter account. Complications ensue. In parallel
to this, Karacehennem gets caught up in a controversy surrounding the
gentrification of the Mission District of the city, and finally decides to
move back to LA.
But as is almost always the case in avant-garde fiction, the plot is
not really the point here. Some versions of the avant-garde want to
draw us into the mysteries of language and narrative structure,
refusing popular demand for facile meanings. Those can be very
boring, I guess deliberately. That’s not what is going on in I Hate the
Internet, which like a Vonnegut novel has a highly engaging, talky
quality. The scaffold of plot is rather an occasion for the narrator to
deliver a series of fragmentary disquisitions on various matters tied
together by his titular hatred for the internet. Each hews to a
recognizably contemporary left-progressive point of view, but is uttered
with unusually creative vitriol.
To hate the internet is first of all to hate the hateful men who
congregate there to express their hatred for women like Adeline; it is
second of all to hate racism, even as public discussion of race is
understood as a screen for the more basic exploitations of capitalism,
which is a third thing the novel hates, especially the hatefully self-
adoring kind associated with the beautiful but hateful Bay Area.
Finally, there is humanity, which is revealed as essentially a “bunch of
dumb assholes,” as is daily displayed (coming now full circle) on the
internet. As it says on the first page: “The Internet was a wonderful
invention. It was a computer network which people used to remind
other people that they were awful pieces of shit.”

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