Writing
a good novel about the Internet is almost as difficult as shooting
a good film about the effects of drugs. You may try all the available
fireworks, and you’ll still fail. Blurred images, out-of-focus edges, tweaked
sitar sounds, ridiculous echoes, and still you’ll get nothing close to
representing the experience.
So
far, defining the Internet with the language of literature has been as
hard as explaining consciousness. Attempts to subsume the Internet into
contemporary literature have been embarrassing. How can the instrument of
knowledge understand itself? How can our own mind, slowly melting into a server
where we store our photographs, memories, comments, emotions, chats, bank
details, dreams and aspirations, understand its own technological nature? More
importantly, how can a powerful instrument of meaning like literature be used
to understand what seems to be its nemesis, the constantly distracting need for
useless and disconnected novelties—the Internet of social networks?
One
writer has succeeded in this mission, and in such a creative manner
that, although everything indicated he would miss the mark, he triumphed. First
of all, he wrote it on a computer. And he sees the contradiction: “Now writers
used computers, which were the by-products of global capitalism’s uncanny
ability to run the surplus population into perpetual servants. All of the
world’s computers were built by slaves in China.”
Jarett Kobek, the author of I Hate the internet knows what he’s
doing. And he tells you. In detail. It’s beyond meta-literature. It’s pure
brilliance.
Writing
“a bad novel”
It’s
hard to write about the Internet because it is so ephemeral.
Harder still is it to have the guts to self-publish a novel built with the
hyperbolic language of online interaction. And then to market it as “a bad
novel” that promises to mimic the Internet “in its irrelevant and jagged
presentation of content.”
Kobek
delivers on the promise, because his style is a mix between a
troll’s rant against Silicon Valley’s tech barons and the language of Wikipedia
entries, which is actually inspired by Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5.
I
Hate the internet—A Useful Novel Against Men, Money, and the Filth of instagram, as the
full title explains, has become an immediate sensation after an enthusiastic
review in The New York Times. But it
is a text that most publishing companies couldn’t print because of its candid
attack on so much that Western society stands for. Including publishing
companies. Funnily enough, success arrived thanks to the Internet. Kobek used
his enemy’s weakness for the first successful pushback against the culture of
Silicon Valley’s smiling billionaires—the perfect Judo move.
