Contemporary Authors

• Atta/The Whitman of Tikrit Semiotext(e) (Los Angeles, CA), 2011
• The Future Won't Be Long ( novel) Viking (New York, NY), 2017

1. The future won't be long : a novel LCCN 2017025377 Type of material Book Personal name Kobek, Jarett, author. Main title The future won't be long : a novel / Jarett Kobek. Published/Produced New York, New York : Viking, [2017] Description 399 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780735222489 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PS3611.O3 F88 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 2. Atta : & the Whtman of Tikrit LCCN 2011456547 Type of material Book Personal name Kobek, Jarett. Main title Atta : & the Whtman of Tikrit / Jarett Kobek. Published/Created Los Angeles : Semiotext(e) ; Cambridge, Mass. : Distributed by MIT Press, c2011. Description 199 p. ; 18 cm. ISBN 9781584351061 (pbk.) 1584351063 (pbk.) Shelf Location FLS2014 118898 CALL NUMBER PS3611.O3 A95 2011 OVERFLOWA5S Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS1) CALL NUMBER PS3611.O3 A95 2011 LANDOVR Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• I Hate the Internet - 2016 Serpent's Tail, London, United Kingdom

• InkWell Management Literary Agency - http://inkwellmanagement.com/client/jarett-kobek

  Jarett Kobek
  Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA has appeared in Spanish translation, been the subject of much academic writing and was a recent bestseller in parts of Canada. He writes regularly for museums and galleries, with his essays appearing under the auspices of Frieze, the Hammer Museum and White Cube.

• Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/20/jarett-kobek-internet-enormously-detrimental-i-hate-the-internet-interview

  Jarett Kobek: ‘The internet has been enormously detrimental to society’
  By Carole Cadwalladr
  The author of Silicon Valley satire I Hate the Internet on the evils of social media, and how novelists have failed to tackle it
  Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla
  Sun 20 Nov 2016 04.00 EST Last modified on Wed 21 Mar 2018 19.56 EDT
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  ‘We live in a very dark moment’: Jarett Kobek.
  ‘We live in a very dark moment’: Jarett Kobek. Photograph: Karen Robinson for the Observer
  When the novel I Hate the Internet came out in the US earlier this year, it had every likelihood of sinking without trace. It was self-published, it was by a young unknown – Jarett Kobek – and its main selling point was naked, gleeful contempt for the devices and technology platforms that are an essential part of all our daily lives. “Nothing says individuality like 500 million consumer electronics built by slaves,” he says at one point. “Welcome to hell.” Hell, for Kobek, a 38-year-old American of Turkish heritage, became daily life in San Francisco, where the novel is set. Along with many of the city’s artists and writers, he found himself driven out by the forces of gentrification, moved to Los Angeles, where he’s now based, set up his own small press, and wrote this book – a scorching satire of how a few hypercapitalist companies in Silicon Valley have come to dominate everything. I Hate the Internet didn’t sink without trace. It found a readership thirsty for its funny, acerbic edge, got a rave review in the New York Times, went to the top of the bestseller charts in Germany and has now been published here by Serpent’s Tail.

  So, do you actually hate the internet, Jarett?
  Not particularly. There’s part of it that I find really contemptible. The title is offered like the sneer of a 15-year-old into Twitter, after they’ve just seen a meme of someone having sex with a chicken or something. I hate parts of it. I certainly think it’s been enormously detrimental to society.

  If there’s going to be an opposition, a response, it’s not going to come in the form of tweets
  You seem particularly down on Twitter.
  It’s not Twitter per se. It’s the undue amount of importance that very serious people put on Twitter. That, to me, is what’s infuriating. It’s a social network that makes everyone sound like a 15-year-old and then very serious people take it way too seriously. And that’s not how to run a society. That’s not how to effect change.

  You say: “One of the curious aspects of the 21st century was the great delusion… 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.” And yet you’re not exempt from that: your novel is available as an ebook…
  Ah, yes. Ultimately, we live in a very dark moment where if you want to be part of any extended conversation beyond a handful of people, you do have to sign on to some things that, ultimately, are very unpalatable. Every era has its unanswerable questions, so maybe the thing to do, which is what I did in the book, is to just acknowledge the inherent hypocrisy of all of it. Though maybe that’s an easy dodge.

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  One of the things that comes up time and again is the undercurrents of misogyny and racism that seem to have been enabled or unleashed by technology. Do you think there’s something fundamental about that?
  I do think it has to be acknowledged that this technology which seems to be really good at enabling misogyny and abuse of women was created in rooms where there were no women. The people who seem to be the recipients of the most abuse online look like the people who were simply not in the room when all of this stuff was being created. If the book does anything, it acknowledges that.

  It seems like a particularly interesting moment to think about that in terms of where we’re at now. Would Trump have been possible without the internet?
  Of course not. Look who benefits from all the endless newspaper inches about how the oppressed peoples of the world are going to be liberated by technology. I’ve just been on book tour to a lot of battleground states where I spent a lot of time 10 years ago. And if you want to look what hypercapitalism looks like, do a before and after of the Midwest, with a 10-year-break in between. It’s so devastated. Was it always a wonderful place to live? Probably not, but was it sort of like a road of ruination and emptiness? No. And I think the internet has been really good at aiding that process, certainly in destroying jobs.

  Reading your book made me think that we simply haven’t even had the language to criticise the internet until now. That there’s been no outside to the internet. No place to oppose it from…
  I think the outside is publishing, actually. I mean publishing in the most Platonic sense of the word, rather than the squalid industry that we have. I think that books actually can be anything. Publishing’s response to the internet has been completely pathetic, but God, if there’s going to be an opposition, a response, it’s not going to come in the form of tweets.

  You claim writers have chosen to ignore the dominant story of the 21st century and have instead rolled over and embraced Twitter as a marketing device. Do you think there’s just been a complete dereliction of duty?
  Not from everyone, but yes, if you see the literary novels that have been coming out even in the last two or three years, very few of them have much of a connection to anything now. How many of the literary novels published by the four major companies in the US have much to do with a world after which Trump wins the presidency? Have they published even a single working-class writer? I can’t think of one.

  We need to talk about the online radicalisation of young, white men
  Abi Wilkinson
  Abi Wilkinson
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  You’re pretty scathing about some of the technology companies. You say that the idea that Google and Twitter contributed to the Arab spring is like saying the Russian revolution was sponsored by Ford...
  I went to Egypt in 2011, about four weeks after Mubarak fell and no one mentioned Facebook or Twitter. What they were talking about was money, and how they didn’t have any. At the same time, I was living in San Francisco, where there were Facebook employees who seemed to believe they were bringing enlightenment and freedom to the oppressed masses of the world, evicting Latino families who’d lived in the same place for 60 years. It’s just absurd to think that a complex, social thing, like a revolution, happening 7,000 or 8,000 miles away was being fuelled and generated by some stuff some nerds put out on a cellphone.

  You had to make legal changes to the UK edition, which you’ve done with the device of writing [JIM’LL FIX IT] where you’ve redacted passages such as those about Google’s Larry Page and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. How did that come about?
  I didn’t want to delete the text per se, and I’d just read Dan Davies’s biography of Jimmy Savile and it really fascinated me, because in the US you’re constantly being told everything is a conspiracy and actually nothing ever is. Rich people tell you what they’re going to do and then they do it. Whereas here, there really was a conspiracy. It really did happen.

  I Hate the Internet is published by Serpent’s Tail (£12.99). Click here to order a copy for £10.65

• Millions - https://themillions.com/2017/05/tk-on-jarett-kobeks-soft-cuddly.html

  QUOTE:
  Kobek’s writing resists categorization. It swerves between fiction, personal nonfiction, and cultural critique in a fashion whose closest antecedent is probably the New Narrative prose

  The Internet Was Built as a Weapon: The Millions Interviews Jarett Kobek
  THE MILLIONS INTERVIEW
  Ismail Muhammad
  May 4, 2017 | 5 books mentioned 13 min read
  Related Books:
  cover
  Jarett Kobek’s writing resists categorization. It swerves between fiction, personal nonfiction, and cultural critique in a fashion whose closest antecedent is probably the New Narrative prose of writers like Kevin Killian. Novels like 2013’s BTW toggle between modes: the novel rhapsodizes over Los Angeles in lyrical prose that evokes the city’s ephemeral quality, but lyricism is the velvet glove in which Kobek cloaks his acerbic wit. With 2016’s I Hate the Internet, Kobek cast off the lyricism in favor of trenchant social criticism that seemed capable of sparking class warfare. Kobek’s focus on technology continues with this year’s Soft & Cuddly, but this time he foregoes fiction altogether in favor a tale of neoliberalism’s collision with early video game culture. Using the controversy 1987 video game “Soft & Cuddly” — which was developed by teenager John George Jones — as a case study, Kobek unfurls a story of society’s panic over representations of violence and a youth-based subculture whose only goal is to undercut that society’s social mores. I spoke with Kobek about thinking of the Internet as a weapon, social media’s role in the 2016 election, the aesthetics of male adolescence, and seriality in fiction.

  cover
  cover
  The Millions: The last time I saw you was at that City Lights reading…

  Jarett Kobek: Yeah, you were there for me being Bernie Bro’d. I feel like everyone who was there should have a reunion at some point, we all went through something.

  TM: Especially after the election — like, the bro ended up being right about Twitter.

  JK: Yeah, ultimately he was right about Twitter. He just had the wrong candidate.

  TM: I wonder, in light of the election, if your thoughts on the nature of the Internet, but especially Twitter, have shifted at all.

  JK: The underlying critique of all this stuff just making money for people hasn’t shifted, but I think it’s impossible to look at Trump’s rise and feel like we haven’t lived through a profound shift in the way politics is conducted. For all the hand-wringing that accompanies every election cycle over sinking to new partisan lows or how politics used to have dignity, I do think that what Trump essentially did was adopt the emotional and intellectual frequency of the Internet flame war, and turn it into presidential politics. Turns out it works very well!

  The thing is, if you’re the annoying person in the flame war, someone else has to be putting forth the reasonable, well-crafted argument about some issue. And all your response has to be is, “You’re a bag of dicks.” Then you watch them slowly collapse in response trying to figure out how to respond to this thing. But of course you can’t respond to someone calling you a bag of dicks without looking like a bag of dicks, and that’s what Trump did to all of his opponents. It’s bizarre seeing the Internet crawl into presidential level politics and be effective.

  coverTM: I’ve been reading a lot of Hannah Arendt after the election, especially Origins of Totalitarianism, and she describes how totalitarian politics thrives on the suspension of the reality effect. It’s weird to think that that dynamic has always been embedded in the Internet, and that it might be an inherently totalitarian space.

  JK: Yeah, what’s always struck me as weird is that not that long ago, there was a lot of rhetoric around the Internet as an instrument of peace, and if not as peace, then the expansion of human rights. But the thing is, basically it was built as a weapon. It was built by the Department of Defense to facilitate communication in the event of a war, to have this really decentralized network that allowed you to launch weapons. I think something about the decision in how that architecture was designed has really facilitated the moment that we’re in now. I tend to think that technology never escapes its genesis, and those engineering decisions made in response to the ideologies of the creators just persist. So there’s this way in which you can look at the underlying architecture of the Internet, which did not prioritize a specific type of communication, so that data could go in any direction as growing into what we have now: any idiot can say any bullshit, and it will have the same priority as things that are true, or things that are just.

  So, it comes out of this moment, and it comes out of decisions made decades ago. So I do think there’s a weirdly authoritarian impulse embedded in the Internet.

  TM: So did Trump just actualize something that was always lurking in the Internet?

  JK: Yeah, I think that’s right.

  TM: Let’s talk about the book. When did you start writing Soft & Cuddly?

  JK: I started thinking about it about a year and a half ago, and I thought it’d be an interesting article, because there was something so strange about the game. but I couldn’t figure out what the article would be. I started to do more research into it, and then Boss Fight Books had an open call for pitches in May 2015. These people seemed like they might be willing to make a mistake on something that’s much different from what they usually do. Then I started writing in the fall of 2015, because I had the sense that I Hate the Internet was going to eat a lot of my time. I turned in a draft, and it was like the worst thing I’d ever written.

  TM: So you were writing it simultaneously with I Hate the Internet?

  JK: I Hate the Internet was done in October 2015, and Soft & Cuddly was written in snatches of time while I Hate the Internet was exploding.

  TM: I want to get back to the stylistic connections between those two books, but can you say more about where the interest in writing about a video game came from?

  JK: There was a really interesting moment when people had personal computers, a hobbyist moment when people could get a computer and tinker with it. My father was this guy who just bought a Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s and was immediately entranced with it, so my childhood was watching this Turkish immigrant chain smoke while programming this computer. I have an enormous fondness for that moment.

  The second thing is, there’s something about the game “Soft and Cuddly” and its predecessor, “Go to Hell,” that I find really fascinating. There are these cultural moments, every once in a while, these moments of openness when for some reason a 15-year-old is able to exist in something like a professional context, and their work is just incredibly weird — because they’re 15! “Soft and Cuddly” looks like someone’s high school notebook from 1990, like someone’s drawing of Metallica logos come to life. There’s something really fascinating about how unpolished and immature that stuff is when it enters the wider world.

  I didn’t write about this in the book, but when the underground comics scene was really happening in the Bay Area, there was this one kid that was hanging around named Rory Haze who did a handful of comics, and his work is just crazy. They were publishing a maladjusted 17-year-old! There’s something about those moments that I find endlessly fascinating, and “Soft and Cuddly” was one of the few times that happened with video games. Activision was like, yeah, why would we not publish a game by a 15-year-old? And then there was this controversy that grew up around the game, so that was interesting to write about as well.

  TM: Those moments when these teen boys can exist in that professional capacity — are they moments when those boys are reflecting a sentiment in society that no one else is seeing. Are these boys cutting against Thatcherite social mores in a way that might only be possible for a teenager to do?

  JK: One of the many tragedies of the teenage boy is the ability to see things in the world that are horrible, and to want to stand in opposition to them, while simultaneously embodying those tendencies. No one has ever accused teenage boys of being hallmarks of progressive thought. So you have this really weird crudeness that, because of that tension, that push and pull, is weirdly fascinating. I think you can see the opposition to the thing percolating up through its representation, like it’s trying to think through the circumstances they’re surrounded by.

  TM: That makes me think, you describe the creator of “Soft and Cuddly” as being a “writer,” but narrative and plot aren’t really these games’ strong suit, at least not in the way that we recognize in literary fiction. Oftentimes, these games’ stories were written by the publisher. So what is he a writer of? Is he writing an attempt to think through his circumstances, or is something else going on?

  JK: That’s a really good question! But I actually don’t know. It’s difficult — one of the things about this book that’s been really weird is that the creator, Jones, has been very supportive of the project, but there’s always this tension: I’m describing something that he did as a teenager. It’s awkward to say this stuff because I’m describing a human being who is 30 years older than the character I’m describing in the book. I can’t say much about motivation.

  TM: If video games aren’t doing narrative or plot very well, then what do you think they’re providing? What’s the aesthetic pay off?

  JK: Well, I think that’s hard to answer, but I think there are different functions. There’s been a very long argument about whether or not video games are art, and I think they clearly can be. I don’t think they often are, but they can be. That describes most cultural products. Most films and books aren’t art, they’re just products people put together. But I think where video games really can move into what we call for lack of a better word “art” is by putting us in the mindset of a totally different person. It’s a visitation into another’s person’s subjectivity that is relatively unprecedented. One of the things with video games that is only starting to become apparent is, like every other cultural product, the way to figure out if something is art is whether its appeal extends across decades. With something like “Soft and Cuddly,” people have been very interested in the game as time has gone on, and it’s inspired derivative works, including my book. That’s not something that you get with most of these games. No one really knows what the parameters are for determining whether or not a game is art, but you can start to see those parameters forming. You start to see it in the fact that people are still thinking about these games, which no one played at the time but which continue to inspire thought.

  The more I dig into the history of this game, the stranger it got. I had no idea that these derivative works existed, but as I did my research, they kept popping up. This game that no one played somehow managed to inspire all of this stuff, and my book is one of those iterative works.

  TM: Near the end of the book, a reproduced interview with British politician and novelist Jeffery Archer makes an assertion that playing video games is more dangerous than simply watching violent television, because it makes you “powerful.” What kind of power do you think he’s talking about?

  JK: I do think there’s a certain power to it, but it’s the power of a certain kind of…there’s something weirdly liberating about the stupidity of the teenage boy’s notebook. There’s something hilariously freeing about seeing this thing come to life. I don’t think that’s the power he’s talking about! I suspect that because he was and is a very dark person, that power is something else. It probably says more about him than anything else—that’s a man who chased power his entire life, and maybe he could only see the game through this power of acquired political power, at the expense of anything else this experience might present us.

  TM: I’m intrigued by the structure of the book, because it moves from doing case studies of life under a “postmodern” Thatcherite government, to the FalklandS War, to anthropological chapters on computer programming. It reminded me of both BTW and I Hate the Internet because there’s a sense of this roving consciousness weaving these strands together into a hybrid cultural history, narrative, and polemic. This occurs in all your books—what about that mixture of registers appeals to you?

  JK: It’s funny, because it’s not even appealing so much as unavoidable. It’s something I developed unintentionally, and it’s something I keep returning to. In the case of Soft & Cuddly, when I conceived of the book, it wasn’t supposed to be like that—

  TM: What was it going to be originally?

  JK: I thought it would be much more straightforward in that it’d focus on John George Jones, the history of the game, etc. There was going to be a lot of information about how the game was created, its reception, and its afterlife. It was very linear. It turned out that the research I did for the book was useless. No one really remembered the games or had any information on the aspects of the game that interested me. There was a limit to the amount of useful information I could collect. But where the research did pay off was in the contemporary press accounts. I found this really remarkable article, where I got the Jeffrey Archer thing from, where British video games creator Mel Croucher did this round table with a who’s who of the British establishment. It’s crazy to think that they’re talking about a video game released on a system that no one was even using at the time the game came out. The more I try to get away from cultural context, the more it bleeds into my stories. The game’s social context just kind of bubbled up to the surface. That very quickly became the clear structure, because the other stuff just wasn’t that interesting.

  TM: What are you working on now?

  JK: I’ve got a book coming out through Viking at the end of the summer, in August. I just got their edits, and I’m also writing another book that is shaping up to be profoundly disturbing…we’ll see how it goes. The novel with Viking is a prequel to I Hate the Internet, written before I Hate the Internet. It’s Adeline and Baby in New York in the ‘90s. When I started writing the Internet, I thought there was something fascinating about the idea of Adeline, whom I’d conceived of as a Gen X in the decaying remnants of punk New York, having to deal with the Internet, and being thrust two decades forward. So much of my publication history is weird and out-of-joint because the book that was originally written is being published after its sequel.

  TM: How did that happen?

  JK: No one wanted to publish me! This is the hilarious back story to all of this. I wrote this story in 2012, and its been revised since, but I could not get anyone to look at it. It’s a very long book, so that precluded getting it published by an indie press because of cost and logistics. With Internet, it was the same story — it was hard to get anyone to pay attention to it. So when the book came out and became successful, much to everyone’s surprise, I had this other manuscript. In this process, because foreign rights offers started to come in, I had to get an agent to negotiate contracts in other countries. The agent read the manuscript and sent it out to major publishers, and Viking ended up with it. But it’s very strange, as is everything with me, a little out of order and all over the place.

  TM: Is that a validation of independent publishing for you?

  JK: Yeah, definitely! The virtue of having Viking do this book, other than not being able to do it on an independent press, is that I don’t have to deal with micromanaging every aspect of marketing and publishing another book. But if you do that, it can work out. So Internet’s success is a validation of this idea that you don’t need mainstream resources at your disposal to get these books out into the world.

  TM: It’s funny — I’m in the Bay Area, and so when Internet came out it was everywhere when it came out, just because of the nature of people’s disdain for tech culture. But the book also blew up in part because of the Internet, right? How do you feel about that?

  JK: Everyone who’s doing this has to make a series of moral compromises, and the question these compromises center around is, How big of an audience do you want to have? There’s a way to get your work out there that is legitimate, valid, and enviable, where your ethics aren’t compromised — but the reality of that is that you sell to 500 people. Having been published in small presses prior to this, I came to the conclusion that the problem as I see it with that model is that you end up communicating with people who are very similar to yourself. There’s not a huge amount of dialogue back and forth. So I made this decision that I would try to go as wide as possible. In so doing, you have to embrace the Internet, because that’s where the conversation is occurring. So you find yourself in bed with Amazon.

  TM: Something really intrigues me about your work—you know, I read Internet after I found BTW in Skylight Books, and it was funny to me that Adeline is actually a minor character in BTW. I’m intrigued by the role that seriality plays in your writing. Why do you return to these characters and this world so often?

  JK: The short answer is that I’m lazy! But the longer answer is that when you live with these characters — and with Adeline in particular — you end up learning something new about them as you write about them. So when I finished the Viking manuscript, I put it aside. Then I was revising BTW, there was a hole in the middle because I excised a chapter. I thought, why not have Adeline return? There was no reason I couldn’t have her return, so she did! I found it to be really interesting to think about. So when I started doing Internet, I had recourse to her again.

  The more I’ve done it, the more I’ve begun to think that it might be a solution to the serious novel in our moment. It’s really hard to ask casual readers to pick up a one-off novel. A lot of the casual readers are adults who grew up reading Harry Potter, books that were multi-volume series. That’s actually what people want to read! They want to feel like each book counts beyond itself, and that there is some overlap or connection, some depth and weight beyond the individual book. That’s why people read 10,000 pages by George R.R. Martin, because even if it gets strange and incomprehensible by the last book, there’s still the weight of the characters growing through time, and you can’t get that through a one-off novel…

  TM: It’s a common thing to video games and science fiction novels, right? This idea of world building?

  JK: Right, and it used to be something that mainstream literary writers did all the time. It’s fallen out of fashion, but Salinger, Updike, and Vonnegut did it. When you think about works that have become inescapable fixtures of the post-war 20th century, so many of them featured reoccurring characters. So it seems to me that there’s something worthwhile that we can return to, and I don’t know why it’s fallen out of favor.

  coverTM: I’ve been thinking about Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, which is very entertaining for a novel about slavery and Jim Crow. But part of what makes the book so riveting is that every chapter takes you to a new decade and a new character, but every chapter is rooted in a world that she’s built, so that past characters continue to appear. That episodic dynamic is intriguing, and it’s something that’s key to the American literary heritage.

  JK: Yeah, and it’s very odd that it’s receded into genre fiction. It really used to be a fixture of the culture.

  TM: It feels like the pretentiousness of literary fiction strangling itself. God forbid literary fiction resembles George R.R. Martin…

  JK: [Laughs.] Yeah, that sounds about right.

• Los Angeles Review of Books - https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/youre-useless-man/

  QUOTE:
  Fiction lets you lie. Fiction lets you be irrational. Fiction lets you cut corners. I think when people are reading fiction or nonfiction, there’s a covenant between the writer and the reader that — unless you’re a complete maniac like Alex Jones or Bill O’Reilly — this is going to be the truth as you know it. And I think what fiction is particularly good at is getting to psychological truths which are impossible to prove.

  What Do You Do If You’re a Useless Man? An Interview with Jarett Kobek
  Gregg LaGambina interviews Jarett Kobek

  171 0 0

  APRIL 28, 2016

  LET’S PRETEND this needs to be mentioned first: Jarett Kobek is not a big fan of the internet. Over the course of a two-hour conversation in a coffee shop in Los Feliz, Kobek will deconstruct nearly everything that crosses his hyperactive mind. Whether he’s speaking about stand-up comedy or Edward Snowden, Zadie Smith or BuzzFeed, Google or the Arab Spring — anything that Kobek descends upon is pressed between microscope slides so firmly that the sample is nearly destroyed for any future use. His hatred might just be a kind of jealousy. The internet is faster than he is, barely.

  In his latest book, I Hate the Internet: A Useful Novel Against Men, Money, and the Filth of Instagram, Kobek tears down everyone in his path, including himself. If he’s hard on Walt Disney (“America’s most beloved Anti-Semite and racist”) and Star Wars (“a total piece of shit”), he’s equally unimpressed by Ayn Rand (“the author of two shitty novels”) and Steve Jobs (“a total unyielding dick”). But Kobek — moonlighting within the story, semi-autobiographically, as J. Karacehennem — also declares (or someone does, it’s not entirely clear): “This is a bad novel.”

  Which brings us to the story. I Hate the Internet would not be interesting if it were a rant without an endgame. In it we come to know a group of San Franciscans maneuvering their way through a city at the cusp of its besiegement in 2013 by the forces of Google, Facebook, and the legions of copycat entrepreneurs with half-baked ideas to sell. If Kobek’s novel is not a love story, well, then it’s a hate story written with a deep compassion for intellect.

  Intellect is the hero of this novel. As Kobek sees it, the internet is the enemy of intellect. With his novel, Kobek does everything in a writer’s power to destroy the enemy. He will lose, of course, but something about reading I Hate the Internet feels like we might finally be entering a welcome era of pushback against the forces of silly men like Mark Zuckerberg and their boyish ideas for the future. In this condensed version of our 120-minute conversation, Kobek makes his case for the future, and much like his novel, the digressions are often more enlightening than the straight answers.

  ¤

  GREGG LAGAMBINA: Are you — Jarett Kobek — the “I” in I Hate the Internet?

  JARETT KOBEK: That’s a really good question. Kind of and kind of not. I would say that when I actually was doing the book, probably, yes, because that was when I was at the height of my internet hatred. I had just escaped San Francisco and it was an unbelievable clusterfuck. Being there was just the worst. Then, I just didn’t really have a title. I was like, “Well, I guess I could call it I Hate the Internet.” But it’s not exactly me. Definitely, a part of it is, but another part of it was just, what else am I going to call this book? What else is going to be the appropriate title for this book? Because, if you give it a more literary title, good luck selling a copy. If you’re trying to be more serious, it’s not really a serious book. I mean, it’s serious, but it’s an attempt at being a funny book.

  It’s a super-serious book that’s also hilarious.

  Right. Exactly. So, how do you convey that? When I started writing it, the thing I was thinking about the most was this British stand-up comedian Stewart Lee. He’s brilliant. I have a very strange relationship to stand-up. I’m sort of in admiration of stand-up, while simultaneously hating all of their material.

  How exactly do you simultaneously admire stand-up and also hate all of it?

  When it’s good, it’s really good. But it also feels like when it’s bad — not even when it’s bad, when it’s just okay — it’s extraordinarily painful. Stewart Lee is entirely good. He did this one DVD called If You Prefer a Milder Comedian, Please Ask for One. It’s fucking brilliant. And, to a certain extent, it’s the template for this book, in terms of how you can have a mental breakdown in this format and see how it will work out. Anyway, long story short, I was watching the third season of his TV show, which just aired last year. It’s never been released in the US so you can only get it pirated. There’s an entire episode about the internet where he’s just chanting, “I hate the internet.” I had also reread Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-Five is probably the best book from the American midcentury. I can’t think of a better book. I read that again and I was like, “Oh my God. I ripped so much off from this.” There’s a lot in I Hate the Internet that’s adopted from Slaughterhouse-Five.

  Isn’t “unintentionally ripped off” called “influence”?

  Yeah, but I had been thinking about that book a lot. I finally ended up rereading Breakfast of Champions, which I had avoided because I remembered it being quite bad. It’s horrible. It’s really bad. But, it’s the book where he comes closest to stand-up, to just doing a stand-up routine. Some of the formal devices, like defining everything, are really good. That was a conscious ripping off. And, like I said, I had been thinking a lot about actual stand-up. I was like, “Oh, you can write a book like this? You can write a book that’s like a stand-up routine?” When you make the next leap, when you’re doing stand-up, you can talk about anything. One of the things about stand-up — in contrast to literary fiction right now — that’s fascinating, is you can go see the worst stand-up in the world at the Comedy Store or the Laugh Shack or whatever the fuck they’re called, and in that five minutes that some guy has his set, he will address more complex issues than most of the literary novels that will be published this year. It’s because that format is so discursive and there’s such a willingness to let stuff penetrate it, whereas the traditional literary form — especially if you’re getting workshopped [in a graduate writing program] — good luck getting stuff penetrating into it that’s not almost purely experiential.

  Why start a small press (We Heard You Like Books) in Los Angeles in 2016 to release a book called I Hate the Internet? That’s beyond counterintuitive.

  At first, I had a lot of concerns about whether or not self-publishing would bring with it an inherent stigma. But, then, I was like, “I know how to do this. It won’t be that bad.” Then I also had this thought, which I think is really true, when you think about California writers who have had staying power, a lot of them have controlled their own presses.

  Like who?

  Dave Eggers. Chris Kraus and Semiotext(e). Lawrence Ferlinghetti and City Lights. There are probably other examples, but those are three that popped to mind. Eggers could have gotten published anywhere. But if you think about Chris, or if you think about Ferlinghetti, it really allowed them a certain luxury to do really strange work while also figuring out how to disseminate it in such a way where it wasn’t just, “Well, I’m writing for 30 people.” The idea of that started to seem better and better and better. Then, as the process went on, it just became clear that this was the right decision. It’s a huge amount of work. Most of the work is not very fun. But, just in terms of the reception this book has had, it never would have had that if it had been published by anyone else.

  It might add credibility to the subject matter of I Hate the Internet. You’re doing it on your own and taking on giant corporations. It might seem strange to have a giant corporation then go ahead and publish it.

  If by some bizarre miracle it had ended up at a major press, I certainly couldn’t have shit all over other writers in it [laughs]. I mean, most of that is affectionate. There’s very little in the book that is particularly nasty about individual writers.

  Most of them are dead.

  A lot of them are dead, but there are some nasty things about Cory Doctorow in there. It’s not even him, though, it’s about his readership. It’s a really weird thing to watch Citizenfour and Edward Snowden, who is, inarguably, responsible for the most significant public disclosure of government workings since at least the Pentagon Papers. And he’s got a novel on his bed that Cory Doctorow wrote for teenagers.

  The whole connection you make between techies, Ayn Rand and all these science fiction books written for teens, and the apps and toys we are using as adults that were conceived by overgrown children. In the book, you write: “Most apps were developed on the principle of the lowest common denominator, working off the general assumption that stupidity was the baseline of the human experience.”

  I think the internet is, if nothing else, a giant communications network which has come to define what it means to be human in the present moment and it was created by people who have no relationship to the human experience. If there’s one idea in the book, it’s this idea that technology is embedded with the ideologies — spoken and unspoken — of its creators. And the analogue that the book uses to try and drive this home is the idea of the camera. People often compare television to the internet. That doesn’t seem right to me. The camera seems right to me, because the camera was a device that was fairly unheralded in terms of what it could do. Then, almost immediately, it became the definer of truth. The thing that’s weird about the camera — if you look at what the camera is really good at and what it’s really bad at — it kind of looks like the prejudices of mid-19th-century Frenchmen. You can’t think of a technology that has been more dehumanizing to anyone who isn’t of European extraction than the camera. The camera is really good at taking pictures of people of color — which is terminology I don’t like — and making them look terrible. It’s a quasi-mystical argument, but there’s really something there. Think about who made the camera. Think about where this emerges from. What did those guys really want to do? They wanted to take pictures of women and they also really thought anyone who wasn’t European, or possibly an American, was a savage. So then you have this device which goes forward which continues to dehumanize people that they didn’t think were human. Now, that’s some heavy shit [Laughs]. But, the internet is sort of the same thing. All of the things which we receive as given in the technology were the results of choices that were both conscious and unconscious of the people who made it. Or the people who are designing individual parts of the internet. A culture grew up around that. I think a lot of the problems that have emerged from the internet are actually the result of these ideologies.

  This is the argument people use against Mark Zuckerberg. He’s an awkward, antisocial person who created the biggest “social” network on the planet that is likely alienating people instead of bringing them together.

  Exactly. Zadie Smith wrote a really great article about Facebook, where the best thing she points out is that all of the questions that Facebook asks you seems like they were written by a 12-year-old. That’s it in a nutshell. No one thinks about those questions because they’re just there as part of the technology. But, simultaneously, her argument from there is, “What does that mean that we’re all now trapped in the amber of high school? And what does that do?” I think what you just said is quite right. It seems to have a really deleterious effect on people’s social lives. How many marriages have broken up because of Facebook? All of these technologies really do reduce people to behaving like children. But during the genesis moment [of the internet], which would be about 1965 to 1995, something like that, all of those guys were reading Ayn Rand and science fiction and they were taking it really seriously. The extent to which something like Stranger in a Strange Land [by Robert A. Heinlein] has had a huge influence over Bay Area culture is kind of appalling and frightening. I do really think that a lot of those ideologies — this idea of unfettered free expression and the citizen against everything, or the lone man against oppressive bureaucracies — which is not to say that those things don’t actually exist — but all of that stuff really shaped how the technology was developed. It is kind of frightening because they’re mostly bad books. They’re really bad books. I mean, fucking Peter Thiel [billionaire entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal] has a company called Palantír, named after the orb in The Lord of the Rings. It’s war technology for the government to spy on people. That’s fucking insane! This is a fairly powerful guy. He wants to build platforms in the sea where entire societies will be ordered around objectivist principles [Laughs].

  Overgrown teenagers, fans of bad science fiction — the internet we have now is what happens when they get to play with billions of dollars in the real world?

  Right. And that’s Google X. All of their research projects are clearly just [Google co-founder] Larry Page being like, “Oh, what did I like when I was 12? Oh, I liked robots!” I think Google in particular is really painful because I genuinely believe that Page and [Google co-founder] Sergey Brin think of themselves as good people. Whereas Peter Thiel, who knows? Steve Jobs clearly didn’t think of himself as a good person, but Page and Brin clearly do. And then they just do this insanely disruptive shit and it’s like, “Of course you would!” What would happen if you were allowed to live out your 12-year-old fantasies? What would you get? You’d get Google Glass [Laughs].

  Why not make I Hate the Internet a work of nonfiction?

  Fiction lets you lie. Fiction lets you be irrational. Fiction lets you cut corners. I think when people are reading fiction or nonfiction, there’s a covenant between the writer and the reader that — unless you’re a complete maniac like Alex Jones or Bill O’Reilly — this is going to be the truth as you know it. And I think what fiction is particularly good at is getting to psychological truths which are impossible to prove. Also, I don’t know how you would write it [as nonfiction]. This would be a 30-page book if it was just like, “I think you should think about cameras when you’re thinking about the internet. And William Gibson has a lot to answer for!”

  What do you like about the internet? How do you start a publishing company in the 21st century, and let people know about it, without embracing at least part of the internet culture you lambast in the novel?

  Well, it’s an active, monumental hypocrisy. It really is. There’s no way around it. I think it’s crazy to expect someone, who ultimately is a writer, to have a solution to this problem. I’m trapped in the same shit as everyone else. I don’t think any writing whatsoever is going to change this problem. I also don’t think starving in the street is going address it either. But I’m quite cognizant it’s a weird thing that the book is succeeding on the strength of word-of-mouth on the internet. But, what can you do? You can not write, I guess. But I don’t really want to do that. You can totally ignore the internet and then sell three books. That doesn’t seem good either. One of the reasons why I wanted to do this book is because I feel like the response of publishing and literary people to the internet has been appallingly bad. It’s amazing how bad it’s been.

  Do you mean fiction about technology or the publishing industry?

  I mean, in the writing, in terms of the industry, in terms of every aspect of it that has been tainted, or touched in some way by the internet. I think the reality is that literary publishing could have done a much better job in terms of responding to the internet.

  In what way?

  Not rolling over like a dog, waiting for its stomach to be scratched? Just in terms with dealing with Amazon, the response was really quite bad. If there’s anything that we should be good at, as literate people, as people who are supposedly thinking about this stuff, maybe we can’t hold back the tides, but there should be more of a protest about what’s happened. The entire creative economy has been upended. People who could have fairly stable existences as writers, now have to write listicles for BuzzFeed? It just seems crazy that there has yet to be a true response of contempt for all of it. So this is an attempt, in this book. Whether or not it works, I don’t know. But I really was like, “Why are writers just getting on Twitter?” That’s so weird.

  There is a certain holiness around the idea of the internet. You can’t hate it, you have to accept it and submit to it. A lot of the corporations that peddle technology use the language of inevitability. It’s as if we don’t have a choice in the matter. Saying you hate all of it, or any of it, is a kind of technological blasphemy. You can say, “I hate television. I hate radio. I hate live music. I hate the post office. I hate vegetables,” but when you say you hate the internet, you’ve said something outlandish. The cover of this book will draw people toward it who are likely thrilled by the sentiment. Are you preaching to the converted, or is this the start of a larger backlash?

  That’s a good question. I think the answer will be more apparent in a little while. Because people have bought the book; it’s been doing really well. I don’t know how many people have read it. Some people have. How many that is, I can’t tell you. It would be great if it got into that territory of people just being appalled by it. Because I think that would be really good for sales, but I think it would also be good for having an interesting dialogue around it. Now, it may turn out that those people are not particularly different than the guy that heckled me during a reading at City Lights in San Francisco. It was like a comments section come to life. It was weird. It was a guy freaking out because I had profaned Twitter and then he acted like all of the worst people on Twitter!

  But live, in person.

  But live! It was kind of the greatest moment of my life as a writer, thus far. It was really intense. The most amazing thing is, we put the video up on YouTube — in an act of pure hypocrisy — and he actually commented on it.

  So he went back into the virtual world to have another go at you?

  Yeah! But going back to what you said, I think the internet has accrued a sort of sacredness to it. And I think that is entirely bullshit. I think it’s just that Google can afford really good publicists. And they can afford really good marketing. Like, if you think about the Arab Spring, which was actually mentioned in the book and yelled at me by the drunken beatnik, he was making an argument that the Arab Spring had been this really amazing moment where Twitter and Facebook had liberated people. I think that’s what he was saying.

  People do say that, whether it was him or someone else.

  Yeah, and it’s like, well, how did that turn out? Plus, I actually was in Egypt about four weeks after [former President of Egypt Hosni] Mubarak fell. No one mentioned Facebook. No one mentioned Twitter. What they fucking talked about was money and how they didn’t have any. Think about what must have gone into that, in terms of selling that story to the media. I mean, the Arab Spring, you could spend a long time deconstructing that thing, but it really was this totally unpalatable moment of covering revolutions in societies we know nothing about as advertisements for companies in and around San Francisco. It would be like the Russian Revolution sponsored by Ford. It’s so crazy.

  Is the internet changing language and what effect, if any, will this have on so-called “serious” literature?

  It’s a really good question. I’m not sure I know what the answer to it is. I’m not particularly bright about semantics [Laughs]. I’m just stumbling my way through, like Frankenstein’s monster. But, you do get to this weird place where the language the internet is creating — and the language that people are creating around the internet — is a language of manipulation. Some of it is just slang and that’s fine. But a lot of it is manipulated language, but then you get to this strange question, or this strange problem with it, which is, “Is there any language that’s not?” Every word is just some shit someone made up somewhere.

  You say something similar about the word “gentrification” in the novel.

  People just make up this stuff. But, is there something happening to language, individual words, on the internet, that’s going to have a really profound effect not just on how we communicate in general, but how we communicate in fiction? In terms of the individual words, I don’t know. In terms of the forms of communication, absolutely. If you just think about video games and the fact that every male — and lots of women — under a certain age, have spent an enormous amount of their lives playing video games and no literary novels address this in any meaningful way? I mean, you have Ready Player One, but that’s coming from more of a celebratory, rather than a probing place, which is fine. But it’s strange. This is something that we’ve been living with for 40 years and you’re not going to get it in fucking Purity by Jonathan Franzen. You’re not going to get Franzen showing up and having anything truly interesting or novel to say about Donkey Kong.

  Is there anything interesting to say about Donkey Kong? Do you think the internet and technology don’t want to be written about? Are things like Twitter and Facebook just not that interesting to write or read about?

  See, I disagree. I think it is interesting. I think the problem is, it’s so ephemeral that it’s really hard to write about. That’s why I stole Vonnegut’s device of defining everything, because I really had this thought, “What happens in 2021 when there’s no more Twitter and a 15-year-old comes to the book?” What is this even going to mean to them unless you concretely define everything that you need to know? You can be a dick with the definitions, but they fairly convey what these things really are. It’s really hard because when you’re writing about technology, what you’re really writing about is the reality created by neoliberal markets to sell themselves to people. And that’s a magic trick. Part of the magic trick is that no one’s supposed to see behind the curtain. It’s very hard to write about. I don’t blame anyone who tries to write about it and fails. Because it’s fucking difficult.

  Writing fiction is slow work and technology is fast.

  Exactly. Like, even this book. It’s a long way from 2013, when this book is set. Three years is a long way. I happened to have been very lucky I was living at the epicenter of the epicenter. That’s another reason why it’s a novel, because you can do shit like the stuff about Google buses that I have in there. But, simultaneously, Google technically doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s Alphabet. That kind of stuff makes it really difficult to write about. And, yet, it’s purely a story of the 21st century.

  Did you become so consumed by these ideas that everything you write next will be related in some way to this book?

  That’s a great question. It’s very hard to go from this to somewhere new, in terms of fiction. Just in terms of form, how do you go back to a normal book? J. G. Ballard did it. But I don’t know if I have it in me. It ruined Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse-Five — where do you go from there?

  You can paint yourself into a corner with one book?

  You can. The person I’ve been thinking about the most — which is possibly the most pretentious reference ever — is Jean-Luc Godard and Weekend. The film ends with the title card Fin du Cinema — “The End of Cinema.” And it’s true! He was never good again! There’s some interesting video work from the ’80s, but realistically it’s never been the same. And, so, I think that this book might be in a similar place. If you write a novel that’s so deconstructing what a novel is and clearly, within the novel itself, reject the novel, how do you then write another novel? I might be done with fiction. It might just be nonfiction from this point forward.

  This book is as much about racism and misogyny as it is about the internet. Is the racism and misogyny that fills comments sections and Twitter feeds something new, or has the internet just amplified an underlying hatred that’s always been there?

  I think it’s two different things. The misogyny, in particular, is the death throes of a certain kind of patriarchal culture. If you look at the college graduation rates, it’s all women. It’s disproportionately women. It’s clear the professional future, if there is one, because God knows, capitalism could collapse — it won’t, but it could — the future, professionally, is women. I think a lot of the misogyny is coming from, well, what do you do if you’re a useless man? And it’s clear you have no real use in a culture that also is now a service economy. That’s where a lot of the misogyny emerges from. The racism? That’s just America. I think it’s always been there. I think it’s really unfortunate because the internet seems to have become a really massive distraction about how you address those issues. It’s hard for me to understand how you can combat racism on a platform that’s also willing to host racism. It seems to me that at that point, it all just becomes product.

  What is the ultimate ambition of I Hate the Internet?

  [Pauses] I don’t know what the ambition is. I just want to eat.

  ¤

  Gregg LaGambina is a writer living in Los Angeles.

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  Q&A with author Jarett Kobek
  ‘What is the last thing you read that made me laugh out loud? George RR Martin’s A Feast for Crows’

  NOVEMBER 24, 2017 1
  Turkish-American writer Jarett Kobek was born in Massachusetts in 1980. He is the author of ATTA, a psychedelic biography of 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and a monograph of a computer game, Soft & Cuddly. His most recent novels are I Hate the Internet and The Future Won’t Be Long. He lives in Los Angeles

  What is the last thing you read that made you laugh out loud?
  George RR Martin’s A Feast for Crows.

  What books are currently on your bedside table?
  The Magic Arts in Celtic Britain by Lewis Spence; Elf Queens and Holy Friars by Richard Firth Green; Antichrist in the Middle Ages by Richard K Emmerson; and You Are the Message by Roger Ailes.

  Who would you choose to play you in a film about your life?
  The Dhaliwood actor/entrepreneur/politician/career criminal Dipjol.

  When did you know you were going to be a writer?
  I got an offer for an ATTA Spanish translation. I figured at that point it had probably stopped being a fluke.

  Do you have a writing routine?
  1,000 words a day.

  When were you happiest?
  I got heckled by a drunken beatnik at the San Francisco launch of I Hate the Internet. It’s the last time I remember being happy.

  When do you feel most free?
  I don’t believe in free will.

  What is the best piece of advice a parent gave you?
  All my father’s advice is unprintable. But some of it was quite good.

  What’s your current favourite word?
  Disenfranchisement.

  What book do you wish you’d written?
  American Psycho, which now must be read as inadvertent prophecy.

  What are you most proud of writing?
  A monograph that no one bought called Soft & Cuddly, about a 1987 game for the ZX Spectrum. It’s a definitive text for the three people who complain there’s not enough analysis of Thatcher-era politics in books on 8-bit graphics and Alice Cooper.

  Who are your literary influences?
  Given how hard I ripped off several of the techniques in Breakfast of Champions for I Hate the Internet, Vonnegut is the inevitable answer.

  What does it mean to be a writer?
  Nothing.

  Jarett Kobek’s ‘The Future Won’t Be Long’ is published by Serpent’s Tail

  Join our online book group on Facebook at FTBooksCafe. Subscribe to FT Life on YouTube for the latest FT Weekend videos

QUOTE:
Kobek crafts an electric tale, and the wilds of New York
City during this intense time period provide a gritty, undeniably magnetic context
The Future Won't Be Long
Leah Strauss
Booklist.
113.21 (July 1, 2017): p18.
COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Future Won't Be Long.
By Jarett Kobek.
Aug. 2017.400p. Viking, $27 (9780735222489).
Kobek's ambitious novel follows a pair of young adults finding their way amid the debauchery of early1990s
New York City. It's 1986 when Baby flees his rural Wisconsin town for the East Village. On his first
night there, he meets fellow misfit Adeline at a squatter's house. Adeline quickly takes to Baby, and the two
embark on an eccentric friendship filled with drug-fueled escapades, sexual conquests, loss, and other
travails. Adeline, an art student, is in a constant battle with her wealthy alcoholic mother, who is
inescapable since she is funding Adeline's education, and navigates a series of relationships. Meanwhile,
Baby, a burgeoning science fiction writer, becomes increasingly immersed in the decadence and notoriety of
the city's infamous night-club scene. Spanning the course of a decade and traversing American coasts, the
narrative alternates between Baby's and Adeline's perspectives as their friendship is tested, and they
individually begin to discover their true passions. Kobek crafts an electric tale, and the wilds of New York
City during this intense time period provide a gritty, undeniably magnetic context.--Leah Strauss
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Strauss, Leah. "The Future Won't Be Long." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 18. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862682/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=83115c2b.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521923075886 2/3

QUOTE:
Punctuated with gentle humor and awash with genuine fondness for its characters, this
novel breezes giddily through the disorder and shifting landscape of their lives,

The Future Won't Be Long
Publishers Weekly.
264.26 (June 26, 2017): p148.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Future Won't Be Long
Jarett Kobek. Viking, $27 (416p) ISBN 978-0-7352-2248-9
Set primarily in Manhattan in the tumultuous decade spanning the years 1986 to 1996, this picaresque novel
refracts the coming of age of its two main characters through their alternating narrative viewpoints and the
events and personalities that defined the city at that time. Baby is a recently orphaned young gay man fresh
off the bus from Wisconsin. Adeline is an art student estranged from her wealthy mother. When
circumstances bring them together, Baby moves into Adeline's apartment, and the two embark on a
whirlwind spree through the East Village, the downtown club scene and its drug culture, and events like the
Tompkins Square Park Riots, the AIDS epidemic, and the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Along
the way, Baby nurtures his nascent talent for science fiction writing and Adeline graduates to become a
successful commercial artist. Kobek (I Hate the Internet) has a great eye for detail, and his descriptions of
his characters' peregrinations through New York's neighborhoods and nightlife read with the authenticity of
genuine experience. Punctuated with gentle humor and awash with genuine fondness for its characters, this
novel breezes giddily through the disorder and shifting landscape of their lives, bearing out Baby's
contention that "Good or ill, there's always change coming." (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Future Won't Be Long." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 148. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497444201/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9dc40069.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A497444201
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1521923075886 3/3

QUOTE:
Pleasantly nostalgic if occasionally exhausting; an ode to a city--and an era--long gone.

Kobek, Jarett: THE FUTURE WON'T
BE LONG
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Kobek, Jarett THE FUTURE WON'T BE LONG Viking (Adult Fiction) $27.00 8, 15 ISBN: 978-0-7352-
2248-9
A swirling, name-dropping, drug-fueled, hypersaturated whirlwind of a novel set against the New York City
of the 1980s and '90s, Kobek's latest (I Hate the Internet, 2016, etc.) is a gritty coming-of-age story with
quiet heart.After the gruesome deaths of both his parents ("my mother killed my father, or was it my father
who murdered my mother?"), a gay high school grad from small-town Wisconsin shows up in New York
City, wanders into a squalid squat, christens himself Baby Baby Baby (just Baby, for short), and meets a
rich girl with yellow sneakers who will immediately and forever change his life. Adeline, who speaks with
the self-consciously stilted diction of an old Hollywood movie star--a grating habit, both for the reader and,
presumably, for her friends--is a Parsons freshman, an ebullient poor-little-rich-girl with an alcoholic
mother and a dead dad. Without thinking twice, she invites Baby to come live with her in her dorm room off
Union Square--"you're a sailor without any port of call," she tells him--and the two fall into a fast and
complicated friendship. As the years tick by--from Reagan to Bush to Clinton--Adeline and Baby, both
artistic and, in their own ways, ambitious, come together and fall apart and come together again as the city
pulses around them. The book's tertiary characters read like a who's who of the times: gay sci-fi writer
Thomas M. Disch lives in their building--an early role model for Baby, who will also become a sciencefiction
writer, though he doesn't yet know it--but also David Wojnarowicz, Bret Easton Ellis, Norman
Mailer, and Dorian Corey of Paris Is Burning fame. There is a prolonged period, in the late '80s when Baby
becomes a Club Kid, thereby making the acquaintance of both Michael Alig and the man, Angel Melendez,
whom Alig would later murder with a hammer. But to the extent that there is propeller to the book, besides
the passage of time, it is the bond between Baby and Adeline, which outlives even their own shifting
identities. Pleasantly nostalgic if occasionally exhausting; an ode to a city--and an era--long gone.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kobek, Jarett: THE FUTURE WON'T BE LONG." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427664/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a31444df.
Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495427664

QUOTE:
The novel is a festival of wit and, finally, wisdom.

Not for the fainthearted
Brian Martin
Spectator. 335.9874 (Nov. 25, 2017): p37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The Future Won't Be Long

by Jarett Kobek

Serpent's Tail, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 295

In 2014 Michael Alig, impresario, party promoter and drug provider, was released on parole after 17 years in prison for the manslaughter of Angel Melendez. Alig, leader of New York's Club Kids during the 1980s and early 1990s, features as a minor character in Jarett Kobek's breakneck, crazed ride through NYC's nightlife from 1986 to 1996. Although the novel is set in the club and drug scene, filled with addicts, gays, trans, queens and freaked-out weirdos, its main themes are serious and compassionate. Repeated constantly is the mantra that history repeats itself; but most important is the theme of enduring friendship. Despite the decadence, Kobek is optimistic.

The two protagonists are 'Baby', a young hayseed from Wisconsin, and Adeline, a rich art and design student from Los Angeles. She is bankrolled by a mother she finds impossible to be with. Baby is gay; so he drifts 'like a dandelion, crazy as a daisy' in the city 'queerer than a three dollar bill'. It is their friendship that is celebrated in the novel, and their involvement in the drug culture of the time is no impediment. Baby's immersion in club life introduces him to people who you might think are entirely fictional but in fact were Alig's associates: Kenny Kenny, Queen Rex, Armand, James St James, D.J. Keoki, Christopher Robin. Thus Baby meets gays, 'girls', drag queens and a whole crowd of druggy freaks.

Baby and Adeline are co-narrators of this book. Adeline talks idiosyncratically, confidentially, sometimes addressing readers as 'darlings' or 'reader'; her expression can be quaintly English. Baby is directly American. After 100 pages there is a distinct hint of Bret Easton Ellis about the cityscape. Then, behold, a party takes place in BEE's loft apartment at 114 East 13th, which is currently let for about $6,000 a month. Thereafter we hear, unsurprisingly, of Jay McInerney. We are reminded of the old master of literary porn 'Uncle Bill Burroughs'. Other writers come into the frame, Mailer with a hand 'like a withered claw', 'every inch the pompous ass'. Always multi-referential, Kobek tells of Quentin Crisp--whose 'flower no longer blooms', alas.

The novel is a festival of wit and, finally, wisdom. Amor vincit omnia. This is not for the fainthearted. Stewart Lee is comic inspiration; and Kobek reveals that Donald Trump was at the opening of Peter Gatien's Club USA in 1992. Reader, judge from that.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Martin, Brian. "Not for the fainthearted." Spectator, 25 Nov. 2017, p. 37. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524738516/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a2722851. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

QUOTE:
not so much a novel as a wildly entertaining rant
Kobek's particular target is social media, which masquerades as liberation while monetising hatred for the benefit of the rich, white billionaires who run these platforms.
as an act of sustained indignation, it's inspired--and has the effect of making most other writers seem coy and platitudinous.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A524738516
Is this the American Houellebecq?
Johanna Thomas-Corr
Spectator. 332.9823 (Dec. 3, 2016): p37.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
I Hate the Internet

by Jarett Kobek

Profile Books, 12.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 280

I Hate the Internet is not so much a novel as a wildly entertaining rant. Jarett Kobek is a self-published former software engineer who has been hailed as the Michel Houellebecq of San Francisco--a city whose tech-era hypocrisies he doesn't so much as satirise as carpet-bomb with excrement. Kobek lacerates so many aspects of western culture that we may as well alphabetise them as follows: Advertising; Alan Greenspan; the Canadian rock band Arcade Fire;Ayn Rand; the Bush family; Californians (in particular, their inability to understand the difference between irony and coincidence); the sacred literary cow David Foster Wallace; Doctor Who fans; Google; Lena Dunham's TV show, Girls; literary fiction ('long-winded bullshit'); Presidents Reagan through to Clinton (and also Thomas Jefferson, 'America's Rapist in Chief ... the rare slave holder who enjoyed raping his property while writing declarations and essays and letters about the dignity of man'); Star Wars; Walt Disney; you the reader.

The story is told in the confrontational style of a Stewart Lee stand-up routine in which the comedian insults his audience (Kobek is a fan). It centres on a semi-famous fortysomething comic-book artist named Adeline who finds herself the target of a Twitter storm involving Beyoncé fans after she dares to suggest that the Queen of Pop has done nothing for social progress.

Kobek's particular target is social media, which masquerades as liberation while monetising hatred for the benefit of the rich, white billionaires who run these platforms. 'Why are we here, why do we do all of these things?' he asks. 'We are on Earth to make Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg richer. There is an actual, measurable point to our striving.'

You can see why the book has become such a sensation among self-hating Millennials, generally all too aware of their own exploitation at the hands of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. You can also see why publishers had a hard time with it. Kobek wears the term 'bad novel' with pride, the 'good novel' being 20th-century-era literary fiction--a CIA-funded scheme to distract Middle America with 'pointless sex' and 'ruminations on mortgages' (he's partly right there).

So it seems petty to complain that this never really develops and the plot, 'like life, resolves into nothing and features emotional suffering without meaning'. Kobek's tech villains are self-important cutesters, while his portraits of the 'victims' of the internet (which include the poor, sex-shamed women, as well as transgender and ethnic communities displaced by the tech barons) verge on sentimental.

Still, as an act of sustained indignation, it's inspired--and has the effect of making most other writers seem coy and platitudinous. At one point, a character, based on the author, stands above the city and shouts, in a parody of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: '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!' He leaves you inspecting the carnage with a grin on your face.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Thomas-Corr, Johanna. "Is this the American Houellebecq?" Spectator, 3 Dec. 2016, p. 37. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A472354872/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=efcb381a. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

QUOTE:
cabrously funny self-published diatribe against the Bay Area's tech culture and especially the way that culture has changed both San Francisco and San Franciscans. Smart and acerbic, it skirted the line between a conventional novel and a book-length essay

Gale Document Number: GALE|A472354872
Book World: Before 'I Hate the Internet,' there was New York's club-kid culture
Jeff Turrentine
The Washington Post. (Sept. 5, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Jeff Turrentine

The Future Won't Be Long

By Jarett Kobek

Viking. 399 pp. $27

---

Jarett Kobek's previous novel, "I Hate the Internet" (2016), was a scabrously funny self-published diatribe against the Bay Area's tech culture and especially the way that culture has changed both San Francisco and San Franciscans. Smart and acerbic, it skirted the line between a conventional novel and a book-length essay as it interposed the story of Adeline, a comic-book artist, with razor-sharp commentary regarding the effect of so much tech "disruption." Cultural-studies heavyweights such as Greil Marcus and Chris Kraus sang Kobek's praises. The novelist Jonathan Lethem wondered whether he might be the "American Houellebecq," as in Michel Houellebecq, the controversial French author whose work similarly blends plot and polemic.

Now, with the publication of "The Future Won't Be Long" - a kind of prequel to "I Hate the Internet" - we see Adeline, some two decades earlier, living in New York. But retrospection is more than just a means of continuing a character's story by looking backward. "The Future Won't Be Long" feels a lot like a document from the period it details - from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s - and even more like one of the novels that Bret Easton Ellis or his literary Brat Pack contemporary Jay McInerney produced during the gaudy fin of the last siecle.

Have you been pining for tales of drug-fueled big-city debauchery set in the pre-digital era, when MTV was king, people still used landlines and hookups were orchestrated on dance floors instead of dating apps? Look no further. As Adeline - and Gatsby - is fond of saying whenever someone tells her that she can't repeat the past: "Can't repeat the past? Of course you can."

The first voice we hear in "The Future Won't Be Long" belongs to Baby, who arrives in Manhattan in 1986 - just out of high school, fresh off the farm and still in the closet. When he chivalrously punches Adeline's cheating boyfriend only moments after meeting her, she returns the favor by giving him a place to crash in her dormitory. Thus a friendship for the ages is born. In short order, Baby and Adeline are inseparable companions and platonic soul mates: not just living together but traveling together, enduring professional and romantic crises together, and (especially) experiencing the intoxicating ferment of late-'80s Lower Manhattan nightlife together.

Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll: It's never been a bad combination for storytelling purposes. It works here, too, but mainly because Kobek knows that milieu isn't everything. When it inevitably occurs, Baby's descent into the orgiastic "club kid" world is interesting, mainly as an obstacle to his creative ascent, first as a college student and later as a burgeoning science-fiction writer. With limited means and no family support, Baby needs someone in his life to spur him on and help him cultivate his talent. And Adeline is always there for him - until she isn't.

Instead, she's off discovering her own self and cultivating her own talent. Given that Kobek has already told us where Adeline ends up and what she does with her life, there's not much suspense attached to her voyage. Even so, you may find yourself cheering her on as she begins to jettison the trappings of a dilettantish rich kid and morphs into a thoughtful artist. By that point in the novel, the most distinctive aspect of her character - her unusual voice, which is self-consciously old-fashioned, like something out of a 1940s movie - starts to sound less like an affect and more like a deliberately chosen means of separating herself from her cohort.

It seems unlikely that "The Future Won't Be Long" will garner the same cultish following that its companion novel did. Its humor is biting but not lacerating; its critique of the amoral club-kid culture of the '80s and '90s can't resonate in the same way that Kobek's takedown of our current digital culture does. Oddly, for all of the squalor and degradation it depicts, this novel can't help but elicit nostalgia for a time when our social lives weren't entirely mediated by tiny screens, when New York felt like the center of the world, and when the prospect of someday becoming an artist or a writer seemed cooler than becoming a software developer.

---

Turrentine, a frequent Washington Post Book World contributor, writes about politics, culture and the environment for OnEarth and other publications.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Turrentine, Jeff. "Book World: Before 'I Hate the Internet,' there was New York's club-kid culture." Washington Post, 5 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A503577745/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23ea0c9f. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A503577745
The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek review -- follow-up to I Hate the Internet; An aggressively unconventional novel of outsiders in 80s New York is brattishly entertaining
The Guardian (London, England). (Dec. 21, 2017): News:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Guardian Newspapers. Guardian Newspapers Limited
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian
Full Text:
Byline: Sandra Newman

Jarett Kobek's second novel is about a gay teenager, Baby, who leaves his home in small-town Michigan for the demi-monde of 80s New York. On his first day in the city, he meets a rich-girl art student, Adeline, who becomes his roommate, playmate, soulmate -- his "one essential person". The book alternates between their points of view, and through their eyes Kobek gives us a rollicking tour of the cool downtown culture of the time.

The novel is a prequel of sorts to Kobek's debut, the self-published cult hit I Hate the Internet, both in the sense that a middle-aged Adeline is the protagonist of I Hate the Internet and in that the cultural commentary of one book looks forward to that of the other.

Both novels are also aggressively unconventional in form. In his first, Kobek informed the reader that he was writing a "bad novel" because good novels had completely failed to encompass the experience of the internet. Thus, in the place of realistic characters and a coherent plot, I Hate the Internet offered Twitterish one-liners, bloggy opinions and chatter about celebrities.

The Future Won't Be Long uses the same techniques: Kobek spends 400 pages bantering, opinionating and telling Big Apple anecdotes. Some are from the fictional lives of Baby and Adeline; some are real vignettes from the era, like the story of Daniel Rakowitz, who murdered a woman, made a stew from her body and fed it to the homeless people of Tompkins Square Park. Various celebrities -- Quentin Crisp, Bret Easton Ellis, Norman Mailer -- appear in cameos to deliver a few characteristic lines.

Related: I Hate the Internet by Jarett Kobek review -- the best 'bad novel' around

Regardless of whether Baby or Adeline is narrating, the prose has a chatty immediacy, with moments of half-baked lyricism that are winningly camp. Adeline describes a period of aimlessness in San Francisco as "too much perambulation enclosed within tendrils of fog and woe"; in one of Baby's many epiphanies, he says, "I'd spent too much time in New York, too much time interacting with its lunatics, its mad ones, its charlatans, its would-be revolutionaries." The tone is always faintly cynical, and the events sometimes grisly, but, as Baby says, describing projections on the walls of a club: "Violence, malice, hatred, death. All very cartoony, detached from the actuality of suffering."

Kobek does not announce his anti-novelistic intentions within the book, and so the reader keeps expecting a narrative arc that fails to materialise. As Baby's clubbing becomes increasingly drug-sodden, promiscuous and alienated, we assume he's heading for some kind of crisis; instead, he just gradually eases off as he gets older and clubbing stops being so much fun. Since his friendship with Adeline is the centre of the book, we assume that some significant conflict will eventually threaten their relationship -- and indeed the two do have a falling-out that separates them for some months, but it's about something extraneous, is dealt with in a single page of snappy dialogue and has no profound effect on either of them. Adeline's reaction to the rift is covered in a single high-camp sentence: "Our unspeakable schism wreaked its terrible havoc, but your old pal Adeline stood her ground, resolute and knee deep in her even-eyed imbecility." She then goes on to give us a full-page description of an unusually heavy period.

It is argumentative, over-dramatic, longer than it has any right to be. Yet one can't help liking Kobek for writing it

These choices are deliberate, but do they work? Yes and no. The violent demise of Baby's parents is described with the same catty frivolity as his meeting with Quentin Crisp; the terror of the Aids epidemic is batted away with a few offhand remarks, and there is just enough realism in the book for this to make the characters seem gratingly insensitive. Everything proceeds at the same sauntering pace; over the course of 400 pages, it can feel like walking in circles. Still, the structureless course of events is, in its way, savagely realistic; and while The Future Won't Be Long may be a "bad novel" in ways Kobek didn't entirely intend, it's mostly very fun to read.

In a typical sally, Kobek ends with a three-page litany of things that "fiction never addresses", which mostly consists of things that are actually fairly commonly represented in fiction: "Like the way in which air travel is an abhorrence that destroys the soul. Like the way in which plastic saps a percentage of joy. Like the way in which no specific action by any individual person or group of persons achieves anything and yet somehow life continues on apace." It's a microcosm of the rest of the book: argumentative, over-dramatic, valuing style over accuracy, much longer than it has any right to be. Yet one can't help liking Kobek for writing it; for so defiantly, brattishly, entertainingly, being a not-good novelist.

Sandra Newman's The Country of Ice Cream Star is published by Vintage.

* The Future Won't Be Long is published by Serpent's Tail. To order a copy for [pounds sterling]11.04 (RRP [pounds sterling]12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over [pounds sterling]10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of [pounds sterling]1.99.

CAPTION(S):

Credit: Photograph: Guardian Live/Steve Ullathorne

Jarett Kobek ... spends 400 pages bantering, opinionating and telling Big Apple anecdotes.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek review -- follow-up to I Hate the Internet; An aggressively unconventional novel of outsiders in 80s New York is brattishly entertaining." Guardian [London, England], 21 Dec. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519783668/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=caddb339. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

QUOTE:
grainy political and cultural rant, a sustained shriek about power and morality in a new global era.
glimpse at a lively mind at full boil.
fundamentally a platform for the author's slashing social criticism.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A519783668
Digital World at the Ready, to Judge You
Dwight Garner
The New York Times. (Mar. 17, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: pC1(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Full Text:
In the movie ''Machete,'' there's a scene in which Danny Trejo rips out an opponent's intestines and, leaping from a window, uses them like rope to rappel down the side of a building. As action scenes go, this one has extra habanero.

In his new novel, ''I Hate the Internet,'' Jarett Kobek performs a similar maneuver on the viscera of the American psyche, at least as regards the so-called information highway. I can't decide if, on his way down, Mr. Kobek is laughing or weeping.

Don't be put off by this book's feeble title. ''I Hate the Internet'' isn't a book about, I don't know, why your selfies always make you look dumpy. Instead it's a grainy political and cultural rant, a sustained shriek about power and morality in a new global era. It's a glimpse at a lively mind at full boil.

''Nothing says individuality,'' Mr. Kobek comments about a generation's laptops and cellphones, ''like 500 million consumer electronics built by slaves. Welcome to hell.'' He's just getting tuned up.

Mr. Kobek is a Turkish-American writer who lives in California. His first novel, ''Atta'' (2011), was a fictionalized biography of the Sept. 11 hijacker-pilot Mohamed Atta.

His new novel is ostensibly the story of a middle-aged comic-book writer named Adeline. She lives in San Francisco and mourns its gentrification at the hands of venture capitalists and tech start-ups. The city's misfits, of whom she is one, are being pushed out.

The story begins as Adeline commits ''the only unforgivable sin of the 21st century.'' That is, invited to give a lecture, she neglects to notice that someone is recording her. Adeline has other problems, Mr. Kobek suggests: ''(1) She was a woman in a culture that hated women. (2) She'd become kind of famous. (3) She'd expressed unpopular opinions.''

Some of these opinions, which become infamous on YouTube, are on why women should be leery of working for tech companies. ''All these crazy young ones are lining up to burn in their very own Shirtwaist Factories, screaming that they're empowered by the very technology that's set them aflame,'' Adeline says, in her goofy trans-Atlantic accent, which makes her sound like ''a drugged out Diana Vreeland.''

Some of these opinions are complaints about the fantasies of fame and power in the songs, videos and social media of today's pop stars. ''A wide range of humanity believed that Beyonc and Rihanna were inspirations rather than vultures,'' we read. ''Adeline had spit on their gods.'' Adeline barely knows what Twitter is. Attack Bey and RiRi? She's about to find out about its self-righteous side.

Adeline's story sits alongside that of a younger woman, Ellen, whose life is destroyed after an old boyfriend's pictures of her, taken during sex, are splashed across the web. Each of these women, in Mr. Kobek's hands, is interesting and sympathetic. But ''I Hate the Internet'' is fundamentally a platform for the author's slashing social criticism.

There's a bit of the French writer Michel Houellebecq in Mr. Kobek's profane satire. There's a bit of Thomas Piketty in his obsession with economic inequality. There's a bit of the Ambrose Bierce of ''The Devil's Dictionary'' in his ability to take words and ideas and invest them with uglier and thus usually more accurate meanings.

New definitions? Comics, here, are ''subtle pornography for the mentally backward.'' Comic-book conventions are ''an excuse for people to dress up like the intellectual properties of major corporations.'' Money is ''the unit by which people measured humiliation. What would you do for a dollar?''

Amazon: ''an unprofitable website dedicated to the destruction of the publishing industry.'' Instagram: ''the first social media platform to which the only sane reaction was hate.'' Then there's this about George W. Bush's paintings: ''Like peering into the shattered mind of a suicidal beagle that's lost depth perspective.''

This is a shaggy and quite entertaining novel of ideas. The two most prominent of these are: Why are humans so eager, on sites like Twitter and Facebook, to give away their intellectual property to wealthy white men? And: What has happened to political activism? Do people think typing 140-character morality lectures is pushing society forward?

''One of the curious aspects of the 21st century was the great delusion amongst many people, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, that freedom of speech and freedom of expression were best exercised on technology platforms owned by corporations dedicated to making as much money as possible,'' Mr. Kobek writes.

A majority of these tweeted opinions, he notes, are smug and hypocritical when not utterly inane. Take Twitter and racism, which brings out the worst in almost everyone. ''Expressing concern about racism was a new religion,'' Mr. Kobek writes, ''and focusing on language rather than political mechanics was an effortless, and meaningless, way of making sure one was seen in a front-row pew of the new church.''

Like all jeremiads, ''I Hate the Internet'' is far better at posing questions than formulating answers. You will sometimes wish that a woman, or an African-American, had composed these acid observations about feminism and race.

At times the author loses his focus; at other times you will sense a bit of halitotic spittle striking your chin. Yet 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.''

My advice? Log off Twitter for a day. Pick this up instead.

I Hate the Internet

A Useful Novel

By Jarett Kobek

280 pages. We Heard You Like Books. $15.95.

CAPTION(S):

PHOTOS: PHOTO (C1); PHOTO (C6)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Garner, Dwight. "Digital World at the Ready, to Judge You." New York Times, 17 Mar. 2016, p. C1(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A446502057/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ec3a13ae. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A446502057

Strauss, Leah. "The Future Won't Be Long." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 18. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862682/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. "The Future Won't Be Long." Publishers Weekly, 26 June 2017, p. 148. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A497444201/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. "Kobek, Jarett: THE FUTURE WON'T BE LONG." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495427664/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. Martin, Brian. "Not for the fainthearted." Spectator, 25 Nov. 2017, p. 37. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A524738516/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=a2722851. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. Thomas-Corr, Johanna. "Is this the American Houellebecq?" Spectator, 3 Dec. 2016, p. 37. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A472354872/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=efcb381a. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. Turrentine, Jeff. "Book World: Before 'I Hate the Internet,' there was New York's club-kid culture." Washington Post, 5 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A503577745/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=23ea0c9f. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. "The Future Won't Be Long by Jarett Kobek review -- follow-up to I Hate the Internet; An aggressively unconventional novel of outsiders in 80s New York is brattishly entertaining." Guardian [London, England], 21 Dec. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A519783668/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=caddb339. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018. Garner, Dwight. "Digital World at the Ready, to Judge You." New York Times, 17 Mar. 2016, p. C1(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A446502057/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ec3a13ae. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.

• Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/02/i-hate-internet-jarett-kobek-review
  Word count: 1193

  QUOTE:
  it’s the enraged comedy of its cultural diagnosis that really drives the reader onwards. There are so many brilliant one-liner definitions that it’s hard not to keep quoting them.
  If Ambrose Bierce woke up today from suspended animation and decided to write a sequel to his Devil’s Dictionary in the form of a sort-of fiction, it would look a bit like this. And when a bad novel is this good, who needs a good one?

  I Hate the Internet by Jarett Kobek review – the best ‘bad novel’ around
  This thrillingly funny and vicious anatomy of hi-tech culture and the modern world is filled with killer one-liners

  Steven Poole
  Wed 2 Nov 2016 05.00 EDT Last modified on Thu 22 Feb 2018 07.48 EST
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  Named and mocked … Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg.
  Named and mocked … Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Photograph: Mike Blake/Reuters
  I know, right? Who doesn’t? We all hate the internet, even as we can no longer imagine life without it, unless we’re one of those people who go ostentatiously offline for a few months and then write a lengthy report about internet-free life that is posted to the internet so we can read it and carry on hating the internet while still actually using it. I mean, you’re probably reading this on the internet. If you’re reading it in print you’ll probably get bored halfway through and check the internet on your phone in case there’s something more interesting to skim. Such is life.

  This book about hating the internet calls itself a novel, and it is, in a way – it features (presumably) made-up characters saying (presumably) made- up things – but one of its manifold charms is that it repeatedly insists it is a “bad novel”. This is a good thing, at least in this bad novel’s satirically paranoid scheme, for it argues that the “good novel” – the American literary novel, “which paired pointless sex with ruminations on the nature of mortgages” – was an invention of the CIA, which funded influential magazines such as the Paris Review. Also, the narrator insists, literary novels of our day simply cannot handle the internet. They don’t know what to do with it. Their attempts to incorporate it are just embarrassing.

  So, a bad novel, then: one that, it promises, will mimic the internet “in its irrelevant and jagged presentation of content”. Its heroine is 45-year-old Adeline, who is a bit famous because of some comic books she drew in the 1990s. The novel opens with her receiving rape and death threats on Twitter, as pretty much any woman will these days who expresses strong opinions on the internet. It then flicks back and forth between the present day and the 90s, filling in the backstory and introducing an agreeable supporting cast of writers and eccentrics hanging out in New York or San Francisco. There is a lot of smart, cynical chat, but not much in the way of dramatic suspense or well-formed story. Those things, after all, are for good novels.

  What there is instead is a quite thrillingly funny and vicious anatomy of hi-tech culture and the modern world in general. The book’s governing rhetorical device is to explain everything about the world it is describing, as if to aliens, or to people far in the future after the collapse of our own civilisation. Thus: “Wars were giant parties for the ruling elites, who sometimes thought it might be great fun to make the poor kill each other.” Or: “Thomas Jefferson was the rare slave holder who enjoyed raping his property while writing declarations and essays and letters about the dignity of man.” Or: “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.” (Such descriptions of the internet recur throughout the book, in an appallingly accurate running joke.)

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  Most contemptuously skewered are the Silicon Valley crowd. “Like many of the men who worked with technology in the information economy, Erik Willems had a deep affection for juvenile literature.” (He means works of fantasy, for example those by Tolkien or Ayn Rand.) Actual people are also named and mocked – Steve Jobs and Sheryl Sandberg, author of Lean In: she is “the billionaire who worked for Facebook and thought that the way women who weren’t billionaires could get respect in the workplace was to act more like the men that disrespected them in the workplace”. Most reviled of all is the libertarian ideology of tech’s flagwavers. “The illusion of the internet was the idea that the opinions of powerless people, freely offered, had some impact on the world. This was, of course, total bullshit… The only effect of the words of powerless people on the internet was to inflict misery on other powerless people.”

  Eventually, this novel that is possibly only pretending to be a bad one (occasionally Jarett Kobek lets his guard slip and commits some literary beauty) culminates in a chapter explaining why the chapter that used to be in its place was a complete failure in its attempt to tie up all the book’s themes. In a rather virtuosic display of via negativa, the new chapter mentions lots of things that were in the old chapter that we can’t read, “Like a description of Thanksgiving as a holiday in which America celebrated the genocide of its indigenous peoples 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”. Or an explanation (quite convincing) of why the 20th-century comics industry is the perfect analogue for the 21st‑century media world.

  Kobek has been compared to the French enfant terrible Michel Houellebecq by none other than Jonathan Lethem, the Brooklyn-based writer of “good novels”, though this book’s cleverly casual style, apparently eschewing literary artifice, reminded me much more of Kurt Vonnegut.

  But it’s the enraged comedy of its cultural diagnosis that really drives the reader onwards. There are so many brilliant one-liner definitions that it’s hard not to keep quoting them. (“Science fiction was a dying genre in which writers with no personal understanding of the human experience posited many theoretical futures of the species.”) If Ambrose Bierce woke up today from suspended animation and decided to write a sequel to his Devil’s Dictionary in the form of a sort-of fiction, it would look a bit like this. And when a bad novel is this good, who needs a good one?

  • I Hate the Internet is published by Serpent’s Tail. To order a copy for £10.65 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• SFGate
  https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/I-Hate-the-Internet-by-Jarett-Kobek-set-6829625.php
  Word count: 886

  QUOTE:
  I Hate the Internet” reminds us that there is more at stake than good form, that — Google it — novelistic “good form” was designed by the CIA as a means of promoting a certain type of American lifestyle. It’s 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.

  I Hate the Internet,’ by Jarett Kobek, set in San Francisco
  By Evan Karp Published 7:38 pm, Saturday, February 13, 2016

  Jarett Kobek set his novel “I Hate the Internet” in San Francisco. Photo: Courtesy The Author
  Photo: Courtesy The Author
  Jarett Kobek set his novel “I Hate the Internet” in San Francisco.
  About every two minutes, someone tweets “i hate the internet.” If you follow the Twitter account @heardulikebooks, which automatically retweets every instance of that declaration, you will be inundated by a fascinating and heartbreaking stream of anthropological treasures.

  Jarett Kobek came up with the idea after he finished his novel “I Hate the Internet,” out this week from indie publisher We Heard You Like Books. He typed those four words into Twitter and was astounded to see how often others did so, and why.

  “I think the reason why it’s so frustrating is because it’s the perfect distillation of 21st century helplessness,” Kobek said about the Internet, by phone. “You can look at almost anyone in the industrialized world, and everyone is kind of, by virtue of the systems that they’re forced to interact with, participating in overlapping networks of global evil, and the Internet is the one that’s the most omnipresent because it’s the one that everyone’s interacting with on an hourly basis.

  Feeling powerless

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  “We’re all talking and communicating on these devices that were, in a lot of cases, literally made by slaves, in China, the components of which were strip-mined from the Congo, doing unbelievable environmental damage, and yet, simultaneously, it’s not like you can get off it.

  “I think when people say, ‘I hate the Internet,’ on Twitter anyway, that is an expression of powerlessness, because it’s being expressed into the Internet,” Kobek said. “It’s a resignation of any sense that there’s anything you can really do.”

  “I Hate the Internet” is set in 2013 San Francisco, when short-lived Mission District restaurant Local’s Corner reportedly denied service to a Latina woman on Cesar Chavez Day. The 600-square-foot restaurant serving locally sourced seafood had replaced a long-standing corner store and fast became a symbol of the tone-deaf realities of tech-fueled gentrification.

  The book is rightly if comically preceded by a list of trigger warnings that includes everything from “capitalism” and “historical anachronisms” — things so prevalent in our society that they’re taken for granted — to “elaborately named hippies practicing animal cruelty on goats” and “seeing the Facebook profile of someone you knew when you were young and believed that everyone would lead rewarding lives” — things you might not expect to have to prepare for, and examples of capitalism extended to its logical conclusions. It announces itself to be a bad novel on Page 23.

  Sense of outrage

  But “I Hate the Internet” reminds us that there is more at stake than good form, that — Google it — novelistic “good form” was designed by the CIA as a means of promoting a certain type of American lifestyle. It’s 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.

  “You can go see a stand-up show and some dude will talk to you about every complex social issue of the moment, and it won’t be encompassed by a language that’s like a labyrinth that you have to get through to understand what the hell someone is saying,” Kobek said. “And it works, and it’s effective, and I thought: Well, why can’t a book do this? Is there something inherently broken in the novel, or at least in our conception of the novel, that we just can’t do this anymore?”

  Evan Karp is the creator of Quiet Lightning and Litseen.com. Twitter: @Litseen

  Jarett Kobek: I Hate the Internet: 7 p.m. Tuesday. Free. City Lights, 261 Columbus Ave., S.F. 362-8193, www.citylights.co

• ZYZZYVA
  http://www.zyzzyva.org/2016/02/29/i-hate-the-internet-by-jarrett-kobek/
  Word count: 919

  QUOTE:
  Much like the latest clickbait article or Buzzfeed list floating through your Facebook feed, the book encourages its own voracious consumption, though Kobek’s writing ensures it won’t be as easily forgotten. Like a mad priest presiding over the death of our disposable culture, Kobek has delivered a fitting eulogy for the digital age

  Tweeting Ourselves into Oblivion: ‘I Hate the Internet’ by Jarett Kobek
  BY ZACK RAVAS
  POSTED ON FEBRUARY 29, 2016
  9780996421805_p0_v1_s192x300The last two years have witnessed several novels lamenting the changing cultural landscape of the Bay Area, setting their sights on the runaway capitalism of the tech industry. But few of these books have actually assimilated the language of tech into their critique. This is part of what makes Jarett Kobek’s novel I Hate the Internet (We Heard You Like Books, 288 pages) so potent.

  I Hate the Internet is ostensibly the story of Adeline, a middle-aged comic book artist living in San Francisco circa 2013. When Adeline, who purposefully affects a Trans-Atlantic accent a la Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, delivers a guest lecture at a Bay Area art school, she has no idea that her off-the-cuff remarks will be recorded and uploaded to the web by a student, generating a firestorm of Internet outrage in the process. While Adeline’s story remains an anchor throughout the novel, her dilemma is not the main focus of the book. Instead, her story serves as a springboard for Kobek to examine the state of San Francisco in the 21st century.

  The narrative transitions from subject to subject at the speed of a mouse-click; a reference to Adeline’s former boyfriend working at LucasArts leads to several digressive paragraphs in which Kobek offers his own explication of the Star Wars property and its billion-dollar acquisition by the Disney corporation in 2012. This technique occurs on nearly every page, creating the impression that the reader has disappeared down a rabbit hole of URLs, following link after link on Kobek’s version of Wikipedia. It also allows Kobek to tie together several disparate threads throughout the book, while maintaining his central thesis that comic book publishers like Marvel and DC Comics—whose artists, such as Jack Kirby, saw almost none of the dizzying profits made off their intellectual properties—were the forerunners of companies like Facebook and Instagram, which earn massive revenues based on the content its millions of users produce for free.

  The book’s self-stated intent is to imitate the computer network “in its obsessions with junk media” and “its irrelevant and jagged presentation of content.” The opening chapters lay out Kobek’s rejection of traditional “literary merit” as a relic of the previous century, a time when the CIA funded writer’s workshops in an attempt to utilize the American novel as a weapon in the cultural war against Soviet Russia. Questions of good taste and artistic merit are rendered meaningless in a world that, post-9/11, no longer makes sense.

  But a cold discussion of I Hate the Internet’s stylistic technique undersells just how damn entertaining the book is, even as it lights a funeral pyre for the San Francisco of old. The city that was once a haven for artists and misfits is now a hotbed for companies like Twitter and various other start-ups, which Kobek wonderfully lampoons by charting the rise of “Bromato,” an app that allows tech jocks to recommend personal trainers to each other. The writer offers succinct takedowns of everything from polyamorous relationships to Burning Man and online dating, to the point that the reader often feels like a member of some future alien race sifting through the relics of the 21st century, trying to determine what led to the fall of Western civilization.

  At times, I Hate the Internet is too self-referential for its own good: by the third instance of Kobek reminding the reader the book they are holding is a “bad novel,” you might be tempted to roll your eyes. There is also the sense that in critiquing a culture that makes it virtually impossible for an individual to opt out, it becomes necessary to implicate oneself as part of the very same system. Fittingly for a novel that frequently takes jabs at Objectivist writer Ayn Rand, the story ends with a John Galt-style rant, in which Kobek reminds us that “Every critique of the racist cisgender homophobic misogynistic patriarchy that you post on Tumblr just makes money for Tumblr!” There is simply no escape.

  I Hate the Internet may be the first novel that arrives with its own “trigger warning,” cautioning the reader that they are about to experience “capitalism,” “despair,” and “seeing the Facebook profile of someone you knew when you were young and believed that everyone would lead rewarding lives.” Much like the latest clickbait article or Buzzfeed list floating through your Facebook feed, the book encourages its own voracious consumption, though Kobek’s writing ensures it won’t be as easily forgotten. Like a mad priest presiding over the death of our disposable culture, Kobek has delivered a fitting eulogy for the digital age.

  THIS ENTRY WAS POSTED IN BOOK REVIEWS AND TAGGED COMIC BOOKS, FACEBOOK, I HATE THE INTERNET, INSTAGRAM, JARETT, KOBEK, NOVEL, TUMBLR. BOOKMARK THE PERMALINK.
  ← THE ‘ADVERSE GIFT’ LEADING TO A FULL LIFE: ‘THE CHILD POET’ BY HOMERO ARIDJISWHEN THE ONLY ESCAPE IS THRO

• Australian Online
  https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/i-hate-the-internet-jarrett-kobek-and-the-rich-white-mens-web/news-story/81c82088b4d12f4418b853db9f0f5336
  Word count: 900

  I Hate the Internet: Jarrett Kobek and the rich, white men’s web
  I Hate the Internet asks us to consider not just how we use technology, but why.
  I Hate the Internet asks us to consider not just how we use technology, but why.
  DOMINIC AMERENA
  The Australian12:00AM February 11, 2017
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  It has become de rigueur in Western society to grumble about our relationship with the internet. We’re told we spend too much time looking at screens, that we can only communicate through social media.

  Such suggestions are becoming hard to argue with, if more than a little tedious.

  But there is a more radical claim at the centre of I Hate the Internet, the first full-length novel by Turkish-American writer Jarett Kobek.

  He thinks the internet is fundamentally a tool of oppression, a money-making venture structured to benefit a select class of billionaire white men.

  Kobek’s remarkable novel is a strident, hilarious polemic that rails against just about everything — from capitalism to racism, gentrification to Instagram — and permeating every page of the book is “the awful stench of men”. The novel was more or less self-published, but has quickly achieved cult status, earning endorsements from writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem.

  Set at the end of 2013 in a San Francisco eviscerated by Silicon Valley investment, I Hate the Internet concerns Adeline, a middle-aged artist famous for a series of comics she drew in the 1990s. After a recording of one of her lectures goes viral, she receives online abuse, like many women these days in the public sphere.

  As Kobek writes, in a refrain repeated in various iterations throughout the novel, “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.”

  While loosely centred on the “Twitterstorm” that erupts around Adeline, I Hate the Internet is structured like “a computer network in its irrelevant and jagged presentation of content”.

  Kobek’s style is a punchy, ever-scrolling info dump, cadged from Wikipedia pages and Buzzfeed listicles. In a similar way to Kurt Vonnegut, Kobek deconstructs the shibboleths of contemporary American culture by explaining them as if to a child. So basketball players are people who “create the illusion of meaning while throwing round rubber balls around rectangular spaces”, while money is “the unit by which people measured humiliation. What would you do for a dollar? What would you do for ten dollars? What would you do for a million dollars?”

  Kobek daringly extends this style to more fraught concepts such as race, by describing characters in terms of their skin pigmentation.

  Take Adeline, described as not having “eumelanin in the basal cell layer of her epidermis and … thus a member of the White race”. It’s a simple rhetorical strategy to show the absurdity of viewing race as a system of difference and the violence that has been enacted because of it.

  The original cover of this book describes it as “a useful novel against men, money and the filth of Instagram” and the most original aspect of Kobek’s book is its insistence that the internet fundamentally enshrines systems of power.

  In its most utopian formulation, many people think of the internet as a democratic “information superhighway”, where users are able to freely share and debate opinions and ideas. But Kobek, who has worked in the tech industry, shows that the platforms we communicate on — Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and the like — are not neutral delivery systems. Instead of being platforms to facilitate discussion, they are designed to sell advertising for energy drinks and skincare products.

  In Kobek’s view, the great irony of the internet is that it has defanged the radical potential of online activism. By writing on social media, activists are merely creating free content for the billionaires who own Twitter and Facebook. The people most concerned with disrupting ­hegemonic culture are actually enshrining it.

  As Kobek writes, “They were typing morality lectures into devices built by slaves on platforms owned by the Patriarchy, and they were making money for the Patriarchy.”

  What then are we to do in a culture where the internet is the water in which we swim? There is no panacea to disentangle us from the complex web of power and privilege that the internet is built on. And short of deleting social media accounts and throwing away all Apple products, Kobek offers no blueprint to lead an ethical online life.

  Instead, I Hate the Internet asks us to consider not just how we use this technology, but why. To consider who benefits when we do and who doesn’t. And perhaps for the moment, that’s all that we can do. As Kobek writes at one point, “You can’t stop the gears of capitalism. But you can always be a pain in the ass.”

  Dominic Amerena is a writer and critic.

  I Hate the Internet: A Novel

  By Jarett Kobek

  Profile Books, 290pp, $27.99

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• FInancial Times Online
  https://www.ft.com/content/50c65a2a-bbb1-11e6-8b45-b8b81dd5d080
  Word count: 263

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  I Hate the Internet by Jarett Kobek review — unhappy valley
  Neville Hawcock DECEMBER 9, 2016 Print this page0

  The internet isn’t the half of it. Also skewered in Jarett Kobek’s first full-length novel are the comics industry, sport, celebrity culture, recent presidents, literary fiction and much else besides. But it’s the unholy interplay between Silicon Valley’s self-serving rhetoric and social media’s soul-corroding chatter that is the focus of the California-based writer’s take-no-prisoners ire. Potentially libellous passages about real-life figures in the high-tech world have been blacked out in this UK edition.

  There’s not much of a plot, as various characters meander through a San Francisco blighted by tech-funded gentrification — a city that has bequeathed to the world a “vision of the billionaire in a hooded sweatshirt”. What matters here is the quality of the hating, which Kobek delivers with wit, vigour and a Vonnegut-like knack for parsing social norms into their component absurdities.

  I Hate the Internet, by Jarett Kobek, Serpent’s Tail, RRP£12.99, 290 pages

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