Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

A wide range of humanity believed that Beyoncé and Rihanna were inspirations rather than vultures. Adeline had spit on their gods.

This wide range of humanity responded by teaching Adeline about one of America’s favored pastimes, a tradition as time-honored as police brutality, baseball, race riots and genocide.

They were teaching Adeline about how powerless people demonstrated their supplication before their masters.

They were tweeting about Adeline.

Adeline called her friends. She asked for advice.

The first person she called was Jeremy Winterbloss.

Jeremy Winterbloss and his wife Minerva lived in San Venetia, up in Marin County across the Golden Gate Bridge. It was half an hour from the city, traffic permitting.

Jeremy answered the phone. Minerva wasn’t home.

When she and Adeline met, Minerva had been an anarchist punk who’d escaped the Soviet Union. They’d both been students at the Parsons School of Design. Now Minerva was a registered nurse.

Minerva wasn’t at home. She was at a hospital, tending the broken bodies of the ill.

“I was waiting for your call,” said Jeremy. “My email is going crazy.”

“No one’s put the frighteners on you, have they?”

“This is all you.”

“What does one do?” asked Adeline. “They’re saying so many cruel, cruel things about yours truly! You can’t imagine the sheer frenzy of Beyoncé’s fans!”

“Did you read the YouTube comments?” asked Jeremy.

“No,” said Adeline.

“Promise me that you won’t,” he said.

Each video hosted on YouTube was surrounded by an apparatus through which its users could comment upon the hosted video. This apparatus fostered debates between YouTube’s users.

Typically these debates were about: (1) Whether or not the person in the video, who was often a 13 year old girl, was an ugly fucking slut who deserved to die. (2) Whether or not President Obama was destroying the country and/or sucking cocks in Hell. (3) Whether or not the other users commenting on the video were dumb assholes. (4) Whether or not Black people were %&$#?@s. (5) Whether or not Asian men had small penises. (6) How wetback Mexicans were stealing good jobs.

To participate in these debates, in which powerless people attacked other powerless people, YouTube’s users would return to each video many times over.

Each time that the users returned to the video, renewed in their intentions of calling someone an ugly fucking slut deserving of death, Google served more advertisements and earned more money.

Google was making money off debates about whether or not President Obama sucked cocks in Hell while destroying America. Lightly sprinkled with comments about whether or not Black people were %&$#?@s.

That was okay. YouTube had the same reputation as Twitter. It was an activist tool that fostered freedom of speech and freedom of expression. It had brought Spring to the Middle East.

“What ever should I do?” asked Adeline.

“Well, what do you want?” asked Jeremy.

“I’m not certain,” she said.

“You could always get an account on Twitter and apologize.”

“But darling,” said Adeline, “I’m can’t. I’m not sorry about anything I’ve done.”

The next person she called was J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell.

“It’s simple,” he said. “Viral content works like joke writing. So, okay, basically, a joke functions through the contrast of ideas. The first idea is the assumed one, the second idea is a tweak on the first. Here’s the set-up to a joke: ‘I just flew in from Pittsburgh.’ Here’s the punchline: ‘And, boy, are my arms tired.’ The humor rests on the tension between the assumed idea of flying in an airplane and the punchline’s verbal tweak which reminds the listener that there are different forms of flight.”

“Are you talking down again, darling?”

“Only a little,” said J. Karacehennem. “Bear with me. So, okay, viral video works along the same principle. Things go viral when the action within the video exists as a tweak of the cultural assumptions embedded within the video’s visual signifiers. Any time you have a grandmother who behaves in a strange way, like a grandmother who sings the latest hit song or talks about sex or does a backflip, that will have some inherent virality, because there is a standing set of cultural assumption about old people in general and grandmothers in specific. These are violated by hit songs and backflips and frank discussions of sex.”

“This is getting terribly borrrrrrring,” said Adeline. “What does any of this have to do with me?”

“The thing is,” said J. Karacehennem, “And I hate to break it to you, but you’re the god damned weirdest person alive. There you are in this video, an attractive woman of some years, a dressed-up version of those rock n’ roll women in their mid-forties that you meet at the Rainbow Room—”

“Darling, are you calling me rockabilly?”

“—Then you open your mouth and you sound like a drugged out Dianna Vreeland and you’ve got an erudite range of insane opinions on every possible topic. It’s fascinating. And you’re kind of famous. People love watching celebrities self-immolate. People fucking love it. It’s the spectator sport of the New Millennium.”

“That’s all very well and good,” said Adeline, “What do I do?”

“I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “In two days, no one will remember. In six months, most of the links will depreciate. Just be glad you’ve published books. The only powerless people on the Internet are the ones with nothing to sell. Imagine being a spotty Paki chav in London. You’d be a suicide. There’s a guy I know whose friend uploaded a picture of him when he was 15. He looks awful. This was almost twenty years ago. It’s still the first image result for ‘ugly nerd.’ Did you talk to Jeremy?”

“Of course,” said Adeline.

“Did he say anything about the impact on sales?”

“We’ve re-entered the Amazon Top 500. Not since the trailer for Don Murphy’s Trill has our book sold so many copies.”

“Ride the wave,” said J. Karacehennem. “Everything is advertising. I wonder if you guys could push it any further.”

“Sirrah,” said Adeline, “Thou must knowest that this is one cow that don’t need no milking. I only want the horror to end.”

“Wait it out.”

“Jeremy said I should acquire my own Twitter and argue my position.”

“Trust me, the one thing you do not want to do in this situation is engage. I’d suggest following the rule of all celebrities who have successfully cultivated an air of mystery. Never explain or complain.”

Adeline’s next call was to Baby. Baby didn’t answer.

Baby was terrible with his phone.

Adeline’s next call was to Erik Willems.

“I don’t grok virality,” he said. “It’s very mysterious to me and yet I’ve helped many startups based around viral content. One of the things that we try to pursue is a blue ocean strategy. What did you say, anyway?”

“Haven’t you seen the video?” asked Adeline.

“I don’t really care,” said Erik Willems. “I’m not that interested in the content so much as the delivery.”

“Yet we’re sexually intertwined,” said Adeline. “And still you can’t be bothered to give two tosses of a tuppence?”

“It’s all just gossip,” said Erik Willems. “It’s all just a solsitre .”

Solsitres are one of the challenges that Annie Zero faces in Annie Zero, Baby’s book about French Neo-Maoists in the Megaverse.

A solsitre is a difficult situation that has no solution but proves to be ultimately irrelevant. The danger of the solsitre is that, much like this bad novel, it wastes time.