Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

Before Erik Willems worked in venture capital, he had a job with Fear and Respect Holdings Ltd., the firm run by His Royal Highness Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud.

HRH Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud disliked using his given name with people who weren’t native Arabic speakers. To grease the gears of global capitalism, he’d adopted many names in different languages.

In Chinese, he was called 野生花卉, which meant Wild Flower.

In Spanish, he was called El Diablo árabe, which meant The Arabic Devil.

In Turkish, he was called Küçükkutsaldağ , which meant The Little Holy Mountain.

In German, he was called Der Meister der Weltschmerz , which meant Master of the World’s Sorrow.

In English, he was called Dennis , which meant Dennis.

Erik Williams met Dennis at Harvard University. They were both graduate students.

Erik was earning an MBA at the Business School. He spent his days arguing case studies and pretending as if future success could be predicted from past failure.

Dennis was earning a Masters of Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, an institution where war criminals taught the global elite how to rule with an iron fist.

Erik met Dennis at a party on Commonwealth Ave in Brighton. The apartment was rented by another student at the Kennedy School. The rentee’s father was prominent in Mid-East politics.

The apartment was small. Dennis asked the rentee why he hadn’t chosen accommodations more befitting someone whose father was prominent in the governance of his native country.

“We afford only so much,” said the rentee. “My father isn’t too corrupt.”

“All things in time, my friend,” said Dennis. “In the domains of the Prophet, Peace Be Unto Him, even the agèd learn on which side their bread is buttered.”

Dennis was living in a Victorian mansion on Chauncy Street. His father owned the building.

Anyway, Erik and Dennis were at a party in this apartment on Comm Ave in Brighton. They both arrived alone. The guests were boring.

Dennis noticed that Erik was examining the rentee’s bookshelves. He walked over and introduced himself.

He told Erik to call him Dennis.

“Do you recognize any volumes befitting of your tastes?” asked Dennis.

“They’re all textbooks.”

“I myself am a man of some refined literary avarice,” said Dennis.

This was before Erik had moved to the Bay Area. He’d yet to develop a taste for juvenile literature.

No one had heard of Annie Zero because Annie Zero didn’t exist. Baby was licking his wounds from the failure of Hot Mill Steam. He hadn’t begun to think about the Megaverse or Neo-Maoists.

“I don’t know much about books, really,” said Erik to Dennis.

“As of late,” said Dennis to Erik, “I have cultivated a hunger and passion for the words and philosophy of the Russian émigré Ayn Rand. I find that engagement with her work relieves the vital center.”

The friendship was formed.

Erik and Dennis graduated at the same time.

Dennis would have graduated earlier but America got terrofucked.

In the aftermath, when dark accusations were flying about the Saudi royal family, Dennis took a leave of absence from the Kennedy School.

On September 13, 2001, he and several relatives charted a private jet out of Rhode Island’s T.F. Greene airport.

Dennis spent the next year in Paris. His father co-owned a hotel in le 8 e arrondissement . Dennis crashed in a palatial suite on the penultimate floor. He ingested a great amount of Bolivian cocaine and fucked a copious number of high priced sex-workers while listening to the albums of Iron Maiden. His favorites were Seventh Son of a Seventh Son and The Number of the Beast .

One time, when he was high on Bolivian cocaine and listening to Iron Maiden and in the company of a sex-worker with a great deal of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis, Dennis imagined that he himself was the seventh son of a seventh son.

“I am not a simple prince of The Kingdom of Saud,” he told the sex-worker, “But also am I born the seventh one, born of woman, the seventh son! I have the power to heal! I have the gift of the second sight! So it is written! So it shall be done!”

“ Mais oui, bien sûr, mon mari ,” said the sex-worker in Tamil-inflected French. “ Mais ma chatte ne ronronne. Passe-moi la Blanche neige .”

When America was back to business and using cluster bombs to transform illiterate Pashtuns into scattered chunks of bruised meat, Dennis returned to Harvard.

A few months after graduation, Dennis offered Erik a job with Fear and Respect Holdings Ltd.

Dennis formed Fear and Respect with a capital seed of $100,000,000. The money was a graduation present from his father.

For over three decades, the old man, His Royal Highness Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud, had run his own company. He’d built it into a powerhouse and made himself the third richest man in the Middle East.

One of Fatih bin Muhammad’s few failures came during the dotcom era of the 1990s, when he’d lost a lot of money on bad investments. The most notorious was Kozmo.com.

Kozmo.com was a one-hour delivery service that sold goods below cost and hoped to make up the money on delivery fees. The hysteria of the moment was such that even with a business model dedicated to losing money, the company raised about $250,000,000 in capital.

Dennis’s father had invested $20,000,000. The money disappeared in about a year. Fatih bin Muhammad was convinced that while the Internet offered growth opportunities, he himself didn’t understand the burgeoning online world.

As he was learning this lesson about the new digital economy, Fatih bin Muhammad was also wracked with concern about his son.

Heretofore, Dennis had proved to be little more than a useless layabout. His only appreciable skills were: (1) An internal radar which allowed him to land at any major airport in the world and immediately locate the city’s upscale drug dealers. (2) Fucking high priced sex-workers.

Fatih bin Muhammad would be damned to Karacehennem before he allowed Dennis to become another useless Saudi playboy. He combined his two problems and decided that Dennis would run a company which invested in Internet and media.

“My son, my son,” he said, “I’m too old for the Internet. My body grows weak and betrays me. Such illness. No longer shall I be called Abū Mamduh. All now shall know me as Abū al-Amrāḍ.

“But you, my child, you are yet young. The swift blood of your mother runs through those veins. The Internet is for the young. Mass entertainment is for the young. Do not shame your father. Go and prove yourself. Conquer the Internet! Conquer new and old media!”

Fear and Respect Holdings Ltd. was formed.

Erik was Dennis’s first hire. On the whole, the situation worked. They had some successes. They had some failures. They made more money than they lost. Fatih bin Muhammad was happy.

Erik only lasted about two years with Fear and Respect. He hated the constant travel and he couldn’t handle Dennis’s frequent insistence that they smoke DMT in brothels.

“I’m good with whores,” Erik said while giving notice. “And I can deal with elves revealing universal secrets in 360° vision, but I can’t handle elfin revelation in Castilian whorehouses. It’s too much for me.”

Erik left Fear and Holding with a decent severance package and a few words of Dennis’s advice: “Get to San Francisco! I am certain there is money awaiting your conquest. Fear not, dear friend, for I will come and visit. My father owns two buildings in the Haight and another in the Financial District.”