Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

“At a certain point of mass celebrity, people stop being people,” said J. Karacehennem. “What is Madonna really? Madonna is a ray of light, an untouchable thing. It doesn’t matter that once she was a pop star who released a book of pornography. She’s become something else. You can never know Madonna because there is no Madonna. Even if you meet Madonna, you still wouldn’t know Madonna. You’d be talking to a physical being that carries all the weight of Madonna but the physical being of Madonna would not be Madonna. Like Atlas in Atlas Shrugged. What would happen if Madonna shrugged?”

“I somehow doubt that either of you know this, but I’ve met Madonna,” said Adeline. “Right after the premiere of Don Murphy’s Trill , when there was a great delusion that the film might succeed. Madonna was as boooooring as you might imagine. She was most definitively not a ray of light. Somehow she knew that I had lived in the old New York. She asked if the Cubbyhole was still open. I said, ‘Darling, I haven’t stepped foot in the city in two years and even if I did, you may rest assured that I’d have the good taste to stay away from 12th Street.’”

“It’s really no different than the Ancient Greeks and their gods,” said Christine.

“Do you have an altar for these people?” asked J. Karacehennem.

“Darling,” said Adeline. “Mine own eyes have rested upon it. It is fabulous.”

“Here’s my paranoid thought about the Bay Area,” said J. Karacehennem. “A few years ago this artist and sex-worker named Sadie Lune held an insemination ritual on 16th Street. I wasn’t there. I didn’t know anything about it, but from what I’ve been told it was a big orgy with an audience. At the end, Sadie Lune’s sperm donor, who was named Oberon, produced his sperm and it was inserted into Sadie Lune with the hopes of creating a child. Apparently it didn’t work, but I wonder if maybe by accident they created a demonic being that’s ruling over the city’s gentrification. An ethereal being, a Moon Child. Maybe that Moon Child is the spirit of the current tech bubble in all its evil glory, dancing on the rocks of Corona Heights. Maybe that’s the spirit of the age. Maybe it was created in an insemination ritual on 16th street.

“But who knows? Maybe the tech people are all just Running to Mama .”

“Running to Mama” was the title of a recent short story by Baby.

He’d written it a few months before Adeline’s flame-out in Kevin Killian’s classroom.

On the surface, everything in the story is identical to our world, but a few pages in and it becomes clear that, in this parallel world, the Internet is very different than our own.

After several creaky plot revelations that involve a woman addicted to Methamphetamine and obsessed with the 900 Theses of Pico della Mirandola, the reader discovers that the Internet on this parallel world is alive, a fully functioning intelligence, and that its primary purpose is not to enrich an oligarchy through a steady dose of celebrity gossip and destroyed lives, but rather to soothe and comfort its users by telling them that they’re all right, and that everything is going to be okay, and that the source of their distress is just a terrible person who’s jealous.

The effect of the Internet on the citizens of this parallel world is complete and total infantilization.

Whenever someone’s feelings are hurt, they go and complain to the Internet, which they have taken to calling “Mama.”

Using the Internet is called “Running to Mama.” Hence the title.

Adeline and J. Karacehennem were standing outside of Sparky’s. Christine had disappeared into a taxi.

“I’m proud of you,” said J. Karacehennem. “You made it through an entire evening without mentioning the cupcake or the pastry.”

“A person may yet learn,” said Adeline. “Tell me, how did you find Christine?”

“I don’t judge anyone’s religious beliefs because everyone’s religious beliefs are equally ridiculous. Besides, what can I say, really? My father believes in leprechauns. I’m very sympathetic. In my heart, beneath it all, I am a pagan.”

“What did you think of Bertrand?”

Bertrand was Christine’s boyfriend. He’d been at the reading and left in the middle. He had to wake up early. He worked for an architect with an office near the Presidio.

“Are you asking because you think I didn’t like him?”

“Honey child, I simply know that you didn’t like him.”

“How could you tell?”

“There was a point where you shied away, when he was distracted by that dreadful little creature reading poesy about Sarah Palin.”

“He seemed okay,” said J. Karacehennem. “It’s only that he was too proud, really.”

“Proud?”

“He kept talking about how his girlfriend was a girl like any other but that she just has a dick. He said it to me. I heard him say it to two other people. Word for word in his accent. ‘My girlfriend is like any other, but my girlfriend has a dick.’ You could hear it in his voice. All the pride.”

Time was passing. Summer arrived. J. Karacehennem had been chosen for a writer’s residency in rural Denmark and disappeared into Scandinavia. Christine was busy with Bertrand.

Adeline had other friends. She saw some. She ignored others.

Most of her time was spent with Erik Willems.

Bromato was failing. The CEO was burning money at an unsustainable pace. There was a question about whether or not Bromato would make it to a Series C round of funding. They were not making money for HRH Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud, also known as Dennis.

MoriaMordor had given Bromato millions of dollars before its CEO and other co-founders had graduated college. They’d been attending Stanford University when they made their pitch.

Stanford University was yet another educational institution that wrapped a cloak of the humanities around its development of new weapons for future wars.

Adeline and Erik were eating dinner at a restaurant on Valencia called Cafe Ethiopia.

Erik Willems had suggested eating at Local’s Corner. Adeline turned him down.

“I think if I ate there, J. Karacehennem would simply murder me.”

“Isn’t he in Denmark?”

“If his emails are any indicator.”

“How would he even know?”

“His girlfriend might see us, darling. I simply shan’t take the risk.”

Adeline liked Cafe Ethiopia because the food was both incomprehensible and delicious. The decor was spartan. She also liked that Cafe Ethiopia was next door to Borderlands Books, a specialty bookstore focusing on Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.

She loathed the three genres but she liked checking to see if they had Baby’s full catalogue.

They always did. They had everything. Except for Hot Mill Steam.

Hot Mill Steam was out of print. So few copies had sold that it was difficult to find anywhere, even on the Internet, which was a wonderful resource for sexism, abusing the mentally ill, and libeling the dead.

Erik Willems was stuffing brown paste into his mouth.

“Darling,” said Adeline. “I have two questions for you. You can answer in whatever order you so please. Numero uno . Why in the blurry blazes did you give millions of dollars to college undergraduates? Numero dos . Have you read Hot Mill Steam ?”

Erik finished chewing.

“They came highly recommended. Some of their professors have steered us towards other investment opportunities that worked out. When they suggested we invest in Bromato, we ran the numbers and they made sense. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Numbers only tell you so much. You can’t predict the variables of human failure. People’s greed and emotion almost always get the best of them.”