Jarett Kobek: I Hate the Internet

“I couldn’t give two shakes of a hangman’s holler,” said Adeline, “about my comics being online and freely available. The Internet hasn’t, as far as I can tell, affected our sales one metric inch. My collaborator feels otherwise. He feels that the Internet has impacted our ability to make good money off our old work. That’s probably wrong, darlings, but what do I know? I barely use email. Have you seen my website? It’s très pathétique . I don’t use Twitter or Facebook. What does send yours truly into a tizzy is when people won’t admit that they’re just stealing other people’s shit. The Internet is a weird place. Everyone makes everything a moral crusade. Why can’t you just steal my books? Why must you be justified? Why must you bore me to death with a looooooooong speech about how copyright is actually copywrong?”

So there Adeline was in a classroom on the CCA campus over by Mission Bay, talking to a bunch of kids.

They were decades younger than her.

She was in her mid-forties. She was kind of famous. She was expressing a series of unpopular opinions. She was in public. It was 2013.

It was here that she made the one unforgivable mistake of the early Twenty-First Century.

She neglected to notice that someone was recording every word that she said.

Months before her appearance in Kevin Killian’s class, Adeline had involved herself with a man named Erik Willems who didn’t have much eumelanin in the basal cell layer of his epidermis.

Erik Willems worked in information technology and Internet startups. Erik Willems was rich. He was a kind of rich that Adeline had never encountered. And she was from Pasadena.

He had explained his money to her in abstract terms, saying, “During periods of economic and societal contraction, the value of labor falls and the value of capital rises. Physical work stops mattering. Money starts making its own money. Some people are good at helping money make money.”

“Our dear old Mother,” said Adeline, “made beaucoup bucks from Daddy’s money, but even our decadence wasn’t nothing like yours.”

Like many of the men who worked with technology in the information economy, Erik Willems had a deep affection for juvenile literature.

Which is to say that he liked Science Fiction.

Which is to say that he also liked Robert Heinlein.

Which is to say that he also liked J.R.R. Tolkein.

Which is to say that he also liked Ayn Rand.

Science Fiction was a dying genre in which writers with no personal understanding of the human experience posited many theoretical futures of the species.

Robert Heinlein was a eumelaninless Libertarian maniac who had written tedious Science Fiction about futuristic group sex. The robots in Robert Heinlein’s books were always horny. The aliens were even hornier. The aliens in Robert Heinlein’s books were randier than dunghill roosters.

His most famous work was Stranger in a Strange Land, which was about a Martian named Michael Valentine who loves fucking and teaches Earthlings how to fuck like a Martian. Stranger in a Strange Land had influenced many straight people in the San Francisco Bay Area into adopting non-traditional sexual lifestyles.

The most common thing amongst straight people in the Bay Area who had adopted non-traditional sexual lifestyles was their need to discuss these non-traditional sexual lifestyles at every possible opportunity. This had the effect of making dinner parties both very annoying and very awkward.

J.R.R. Tolkein was the most abused author in the history of the English language. He had written The Hobbit , which was for children, and The Lord of the Rings , which was for adults. He had no eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.

Both of his books were informed by his terrible experiences in World War I during the Battle of the Somme, where he watched every thing around him die.

World War I was one of the biggest wars in human history. Wars were giant parties for the ruling elites, who sometimes thought it might be great fun to make the poor kill each other.

The poor were well-paid for their deaths and blown-off limbs and their scarred faces. The poor were called heroes and allowed to propagate the myths of noble battle and fraternity, which were ideas used to convince new generations of poor people that it was okay to kill other poor people.

Both of Tolkein’s books were about elves, wizards and magic. Both books were read by morons. Both books had been turned into a series of idiotic films featuring a lot of flatulence.

Ayn Rand was a speed freak, a social welfare beneficiary and a sex cultist. She was quite possibly the most influential thinker of the last fifty years. There wasn’t much eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis.

She wrote books about how social welfare beneficiaries were garbage who deserved to die in the gutter. All of her books were terrible. All of her books were popular. Several had been turned into unpopular movies.

She was well regarded by very rich people unwilling to accept that their fortunes were a combination of random chance and an innate ability to humiliate others.

Ayn Rand’s books told very rich people that they were good, that their pursuit of wealth was moral and just. Many of these people ended up as CEOs or in high levels of American government.

Ayn Rand was the billionaire’s best friend.

Some of Ayn Rand’s better known followers included:

Paul Ryan, the 2012 Republican candidate for Vice President of the United States of America.

Vince Vaughn, a dough-faced actor who had starred in such hilarious comedies as The Watch, Couples Retreat, Four Christmases, The Internship, and Delivery Man. The Internship was a film about two adults who receive internships at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley.

Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, a billionaire weapons profiteer and incompetent hedge fund manager who wanted to build independent nation states on floating ocean platforms.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, an unprofitable website dedicated to the destruction of the publishing industry.

Ron Paul, a septuagenarian medical doctor and perennial Presidential protest candidate.

Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1986 to 2006. In his relative youth, Greenspan sat at the knee of Ayn Rand whilst she explained that poor people were garbage who deserved to die in the gutter.

None of these men had eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises.

Another of Erik Willems’s favorite writers was Adeline’s best friend, Baby.

Adeline met Baby during September of 1986 in an Alphabet City squat. She had lived in New York from 1986 to 1996. It was eleven years with only two instances of life beyond the city.

The first instance was in 1988, when she and Baby went to live with Suzanne in Pasadena. The second was in 1993, when Adeline went to live with Jeremy Winterbloss and his girlfriend Minerva, who shared an apartment in San Francisco’s Lower Haight.

Back in 1986, Adeline was dating a punk rocker who lived in the Alphabet City squat. Baby had that very day arrived in New York on a bus from Wisconsin. He knew someone living in the squat.

The day ended with Baby’s clothes being stolen by a junkie and Adeline’s boyfriend screwing the brains out of another girl. Baby, a former high school athlete, beat the shit out of Adeline’s boyfriend. Adeline invited Baby to crash at her dorm.

With the exception of a two year period in the mid-1990s, they had been simpatico ever since.

While he lived in New York, Baby had come into his own as a writer of Science Fiction. His first published story was entitled “Heroin of the Masses.”