Rating: 4/5, good
“A useful novel against men, money, and the filth of Instagram”
I Hate the Internet is a very strange book. It’s half novel and half anti-tech industry diatribe. Jarett Kobek beats his breast to social justice precepts while railing against call-out culture and slacktivism. There are characters, but they take a backseat to the social criticism (much like in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which Kobek both reviles and imitates).
The central character is Adeline, a Generation X comic book artist. Her friends and relations compose the rest of the sprawling cast of characters. The plot can be a little hard to follow because the two main characters have pen names, but it’s clearly explained on the Wikipedia page (written, I’m guessing, by Kobek himself, based on the effusive praise of Kevin Killian), so that might be helpful to have on hand while reading.
I Hate the Internet has some very funny and insightful parts, but to get to them you have to trudge through a lot of random digressions about economics and politics and history and tolerate having these things explained to you like you’re five years old (to be fair, he does warn you that the text is “276 pages of mansplaining”).
Most of Kobek’s ire is reserved for Twitter. He talks about how Twitter gentrified a black area, and makes money whenever black activists post to Twitter. Adeline does a talk for Kevin Killian’s class, in which she wonders aloud why women would want to work for tech companies, because “all technologies wind up in the hands of warmongers” and “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. The talk goes viral on Twitter and triggers a lot of misogynistic threats. The novel was published in 2016, but set in 2013, a year before GamerGate. His issues with Twitter are: 1, gentrification, 2, exploitation of intellectual property, 3, lack of response to cyberbullying and online misogyny.
The exploitation of intellectual property facet was the one I found most interesting, as someone who spends a little too much time on social media. You post on social media for fun, but Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr/Instagram makes money from your productivity via advertising dollars. It runs into that old art problem of “If you would do it anyway, do you deserve to get paid?” I would say it depends on the quality of the postings, and how much you reblog vs how much you post original content.
With a little looking around, I found out that you can post ads to Twitter and earn “up to $0.42 per click”, while Twitter earns $0.50-$2.00 a click on its ads. House wins, of course, but house builds a platform which provides a certain amount of value to you by allowing you to use it as a vehicle for expression and communication.
However, at the same time you’re giving advertisers access to information about you (gender, location, hobbies) so that they can better tailor their ads to you as a customer, and then bleed money from you by getting you to buy funny t-shirts or mugs or whatever. There’s an exchange there, but is it equivalent? I don’t feel that I can say, but I Hate the Internet did make me think more critically about what I provide to internet services vs what they provide to me.
Speaking of sketchy valuation of labor, a repeated theme in I Hate the Internet is how online SJWs are using machines built by extremely low-paid Chinese workers, which is best put forth in this paragraph:
“It didn’t suggest that most educated White people, by virtue of their interaction with consumer electronics built by slaves, demonstrated that they didn’t believe in inclusion or fairness or justice. Fifty years ago, they had been ignorant in their unexamined racism and now they were ignorant in their unexamined anti-racism. They could switch back at any time. Expressing concern about racism 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. The prayed not from any hard earned process of thought or genuine faith but because failing to bow and scrap before the shibboleths of the moneyed political Left might hurt their job prospects.”
Chinese workers in Apple factories are paid about $1.50 an hour / $300 a month to assemble iPhones. To be honest, I didn’t know those numbers before looking them up, but they are shocking. The general cost of living in China is about $600, according to this site, and since the wages don’t pay enough for apartments, the factory workers have to live in dorms, which are pretty horrific looking.
It’s strange that something can be so ubiquitous and yet so rarely talked about. And it’s not just the tech industry – it’s pretty much every product you can buy in America. I guess the reason we don’t talk about it is because it’s depressing, and we don’t know what to do about it. We can put pressure on companies like Apple to pay workers more – that’s one thing. They charge a premium for their products, but demand speed and low costs from their manufacturers. The problem is, there’s only so much the consumers can do if the product is a necessity, and cell phones have become somewhat of a necessity for us in the U.S. And lower income consumers have fewer options when it comes to buying ethically, especially in clothing. But maybe we’re at fault for expecting to get more stuff for less money? Our consumer culture is very “deal” focused and not so much quality or ethics focused, but that does seem to be changing with certain ethical brands.
I do agree with Kobek about social media leftism being like a purity contest where echo chambers can form a group consensus that stifles individual thought. And all the fashionable terminology and having to constantly equivocate so as not to offend can be annoying. But I think in making this critique Kobek is doing the thing he says not to do: “focusing on language rather than political mechanics”. He doesn’t really have any suggestions for changing the problems found in the book, in fact his concluding chapters are pretty damn nihilistic. He appears to subscribe to the simplistic dictums of “Gentrification is BAD!” “Corporations are BAD!” “White people are BAD!” “Money is BAD!” that you see all plastered over social justice Twitter.
As annoying as this novel is, it does make you think critically about corporations and money and how corporations will exploit people as much as they are allowed to. And it has some great one-liners. And a couple sorely needed take-downs of Star Wars, scifi/fantasy, cosplay, and the idea that *words are magic*.
I thought this part was really interesting as well:
“It’s just more masculine bullshit,” said The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter. “Men are always writing books about killing each other. When they aren’t writing books about killing each other, then they’re just killing each other.”
Since reading this book, I’ve had the phrase “masculine bullshit” stuck in my head. It describes so much media, from Star Wars to classic literature to the vast majority of video games. When I was reading A History of Western Philosophy, I ran across this Nietzsche quote that’s also been stuck in my head: “Almost everything that we call ‘higher culture’ is based upon the spiritualizing and intensifying of cruelty.” I also think it’s good to remain on-guard against the common assumption that art is deep to the extent that it is dark and/or violent.
I Hate the Internet is a LOT (if this book were a person, it would be your know-it-all friend who never stops talking), but it has some really funny parts that I bookmarked and might return to when I need a laugh or a sharp piece of invective to quote, so I’m giving it a 4/5.
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