I read I Hate the Internet through the foggy perception of a man sick enough to pity himself but not sick enough to cancel his obligations. I read I Hate the Internet in a pause between scuttling from meetings to a class. I read I Hate the Internet on a chair by my fireplace, when it’s freezing out and later, when the temperature has unexpectedly jumped, I read I Hate the Internet on a bench in the sun, leaves dead and decaying heaped in a drift around my feet. I read I Hate the Internet while drinking more than the recommended dosage of cough syrup (dextromethorphan only — just because we are sick does not mean we have to be uncivilized), and so the haze of a mild cold isn’t the only haze through which I read I Hate the Internet. I read I Hate the Internet aloud in bed to my ailing girlfriend, who really took to “drp slut” not only as an insult but also as a handle. That was back when I was just starting reading I Hate the Internet. She was sick then, and I was not…
I arrive 40 minutes early to a farewell symposium for N. Katherine Hayles and—it seems only appropriate—I read I Hate the Internet. A classmate sits on the couch across from me, pulls out her own copy of the book. Do you hate the internet too? Maggie asks me, before making a crack about how it’s pretty bad, but it’s a “bad novel,” so that must mean it’s OK. I can tell: she’s using irony.
(I had assumed I would not be the first to post to the blog. Since it seems I will be, I use Maggie now as an imaginary interlocutor.)
To begin with, I Hate the Internet is a “bad novel.”
I will say what to me seems obvious. Kobek designating his novel a “bad novel” is not a way to hold his book at arm’s length and excuse its faults. Rather, it is an intentional generic description, one positing, positively, a new genre of novels, “bad novels,” defined diametrically against the dominant form of literary novels today, “good novels.”
Kobek lays out his notion of the “good novel” early. This is the novel funded by the CIA, buoyed by their support of the Paris Review and their engineering of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature (24). It is the novel that goes by the name literary fiction, that is universally thought of as serious, that is thought to influence people, change culture, and shape international affairs. Why else would the CIA fund it?
It is thus not primarily the “program aesthetic” of the legions of MFA “good novels” that Kobek’s notional “bad novels” protest. Rather, it is the belief in the efficaciousness of novels.
I Hate the Internet is a book that loves to complain, or rather, to espouse vaguely leftist commonsense about the semi-hidden evils of contemporary society. Its bugbears are familiar to any vague leftist who daily trawls the web.
A Partial List; or, Cool Topics, Bro:
Misogyny (28); Eurocentrism in its American form (31); the hypocrisy of the American founding fathers (31); corporate greed (32); bourgeois appropriation (41); the Truth about Walt Disney (45); anti-black language bias (50); the preterition of female to male sexuality (56); corporate surveillance (57); accidental semio-labor, or, the extraction of profits from free expressive labor (58); clicktivism (63); cults of celebrity (64); deregulation (95); Bill Clinton’s (neo)liberalism (96); torture (96); George W. Bush as the Worst President Ever (96); Alan Greenspan (96); reformism (97); inflated corporate valuations (105); the prohibition on Gay Marriage (110); Lady Gaga (119); Weapons of Mass Destruction, and their non-appearance in Iraq (124); gentrification; cultural appropriation (131); misuse of the word “irony” (134); scolds who care too much about misuse of the word “irony” (134); colonialism (169); global warming (184); overpopulation (184); racial bias in policing (202); racism (210) and liberal racism (212); the CIA funding of the crack epidemic (220); and radicalized beauty standards (223).
I Hate the Internet is a book that loves to complain about the familiar bugbears of the vague left while doing about the same amount of work to dismantle them as the clicktivism it mocks. Like the online critical gesture, all the book does is unmask injustice. This is the familiar liberal solution: show hidden violence for what it is. After decades of critique, after a vast critical (or semi-critical) apparatus growing up on the internet, perhaps the only shred of subversiveness in I Hate the Internet’s persistent unmasking is in shouting about the mereness of this unmasking. What does it tell me about myself, a sympathetic reader might wonder about himself, that I keep nodding along, and that that feels good. How do the yeps I pencil in the margins indict me?
Kobek’s novel is not an abdication of the efficacy that “good novels” actually wielded over the political sphere. The idea of that influence is “insane.”[1] All that I Hate the Internet does is drop the pretense.
That is the meaning of the refusal to write or include the 25th chapter, which would have “served as the ideological heart of the book” (210). It is a refusal to pretend any longer about the efficacy of the novel. Indeed, it is more than the book that is at stake, since I Hate the Internet takes in its sights both “good novels” and internet discourse: this is an argument about language. “Expressing concern about racism,” Kobek writes, “was a new religion and focusing on language rather than political mechanics was an effortless, and meaningless, way of making sure one was seen in a front-row pew of the new church” (212).[2]
I Hate the Internet doesn’t take the step to efficacy it signals, but—according to its own reckoning—by evacuating itself of its “ideological heart” it at least avoids the heartwarming liberal fantasy it disdains.
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[1] “The funding of good novels was based on an abandoned misapprehension that writers, being the apparent creators of culture, has come impact on contemporary international affairs. ¶ This was, of course, insane” (200).
[2] Note, y’all, that he’s talking about us, as he notes on the next page: “The curious thing was that Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Blogspot … were the stomping grounds of self-styled intellectual and social radicals” (213).
