I Hate the Internet begins with Adeline, a female comic-book artist, making "the one unforgivable mistake of the early Twenty-First Century".
She gives an irreverent talk to a group of college students about Beyoncé and Rihanna, revolutions in the Middle East and whatever else comes to her mind. But that’s not her mistake. Her mistake, writes author Jarett Kobek, is that she “neglected to notice that someone was recording every word that she said”.
A video of her talk is posted on YouTube, and the machinery of internet outrage goes into full swing. “A wide range of humanity believed that Beyoncé and Rihanna were inspirations rather than vultures,” writes Kobek. “Adeline had spit on their gods.”
I Hate the Internet seems to be an accurate summary of Kobek's feelings, even if much of the book reads as satire. The Turkish-American author wrote the book in about two months, when his relationship with the internet was one of "pure hate", he told Literary Hub. "I'd just escaped San Francisco, where I'd watched long-standing communities of people be destroyed, basically, by the people who own the internet. The city gave me a nervous breakdown."
I Hate the Internet can feel, at times, like a nervous breakdown. It's set in San Francisco around 2013, amid white Google buses shuttling Google-Glass-wearing employees to their corporate campus and amid evictions of poor residents by landlords to make way for overvalued start-ups. A kind of internet dystopia has arrived in the city and Kobek's novel strips naked the systems that "have reduced everyone to the worst possible fate".
Adeline is one of many characters in the book who find their fates tied to the internet. One character prays to a pantheon of Silicon Valley gods (Steve Jobs is Hades) to ward off her inevitable eviction, while another launches a start-up called Bromato (a combination of Bro and Tomato) backed by an Arab prince, who alternately goes by the names Dennis and Master of the World’s Sorrow.
Kobek has even written a version of himself into the novel as J Karacehennem, who has written a book titled ZIAD, about a 9/11 hijacker – Kobek's 2011 novel ATTA fictionalised the life of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta.
Other characters are plucked straight from reality. Jack Kirby, the American creator of the comic-book characters X-Men and the Hulk, never appears in the novel, but is claimed as its “central personage” nonetheless. Kirby, whose creations made billions for Marvel, was never really compensated in kind, and in Kobek’s novel he becomes a kind of figurehead for the bloggers, YouTubers, Tweeters and Facebookers who “become nothing more than comic book artists, churning out content for enormous monoliths that refuse to pay us the value of our work”.
Kobek’s blending of the purely fictional with the semi-historical is entertaining in the way that conspiracy theories are. He ties it all together – from George H W Bush’s exhumation of an Apache warrior’s grave to the United States’ invasion of Iraq – and then goes on to lampoon American media coverage of the Arab Spring and how journalists heralded Twitter and Facebook as the cause of revolutions – “So that was another miracle worked by American corporations headquartered near, in, and around San Francisco: the first ever arrival of Spring in the Middle East.”
I Hate the Internet is likely a novel for people who already hate the internet – not those who might need additional persuading. The novel is a caustic answer to half-hearted grumblings against social media. "Why are we on this planet? Why are people here? Why do we lead our pointless lives?" asks one character, only to conclude, "We are on Earth to make Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg richer. There is an actual, measurable point to our striving."
Leah Caldwell writes for Alef Magazine, the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Texas Observer.
