Jarett Kobek - I Hate the Internet

“San Francisco, fuck your ethnic cleansing! Fuck the massive decrease in your African-American population! Fuck your gentrification! Fuck your working class, too, for being so deluded by the shiny baubles of consumerism that their every protest only comes too late, when the die is cast and the deed is done! Fuck everyone who thought that the newest business would improve the neighborhood only to discover two years later that they couldn’t afford their rent!

“San Francisco, your future is a vast ethnic ghetto! The Mark Zuckerbergs of the world are working on immigration reform. They don’t give a fuck about Latinos but they love using Latinos as a disguise for their agenda! Their goal is to replace their existing workforce with workers from Asian countries. Because tech workers from Asia will work for one-third the salary! All the low level cogs in the tech industry are so fucked up their own asses that while they were hosting public mournings for net neutrality, they failed to get anything like a political education! They have no idea what’s happening to them! They can’t conceive of the natural path of business! They can’t believe that all companies which create a middle class then systematically dismantle it!

“All of your luxury condo developments will be the slums of the future! You will have tens of people crammed into every 2BR shithole and none of the new residents will care about your granite counter tops with full backsplash or your handset ceramic tile entries or your European hinges or your melamine interiors! You will be a dystopian slum like in the shitty novels that all the tech idiots read back in the 1980s, except nothing will be fun and the hackers won’t be cool! There is no cypherpunk future! The cypherpunk future is cancelled! The future will be like the past! Boring and full of shitty jobs! Poor people bussed to and fro, working on the latest rollout of the PageRank algorithm!

“Fuck you, San Francisco! I’m moving back to Los Angeles where the rich people are honest in their deceits! I am moving back to Los Angeles where all of the bullshit is transparent because everyone is a total idiot! I am moving back to Los Angeles where I can watch SpongeBob SquarePants sexually harass teenagers on Hollywood Boulevard! I am moving back to Los Angeles where gentrification barely works because everything is a hideous strip mall and there is nothing worth destroying!

“San Francisco, true change is possible! All you need to do is install adblockers on every web browser! It can all change tomorrow if you spend the three minutes on Google learning how to dismantle Google! Do it! Freedom is yours!

“A short term solution! The fundamental problem is that every technology embeds the ideologies of its creators! Who made the Internet? The military! The Internet is the product of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency! We call it DARPA for short! Who worked for DARPA? DARPA was a bunch of men! Not a single woman worked on the underlying technologies that fuel our digital universe! Men are the shit of the world and all of our political systems and philosophies were created and devised without the input of women! Half of the world’s population lives beneath systems of government and technological innovation into which their gender had zero input! Democracy is a bullshit ideology that a bunch of slaveholding Greek men constructed between rounds of beating their wives! All the presumed ideologies of men were taken for inescapable actualities and designed into the Internet! Packet switching is an incredible evil!

“The Internet is the last stand of the Patriarchy. It was designed by warmongering men to systematically dehumanize women! The whole thing is fucked! It’s where straight men are hosting their final battle! They’ve discovered the grim truth of their own obsolescence! They lost control of the complex systems we call society, so they created a new one! A new one where they could play by their own rules! Rules devised according to the tepid pseudo-philosophical thought of Ayn Rand and junk science fiction! Women, you can’t win! Not if you play on their terms! Not if you use the Internet!

“Women must develop their own Internet! They must group together and engineer a new, gynocentric Internet and they must exclude all the stupid assumptions of men in its implementation and design! They must not repeat its mistakes! No bullshit about freedom of speech, no bullshit about individual liberties, no bullshit reimagining of juvenile literature! No IPv4! No packet switching! Packet switching is the root of all evil! When women have finished engineering their own Internet, they must ban men from it! For at least ten years until the bugs are worked out!”

J. Karacehennem stopped talking.

“That’s all I’ve got,” he said.

“How do you feel?”

“It didn’t really do much. I guess it was worth trying.”

One of the tourists walked up to J. Karacehennem. She was a young woman, maybe twenty-two years old.

Her father was a powerful man who had made a great deal of money enslaving his countrymen and making them build consumer electronics like the iPad and the iPhone .

She had not come to Twin Peaks to hear the towelheaded son of a Turkish camelfucker holler into nothingness.

She stared at him. He stared back.

Then she said, “Diu nei puk gai gwai lo.”

This is what it meant: Fuck you till you fall down in the street, foreign devil.

Then it was New Year’s Eve.

Adeline was invited to a soirée at Mike Kitchell’s apartment. Mike Kitchell’s apartment was on 26th Street near Mission.

Mike Kitchell was best friends with J. Karacehennem. Adeline suspected that her invitation derived from the simple fact that J. Karacehennem had fled San Francisco and Mike Kitchell felt a little lonely.

The transition from 2013 to 2014 came in Mike Kitchell’s kitchen, with everyone looking through Mike Kitchell’s windows. Fireworks were exploding over the Mission.

Adeline even smoked a few of Mike Kitchell’s cigarettes. Mike Kitchell smoked Marlboro Menthol Lights 100s. Cigarette smoking was a vice that Adeline did not enjoy or indulge. But she was slightly drunk and it was 2014. So she lit up.

Mike Kitchell’s boyfriend Dean Smith was there. Dean Smith was an excellent artist with too small of a reputation.

Mike Kitchell was tweeting about New Year’s Eve. His WaNks Index Score was 8.374449339207048.

Konrad Steiner was there. So was Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta. So was a friend of Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, but Adeline failed to catch the friend’s name.

A few days earlier, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta’s apartment had burned down. Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta had been out of town.

J. Karacehennem, Mike Kitchell, Dean Smith and The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter spent Christmas morning rescuing the cat.

The cat was fine. The apartment was destroyed.

Everyone agreed that 2013 had been, without question, the worst year that they could remember.

Only Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta had a moderate amount of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis.

Erik Willems was not there. Adeline thought about inviting him but he was busy.

His Royal Highness Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud, also known as Dennis, was in town.

Dennis was having a housewarming party. He’d just closed on the top floor condo of a building on Alabama Street.

Dennis’s new condo featured custom LED-lit soffits and built-out niches, an EcoSmart fireplace with white oak surround, radiant heat floors with zone nested controls, a Siedle video intercom entry and alarm system, automatic sun shades, ebony stained rift-cut white oak floors, a private elevator to every level of the home including the panoramic view roof terrace, a poured concrete gas fire pit, a Calcutta marble kitchen with custom German designed Leicht cabinetry, Axor and Hans Grohe bathroom fixtures, two Carrara marble bathrooms with Toto low flush toilets, CAT-5 wiring for phone and data, and shielded CAT-6 for media.