Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

As they got out of the car, Adeline noticed that it was very cold. She assumed that the weather was too frigid for anyone to deliver a speech. She also noticed that the cold hadn’t stopped the tourists. A large number appeared to be from China. They were taking pictures of the city, even though much of it was obscured by fog.

“Darling,” Adeline said to J. Karacehennem, “if you’re going to do it, then now’s your moment. Otherwise let’s go and eat.”

The hand of the clock reached the dot of 8.00.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said the voice of J. Karacehennem, “Mr. Thompson will not speak to you tonight. I’ve taken over. You wanted to hear a report on the world crisis but instead you will hear me babble like a maniac for an ungracious amount of time.”

The tourists turned to look at J. Karacehennem. He had done many book events. He had learned how to project his voice. He could be very loud indeed.

Adeline tried not to feel mortified.

“For twelve years, you have been asking: who is J. Karacehennem? This is J. Karacehennem speaking. I am the man who is sick of San Francisco. I am the man who has come to shout impotently at a city from a hillside scenic overlook. If you wish to hear the babblings of an incoherent lunatic, then I am the man for you.”

The tourists moved in closer.

Oh great God almighty, thought Adeline, What if he starts screaming about Falun Gong and UFOs? After all, he was his father’s son.

“San Francisco,” continued J. Karacehennem, “You are the worst place on earth! You have taken the dream of a bohemian enclave for misfits and morons and you have transformed it into a Disneyland for the nouveau riche. You have replaced your artists and your independent movie theaters with locally sourced restaurants! You have taken an enormous shit on the independent value of culture. You have made it exponentially harder for freaks to find peace! San Francisco, though you may not believe it, I am here to inform you that your shit stinks!

“You have given shelter to the worst people imaginable. You have elevated annoying nerds to minor celebrities. You have made us suffer beneath the terrible lash of Mark Zuckerberg. You have bequeathed to us a vision of the billionaire in a hooded sweatshirt and you have created an environment in which no one will acknowledge the idiotic theater of a billionaire in a hooded sweatshirt!

“You have taken the last true good thing, the initial utopian vision of the Internet, and you have perverted it into a series of interlocking fiefdoms with no purpose other than serving advertisements. Listen, San Francisco, I was there. I know what the Internet was like before people used it to make money. 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 386sx! I am the only literary writer in the world who coded his own BBS software in badly indented C++! I am the only literary writer in America who can use the ncurses library!

“The Internet is in my blood. I am of the Internet. I know that everything on the Internet which we take as inevitable was engineered by nerds with a fondness for shitty novels. The reason why people harass teenagers into suicide is because a bunch of White dudes with no sense of the human experience decided that they would build anonymity into the Internet as a feature rather than a bug! You nerds have blood on your hands!

“Fuck Steve Jobs and fuck your worship of Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs was no more than nothing! His only distinction was that, unlike every other awful CEO in tech, he had a mild sense of design. His jeans were rubbish! His turtle necks were awful! He owed seven percent of Disney! Apple was a company run by a bully surrounded by cultists so indoctrinated that they didn’t realize they were being bullied. In the end, all the sycophancy killed their god! The man’s death was the most public suicide since Marilyn Monroe or maybe Jesus Christ! I know, I know, I know. I know that my criticism is without merit because I know that the iPad changed everything!

“San Francisco, you are the most beautiful city in America and you are full of America’s most annoying people! You were annoying before the tech people arrived! You created a half-baked gauzy ideology of narcissism disguised as self-empowerment and now you have spread your filth across the world! Philip K. Dick saw you for what you are! That’s why he wrote The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. You are nothing more than a city of people who thought they could brute force their way to enlightenment by buying a Beatles LP! You haven’t changed!

“Fuck anyone who believes it is their duty to lecture poor people about the appropriate terminology! You bags of shit put forth your commentary on platform technologies owned by your enemies! You are making money for rich White dudes! Every critique of the racist cisgender homophobic misogynistic patriarchy that you post on Tumblr just makes money for Tumblr! All you’re doing is advertising for the very people and companies that perpetuate the economic system of injustice which you are supposedly challenging!

“Fuck your unbelievable ability to pick on the powerless. Fuck all the crocodile tears that you shed every time a mentally backwards idiot calls some Turk a towelhead camelfucker! I don’t give a fuck about the opinions of illiterate gas station attendants in Dubuque! It’s so easy to demonstrate your own righteousness and it’s so easy to challenge the social order when all you’re doing is picking on idiots who are better off ignored and left to wither in the stench of their own lives! You have transformed activism into high school politics! You are no better than nothing! To Hell with all language police!

“You are buried beneath your own celebrity gossip! Buried beneath tweets about how awful it is that drunken Republican Congresspersons from the South hold opinions you don’t like! You are a city and a nation of bullies and you are very selective in your targets! Maybe it’s not the fault of the people who use these elaborate mechanisms of the Internet! Maybe it’s the fault of the people who engineered these systems to prey on the worst instincts of the human race because preying on the worst instincts of people is a much better way to generate advertising revenue than appeals to the angels of our better nature!

“Fuck your insipid and limp vision of multiculturalism which has nothing to do with the lives of the people outside of your hidey-holes! I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about! Come to Hollywood Boulevard on a Saturday night and reconcile your racial and gender politics with the club scene! Please, save me from my ignorance! Please, tell me more about Pussy Riot!

“Down with your literary people, San Francisco! Down with all literary people! Book people are the only people who had the natural resources to resist the Internet’s misery! Book people are the only people who have a half-way interesting argument to make against the Internet! Instead, book people rolled over like dogs at the kitchen table! The very first time that they saw a website! Begging their master for a scratch of the stomach! Publishing evolves and consolidates and rots from the inside but no technology can ever overwhelm Charlotte Brontë! Nothing can deal with Villette! Nothing ever changes, the world is the same as it was in 79AD! The empire never ended! The only defense is William MAKEPEACE Thackeray and Gloria Naylor! Now all writers are on Twitter, pretending they can’t spell in pathetic attempts to win a larger audience! Fuck all of you! Fuck all of you except for Kevin Killian! Kevin Killian is the only one amongst you who’s worth a damn! And Dodie Bellamy too!

“Fuck every teenager who talks with his or her parents! Your parents are the fucking enemy! They love having you on the Internet! They can monitor you! You must throw down the tools of your oppressors! You must rebel against tweeting about television and you must cast down your iPad, even though it has changed everything. You must hold vinyl records close to your heart and listen to them while you read paperback books and stop taking the drugs your parents’ doctors have prescribed for you! If you must do drugs, teenagers of America, have the decency to buy street drugs from actual dealers! Make sure your gay sex is perverse! Stop having cute gay sex! Straight people are your enemy! They only want you for a pet!