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.
“Actually,”
he admitted, “I could have called it I Hate Four Companies and Social Media. But that is such a bad
title.” Indeed, the attack is not on the entire Internet, but mostly on its
social media phase.
We
knew about this
The
damage to our privacy caused by the explosions of anonymous rage
online has been diagnosed long ago. So don’t be surprised if the backbone of
the plot of this book is simply the story, set in San Francisco in 2013, of
45-year-old Alina, a comic book artist, semi-famous in the 90s, who is ravaged
by a Twitter storm.
It
all happens because someone posts a YouTube video where Alina dares
to publicly say that singer Beyonce has done nothing for social progress. The
fans’ attack is vicious and life-changing for Alina and her friends.
The
plot’s kernel is something you can find in TV series like ‘Black
Mirror’ and ‘Mr. Robot’, or in the sit-com ‘Silicon Valley’, which mocks
Internet moguls who constantly promise “to make the world a better place.” But
in this book, as the narrator warns us, “the plot, like life, resolves into
nothing and features emotional suffering without meaning.”
The
fallout from the surreptitious recording is as central a theme
as the feeling of revenge. Recrimination is what you hear in the frustrated
scream of the autobiographical voice. In a hilarious parody of the climax of
Ayn Rand’s libertarian novel Atlas
Shrugged, standing on top of a hill, the protagonist howls: “I know what
the internet was like before people used it to make money. I am the only
literary writer in America with a serious tech background! I am the only
literary writer in America who ran Slackware 1.0 on his 386x!”
This
is the same troll-like voice blurting out these gems: “Wars
were giant parties for the ruling elites, who sometimes thought it might be
great fun to make the poor kill each other.” Or describing Thanksgiving “as a
holiday in which America celebrated the genocide of its indigenous people
through the gathering of extended families for a meal during which young people
were made to feel awkward by their elders expressing thoughts of casual racism
and homophobia.”
Kobek
acknowledges having adopted Vonnegut’s, and stand-up comedy’s, technique
of defining things in order to make the truth shine with a laugh—to explicate
everything as if the world had to be described to aliens. This is why, although
author Jonathan Lethem compares him to French novelist Michel Houllebecq, the
resemblance to Vonnegut holds better.
The
central criticism in the book is that because the digital
network is tailored to the mind of a 15-year-old (its language that of a
12-year-old) humanity is being pushed into cretinism. Not just because of the
constant interruption of deep thought transforming us into fast yet shallow
decision-makers, but because it is designed to keep us in a state of constant
narcissistic adolescence.
Intellect
is the hero of this novel, as the Los Angeles Review of Books has written. And, Kobek tells us, the
Internet is the enemy of the intellect.
Dataism
and cyborgs
Criticism
of that vulnerable phenomenon called culture has been
formulated eloquently in the last 10 years. The latest, most successful
non-fiction attempt is the lucid Homo Deus by Israeli professor Yuval Noah
Harari, who concludes that if we let the Internet transform our mind, there’ll
be two options: dataism—obsolete humanity substituted by machines; or
techno-humanism—humanity upgraded into cyborgs, half organic, half machine.
This
is not sci-fi. Algorithms already control not only book
recommendations on Amazon, but stock market investment, the lives of Uber
drivers, and the selection of partners on websites. They are used in medical
diagnosis and legal counsel. They are on the boards of directors of
multinationals. And they might soon be allowed to own property. None of this
requires conscious awareness, so this scenario could play out even if machines
don’t acquire a consciousness. Even love, science now tells us, is nothing but
an algorithm of emotions.
These
are not the hysterics of net-Luddites who ask us to go back to
horse-carriages, fountain pens and travelling pigeons. Artificial Intelligence
is happening.
The
best criticism of this phenomenon has been developed by Nicholas
Carr in The Shallows—What the Internet is Doing to our Brains,
and also by Lee Siegel in Against the
Machine—Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, which points out that
losing these bearings can have quick, catastrophic repercussions: “It is
knowledge that gives us our ethical and historical ballast, and knowledge also
brings the critical detachment necessary to arrive at that humane stability.
Critical detachment, not the multiple diversions and distractions of
information, is the guarantor of a free society.”
Married
to a digital Golem
As
Goethe famously said: “None are more hopelessly enslaved that
those who falsely believe they are free.”
And
this is exactly what is happening, according to Kobek. “One of the
curious aspects of the Twenty-First Century was the great delusion among many
people, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, that freedom of speech and
freedom of expression were best exercised on technological platforms owned by
corporations dedicated to making as much money as possible. In fact, all of the
people who exercised freedom of speech and freedom of expression on Twitter
were doing nothing more and nothing less than creating content that they did
not own for a corporation in which they had no stake.”
In
the 90s, David Foster Wallace wrote an essay urging young
novelists to come to terms with television in contemporary life. Kobek achieves
this with the Internet, showing there’s also room for a new narrative focused
on our changed sense of perception, morphed as it is by our technological
prostheses. It’s time for novels that will render the loss of linearity in our
thinking and in our feeling, a process brought about by our marriage to the
digital Golem.
In his 1991 movie Until the End of the World, German
director Wim Wenders described a futuristic machine capable of recording human
dreams. The people involved in the experiment, in a secret cave in the
Australian desert, eventually became addicted to viewing their dreams on
portable video screens. I’m always reminded of that old movie when I encounter
the contemporary abuse of smartphones, although Wenders’ dreams are more
gracious than the immanent flow of feline sentimentality, inane tourism, and
uninformed opinions filling our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter timelines
today.
Disease
of images
At
the end of the film, it is a writer, with his reconstruction of a
linear story of what happened, who saves the heroine from her iconodulism, her
adoration of images that glues her to the screen night and day. It is in the
written words of his book that she finds a cure for her “disease of images”.
Wenders,
the most literary of directors, understood the importance of
words in bringing us meaning against the senseless hypnotic obsession for
images.
This
is why literature can still save the day. And why there is value in
cultivating deep thought. Through reading. Otherwise we are bound to become
that army of unaware, foolish zombies described in I Hate the internet: “People
who spent their leisure time tweeting and creating intellectual property for
Twitter were going out into the world and dressing themselves as the
intellectual properties of major international conglomerates. They had
transformed their bodies into walking advertisements for entities in which they
had no economic stake.”
Take
a walk in the closest mall or shopping centre, factory, office
or promenade and look for yourself. The future is here, and we had better do
something about it. It could begin by teaching children how to focus on a good
book for two hours straight. Even on an e-reader, it doesn’t matter, as long as
you’re able to turn off the wifi or 3G.
Choosing
how we assimilate knowledge is what can save us. There’s no need to
smash the machines, no time for Luddism, but time to understand the message in
the medium.
The
writer is an author and professor of communication theory. His
next book, The Edge of an Era, will
be out next month.
Excerpted from The Hindu Literary Review, Sunday, 28
May 2017
image courtesy: vagabomb
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