Kobek - I Hate the Internet

PRAISE FOR
I HATE THE INTERNET

Could we have an American Houellebecq? Jarett Kobek might come close, in the fervor of his assault on sacred cows of our own secretly-Victorian era, even if some of his implicit politics may be the exact reverse of the Frenchmans. I just got an early copy of his newest, I Hate the Internet and devoured ithes as riotous as Houellebecq, and you dont need a translator, only fireproof gloves for turning the pages Jonathan Lethem

A grainy political and cultural rant, a sustained shriek about power and morality in a new global era. Its a glimpse at a lively mind at full boil [An] entertaining novel of ideas This book has soul as well as nerve. It suggests that, as the author writes, The whole world was on a script of loss and people only received their pages moments before they read their lines. Dwight Garner, New York Times

A brilliant, laugh-out-loud screed against the overlapping global evils that the internet represents, a furious manifesto dressed in the guise of fiction, about a San Francisco artist whose life is upended when a recording surfaces online of her doing the unthinkable. Its an eye-opening look at the world we live in, where our lives revolve around devices made by enslaved children in China, and where the only thing we feel empowered to do about it is complainvia said devices Chicago Review of Books

A book filled with outrage that needs to be felt, not framed, that talks about how we talk about a world in which we actually live San Francisco Chronicle

I Hate the Internet is thought provokingand so funny! I cant remember the last book I read that made me laugh this much. Kobek has a gift for seeing things from a different angle and for uncovering lies and invisible structures of society, and he does it in a playful, anarchistic and quirky way. The rows of association in this bookKobeks deconstructing voicewill keep you entertained and baffled throughout the reading Dorthe Nors

This is a relentless, cruel, hilariously inflamed satire of a loop of economic mystification and the reemergence of the credibility of the notion of Original Sin in the technological utopia of the present-day Bay Area and the world being remade in its image Greil Marcus, Pitchfork

A riproaring, biting, form-follows-function burlesque of the digital age that click-meanders its way like the ADHD freaks were all becoming while offering up compelling narrative lines that kept me clicking faster and faster. Read this book. Now Dodie Bellamy

With the nasty-eyed sharpness of Swift, Burroughs or Houellebecq Kobek writes a tripwire just above the level for walking. Everyone falls down. Its a satire about losing track of the world. How? It takes a swipe at those that suppose were tracking the world were in, rather than just the world. The result of that first-person engorgement is a fetishised digitalized idiocy exposed as a blank hate state, a bleak panorama of digitised repression balanced on the corrosive manipulative belief in a centred world. If Donald Trump is the personification of the centred world, then Kobeks satire can be directed towards him and all he stands for 3:AM Magazine

JARETT KOBEK is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA was called highly interesting, by the Times Literary Supplement, has appeared in Spanish translation, been the subject of much academic writing and was a recent and unexplained bestseller in parts of Canada.

i hate the internet

JARETT KOBEK

With many special thanks to James Hopkin

First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Serpents Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London
WC1X 9HD
www.serpentstail.com

First published in 2016 in the USA by We Heard You Like Books,
A Division of U2603 LLC, Los Angeles, CA

Copyright 2016 by Jarett Kobek

Illustrations Time Magazine & Some Advertisements, Bro
Courtesy of Sarina Rahman

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author

A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library

eISBN 978 1 78283 314 7

a note on this edition

Over the centuries, many aspects of the early modern period have been eliminated from British life. These include wearing soiled Lincoln green, baiting bears, the Divine Right of Kings, and laughing at cripples from the banks of the River Fleet.

One relic of the early modern era that has survived into the present is the defamation law of the United Kingdom, which puts the burden of proof on the defendant. Instituted to keep people from killing each other over insults about small penises and big noses, its evolved into the primary method by which the ultra-rich prevent disparaging information about themselves from appearing in the press.

The most stunning example is the case of Sir Jimmy Savile, a living depravity who preyed on the young, the disabled and the dead. Savile dressed, acted, and spoke like a living depravity. Savile wrote newspaper columns about being a living depravity.

Yet through the persistent threat of defamation suits, Savile managed to stop any third-party reporting on his status as a living depravity. This allowed the living depravity to climb to the upper echelons of British society, where the living depravity became close personal friends with Prince Charles, Baroness Thatcher, and Peter Sutcliffe.

His image in the popular imagination was as the host of Jimll Fix It, a television show on which he berated children with non sequiturs while making their dreams come true, as long as those dreams fit within the allocated broadcast budgets of the BBC.

In an entirely unrelated note, theres a technique in music, particularly amongst sub-Saharan Africans and peoples of the African diaspora, known as call and response. In call and response, a performer will call out to a crowd, which will elicit a verbal response.

Do we have any stout Leeds lasses in the house? asks the theoretical performer.

Aye! answers the theoretical crowd, indicating that there are indeed stout Leeds lasses in the house.

Anyway.

When this book says hip, then you, the reader, will think hop.

When this book says hey, then you, the reader, will think ho.

When this book says [JIMLL FIX IT], then you, the reader, will know that something from this books original US edition has been changed on advice of counsel for fear of provoking litigation under English defamation law.

trigger warning

Capitalism, the awful stench of men, historical anachronisms, Jimmy Savile, death threats, violence, human bondage, faddish popular culture, despair, unrestrained mockery of the rich, threats of sexual violation, weak iterations of Epicurean thought, the comic book industry, the death of intellectualism, being a woman in a society that hates women, populism, an appalling double entendre, the sex life of Thomas Jefferson, genocide, celebrity, the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, discussions of race, Science Fiction, anarchism with a weakness for democracy, the people who go to California to die, millennial posturing, ~865kb of mansplaining, Neo-Hellenic Paganism, interracial marriage, elaborately named hippies practicing animal cruelty on goats, unjust wars in the Middle East, 9/11, seeing the Facebook profile of someone you knew when you were young and believed that everyone would lead rewarding lives.