PRAISE FOR
I HATE THE INTERNET
“Could we have an American Houellebecq? Jarett Kobek might come close, in the fervor of his assault on sacred cows of our own secretly-Victorian era, even if some of his implicit politics may be the exact reverse of the Frenchman’s. I just got an early copy of his newest, I Hate the Internet and devoured it—he’s as riotous as Houellebecq, and you don’t need a translator, only fireproof gloves for turning the pages” Jonathan Lethem
“A grainy political and cultural rant, a sustained shriek about power and morality in a new global era. It’s a glimpse at a lively mind at full boil … [An] entertaining novel of ideas … This book has soul as well as nerve. It suggests that, as the author writes, ‘The whole world was on a script of loss and people only received their pages moments before they read their lines.’” Dwight Garner, New York Times
“A brilliant, laugh-out-loud screed against the ‘overlapping global evils’ that the internet represents, a furious manifesto dressed in the guise of fiction, about a San Francisco artist whose life is upended when a recording surfaces online of her doing the unthinkable. It’s an eye-opening look at the world we live in, where our lives revolve around devices made by enslaved children in China, and where the only thing we feel empowered to do about it is complain…via said devices” Chicago Review of Books
“A book filled with outrage that needs to be felt, not framed, that talks about how we talk about a world in which we actually live” San Francisco Chronicle
“I Hate the Internet is thought provoking—and so funny! I can’t remember the last book I read that made me laugh this much. Kobek has a gift for seeing things from a different angle and for uncovering lies and invisible structures of society, and he does it in a playful, anarchistic and quirky way. The rows of association in this book—Kobek’s deconstructing voice—will keep you entertained and baffled throughout the reading” Dorthe Nors
“This is a relentless, cruel, hilariously inflamed satire of a loop of economic mystification and the reemergence of the credibility of the notion of Original Sin in the technological utopia of the present-day Bay Area and the world being remade in its image” Greil Marcus, Pitchfork
“A riproaring, biting, form-follows-function burlesque of the digital age that click-meanders its way like the ADHD freaks we’re all becoming while offering up compelling narrative lines that kept me clicking faster and faster. Read this book. Now” Dodie Bellamy
“With the nasty-eyed sharpness of Swift, Burroughs or Houellebecq Kobek writes a tripwire just above the level for walking. Everyone falls down. It’s a satire about losing track of the world. How? It takes a swipe at those that suppose we’re tracking the world we’re in, rather than just the world. The result of that first-person engorgement is a fetishised digitalized idiocy exposed as a blank hate state, a bleak panorama of digitised repression balanced on the corrosive manipulative belief in a centred world. If Donald Trump is the personification of the centred world, then Kobek’s satire can be directed towards him and all he stands for” 3:AM Magazine
JARETT KOBEK is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA was called ‘highly interesting,’ by the Times Literary Supplement, has appeared in Spanish translation, been the subject of much academic writing and was a recent and unexplained bestseller in parts of Canada.
i hate the internet
JARETT KOBEK
With many special thanks to James Hopkin
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London
WC1X 9HD
www.serpentstail.com
First published in 2016 in the USA by We Heard You Like Books,
A Division of U2603 LLC, Los Angeles, CA
Copyright © 2016 by Jarett Kobek
Illustrations “Time Magazine” & “Some Advertisements, Bro”
Courtesy of Sarina Rahman
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author
A CIP record for this book can be obtained from the British Library
eISBN 978 1 78283 314 7
a note on this edition
Over the centuries, many aspects of the early modern period have been eliminated from British life. These include wearing soiled Lincoln green, baiting bears, the Divine Right of Kings, and laughing at cripples from the banks of the River Fleet.
One relic of the early modern era that has survived into the present is the defamation law of the United Kingdom, which puts the burden of proof on the defendant. Instituted to keep people from killing each other over insults about small penises and big noses, it’s evolved into the primary method by which the ultra-rich prevent disparaging information about themselves from appearing in the press.
The most stunning example is the case of Sir Jimmy Savile, a living depravity who preyed on the young, the disabled and the dead. Savile dressed, acted, and spoke like a living depravity. Savile wrote newspaper columns about being a living depravity.
Yet through the persistent threat of defamation suits, Savile managed to stop any third-party reporting on his status as a living depravity. This allowed the living depravity to climb to the upper echelons of British society, where the living depravity became close personal friends with Prince Charles, Baroness Thatcher, and Peter Sutcliffe.
His image in the popular imagination was as the host of Jim’ll Fix It, a television show on which he berated children with non sequiturs while making their dreams come true, as long as those dreams fit within the allocated broadcast budgets of the BBC.
In an entirely unrelated note, there’s a technique in music, particularly amongst sub-Saharan Africans and peoples of the African diaspora, known as call and response. In call and response, a performer will call out to a crowd, which will elicit a verbal response.
“Do we have any stout Leeds lasses in the house?” asks the theoretical performer.
“Aye!” answers the theoretical crowd, indicating that there are indeed stout Leeds lasses in the house.
Anyway.
When this book says “hip,” then you, the reader, will think “hop.”
When this book says “hey,” then you, the reader, will think “ho.”
When this book says [JIM’LL FIX IT], then you, the reader, will know that something from this book’s original US edition has been changed on advice of counsel for fear of provoking litigation under English defamation law.
trigger warning
Capitalism, the awful stench of men, historical anachronisms, Jimmy Savile, death threats, violence, human bondage, faddish popular culture, despair, unrestrained mockery of the rich, threats of sexual violation, weak iterations of Epicurean thought, the comic book industry, the death of intellectualism, being a woman in a society that hates women, populism, an appalling double entendre, the sex life of Thomas Jefferson, genocide, celebrity, the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, discussions of race, Science Fiction, anarchism with a weakness for democracy, the people who go to California to die, millennial posturing, ~846kb of mansplaining, Neo-Hellenic Paganism, interracial marriage, elaborately named hippies practicing animal cruelty on goats, unjust wars in the Middle East, 9/11, seeing the Facebook profile of someone you knew when you were young and believed that everyone would lead rewarding lives.
chapter one
Long after she had committed the only unforgivable sin of the Twenty-First Century, someone on the Internet sent Adeline a message.
The message read: “Dear slut, I hope that you are gang-raped by syphilis-infected illegal aliens.”
The Internet was a wonderful invention. It was a computer network which people used to remind other people that they were awful pieces of shit.
ADELINE RECEIVED THIS MESSAGE because she had committed the only unforgivable sin of the early Twenty-First Century. But before she could arrive at that really big mistake, she had to make several smaller ones.
Some of her other mistakes: (1) She was a woman in a culture that hated women. (2) She’d become kind of famous. (3) She’d expressed unpopular opinions.
Being a kind of famous woman who expressed unpopular opinions in a culture that hated women was in itself a serious mistake, but neither it nor its constituent parts were the big one.
The big one was something else.
THE ABOVE OFFERS only one possible interpretation of the message, with both spelling and grammar adjusted for clarity. The original read: “Drp slut… hope u get gang rape…. bi bunch, uv siphilis elegial alines…………”
It is possible that “elegial alines” was not referencing the citizens of foreign countries who arrive in America by methods other than state-approved visas and green cards.
It is also possible that “drp slut” was something other than a general salutation followed by one of the hundreds of derogatory English terms for women. A “drp slut” could be any number of things.
“Drp” itself is somewhat tricky, as it lacks vowels. It might be short for derp, a common Internet neologism denoting stupidity. And while “drp” is rendered as dear it could as easily be deep.
“Slut” is one of the hundreds of derogatory English terms for women. These terms attach importance to the number of a woman’s sexual partners. There are no equivalent terms for men, which is some straight up bullshit.
“SLUT” IS ALSO the Danish word for end.
When stores in Denmark approached the final days of a merchandise sale, the proprietors of these stores tended to put up signs announcing a slutspurt.
Slutspurt was a colloquialism which meant end of the sale. Slutspurts were often embarrassing for Danes who hosted native English speakers.
It was possible that whoever sent Adeline the message was fluent in both English and Danish. It was possible their conjunction of the Danish word for end and “drp” was an erudite multilingual gambit, referencing the deep end of something. Perhaps a swimming pool.
On the other hand, the message was sent by someone on the Internet. They were probably just another dumb asshole who hated women.
chapter two
In the 1990s, when Adeline was in her early twenties and just out of college, she and her friend Jeremy Winterbloss started working together on a comic book called Trill. It was published in 32-page monthly pamphlets, with the art in black-and-white.
Adeline drew the pictures. Jeremy Winterbloss wrote the words.
Trill followed the story of an anthropomorphic cat named Felix Trill as he moved his way through a quasi-medieval world, discovering haunting vistas while battling other anthropomorphic animals.
Most of Trill was about a series of wars between anthropomorphic cats and anthropomorphic dogs. This changed with issue #50, when both sides put aside their differences and realized that they had a mutual enemy: hairless apes with a tendency towards fervent monotheism.
This shift in focus followed several months of Jeremy ingesting a prodigious number of psychedelic drugs.
During one acid trip, Jeremy had a vision of Felix Trill. The creation talked to its creator. Due to Jeremy’s misfiring neurochemistry, Felix Trill spoke with the voice of an old burnout.
“Hey man,” said Felix Trill to Jeremy, “You got it all mixed-up. The way you write me. It’s a real bummer. Because me and the dogs and all the other animals, we’re only fingers dipping below the surface of the ocean, and you’re a fish, deep in the hazy water, and you know the thing about fish, man, fish are full of hang-ups. You’re so uptight that all you see is the divided fingers. That’s your hassle, not ours. None of us can get with that trip. Your limited perception, man, is making you see five separate entities. You can’t see that me and the dogs and the other animals are all connected, we’re all part of the same hand. Five fingers, one hand. The hand is the important thing, brother. You gotta get more cosmic. Don’t be so heavy on the details. Keep it cool, friend.”
Adeline and Jeremy published seventy-five issues of Trill before changes in the market made the project unprofitable.
Issue #75 appeared in 1999.
JEREMY EARNED A DECENT LIVING off Trill. Adeline lived off the money too, but she didn’t have the same needs as Jeremy. Adeline’s family was rich.
She was from Pasadena, California. She grew up there during the 1970s and 1980s.
Her father had been an oral surgeon who performed a wide range of dental procedures on some very famous people.
The heart of Adeline’s father had exploded a few hours after he put a cap on the lower left incisor of two-time Academy Award winner Jason Robards.
Jason Robards was one of those character actors who earns respect and accolades during his working life and is forgotten as soon as he dies. He won his Academy Awards in 1977 and 1978.
The first Academy Award was for playing Ben Bradlee, the editor of the Washington Post, in a film called All the President’s Men. The second Academy Award was for playing Dashiell Hammett, author of The Glass Key and The Maltese Falcon, in a film called Julia.
Both movies were based on books in which the respective authors presented self-aggrandized visions of themselves confronting the systemic evil of governments.
Both movies were better than the books on which they were based. Almost all movies are better than books. Most books are quite bad.
Like this one.
This is a bad novel.
ADELINE’S FATHER LEFT HIS MONEY to Adeline’s mother, who turned out to be better at business than Adeline’s father.
Adeline’s mother was named Suzanne. Suzanne made sure that both Adeline and Adeline’s sister, Dahlia, would never want for nothing.
Suzanne was a failed actress who met Adeline’s father while waiting tables at a coffee shop on Wilshire Boulevard. She’d been an extra in several episodes of Gidget, a television show about a teenaged girl who enjoys surfing.
Suzanne was an alcoholic.
chapter three
Back in the early 1990s, when they decided to publish Trill, both Adeline and Jeremy Winterbloss recognized that their project suffered from two structural disadvantages.
STRUCTURAL DISADVANTAGE #1: the principle products of the comic-book industry were 32-page monthly pamphlets containing drawings of gargantuan-breasted women. These breasts resembled over-inflated volleyballs, much like the ones spiked and served by the cast of Gidget.
This focus on gargantuan breasts meant that most of the industry’s output was subtle pornography for the mentally backwards.
There’d been a few successful books that featured talking animals, but Jeremy could think of only one semi-successful comic book about an anthropomorphic cat. That book was “Omaha” The Cat Dancer.
Omaha was created by Reed Waller and Kate Worley. Omaha was a stripper in an urban milieu. Being a cat dancer got Omaha into all kinds of trouble.
The pornography in “Omaha” was not subtle. Most issues depicted Omaha having sex with other anthropomorphic animals of many species and genders.
Jeremy showed Adeline a few issues of “Omaha” The Cat Dancer. Adeline thought it strange that Omaha, a cat, had a dense patch of hair on her mons pubis. But that was comics.
STRUCTURAL DISADVANTAGE #2: as with any business, the comics industry had its own culture, and that culture was soaked in sexism and racism like a Christmas ham marinating in syrup and ginger.
Jeremy had experienced the sexism and racism first hand, having worked for several years in the late 1980s as an intern at Marvel Comics.
JEREMY WINTERBLOSS was an African–American man, which meant that some of his ancestors were brought to the United States in bondage and put to work in the service of his other ancestors. This second group of ancestors owned the first group.
Many of Jeremy’s ancestors were part of the social construct called the White race, and they raped many of Jeremy’s other ancestors, the ones who were owned and were part of the social construct called the Black Race, whose members were also known as Coloreds or Negroes or Nigras or any of hundreds of other derogatory words.
There were not many derogatory words for members of the social construct called the White race. The ones that did exist were sort of useless and packed almost no offensive punch.
These were: honkey, cracker, hillbilly, redneck, peckerwood.
Peckerwood had some possibilities. The others were pathetic.
SOMETIMES WHEN JEREMY’S MALE ANCESTORS raped Jeremy’s female ancestors, the underlying biology would produce babies. When these babies were born, they were owned by their fathers or their fathers’ families.
You could rape your property and make new property and that new property would earn you more money. It was a nice time to own people. It was a bad time to be owned.
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION of the White race was pseudoscience revolving around the misapprehension that inessential physical features represented biological distinctions amongst members of the human species.
Of all the inessential features that led to the social construction of the White race, differences in skin pigmentation were the most prominent.
There was a widely held belief amongst members of the White race that their skin was uncolored and thus White. In fact, members of the White race were an unfortunate pink somewhere around the shade of a newborn piglet.
According to certain people who self-described as People of Color, which was a remarkably offensive and unexamined phrase, and members of the White Race, Colored skin was the visual byproduct of eumelanin’s presence in the stratum basale layer of the epidermis.
Eumelanin was the product of melanocytes, which are cells located alongside the basal cells in the stratum basale layer of the epidermis. Under histopathologic examination, eumelanin looked a little like a dried mustard stain.
Most members of the White race were so accustomed to their piglet pink that they couldn’t see their own pink. To them, their piglet pink was invisible as the genocides committed by their forefathers.
An entire social order was built around the inability to see what was right in front of, and on, their faces. An entire social hierarchy was built around mustard stains in the epidermis.
This is one of several reasons why many people considered the human species to be a bunch of dumb assholes.
OF COURSE, the social hierarchy’s racial component was a generalized dodge to avoid talking about the only real factor in establishing order. Which is to say money.
According to many first year graduate students in economics, money was a general agreement amongst a group of people that certain tangibles or intangibles represent the ordering of value.
In fact, money was the unit by which people measured humiliation.
What would you do for a dollar?
What would you do for ten dollars?
What would you do for a million dollars?
What would you do for a billion dollars?
ADELINE DIDN’T HAVE EUMELANIN in the basal cell layer of her epidermis and was thus a member of the White race.
This offered her a great deal of social prestige, particularly as she was from a rich family. But she was a woman. Being a woman detracted from that social prestige.
All women in America, even the rich White women, took a ton of shit. They were doomed if they did and doomed if they didn’t.
Men had spent millennia treating women like crap. One theory as to the origins of this social ordering suggested that women’s lack of upper body strength made them worse at ploughing fields and swinging swords.
Ploughed fields produced food.
Swung swords produced dead humans.
Most societies, being dominated by men, put premium value on eating and killing. This emphasis on strength over intelligence neatly avoided the fact that women are smarter than men.
Women’s lack of upper body strength was only one explanation of the social ordering. There were hundreds of ideas for why women were treated like crap but very few practical solutions.
A LITTLE BIT before Adeline made her unforgivable mistake, a billionaire named Sheryl Sandberg wrote a book called Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Sheryl Sandberg didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis.
In her book, Sheryl Sandberg proposed that women who weren’t billionaires could stop being treated like crap by men in the workplace if only they smiled more and worked harder and acted more like the men who treated them like crap.
Billionaires were always giving advice to people who weren’t billionaires about how to become billionaires.
It was almost always intolerable bullshit.
SANDBERG BECAME A BILLIONAIRE by working for a company named Facebook.
Facebook made its money through an Internet web and mobile platform which advertised cellphones, feminine hygiene products and breakfast cereals.
This web and mobile platform was also a place where hundreds of millions of people offered up too much information about their personal lives.
Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg, who didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.
What is your gender? asked Facebook.
What is your relationship status? asked Facebook.
What is your current city? asked Facebook.
What is your name? asked Facebook.
What are your favorite movies? asked Facebook.
What is your favorite music? asked Facebook.
What are your favorite books? asked Facebook.
ADELINE’S FRIEND, the writer J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, had read an essay called “Generation Why?” by Zadie Smith, a British writer with a lot of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. Zadie Smith’s essay pointed out that the questions Facebook asked of its users appeared to have been written by a 12-year-old.
But these questions weren’t written by a 12-year-old. They were written by Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg was such a billionaire that he was the boss of other billionaires. He was Sheryl Sandberg’s boss.
J. Karacehennem thought that he knew something about Facebook that Zadie Smith, in her decency, hadn’t imagined.
“The thing is,” said J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, “that we’ve spent like, what, two or three hundred years wrestling with existentialism, which really is just a way of asking, Why are we on this planet? Why are people here? Why do we lead our pointless lives? All the best philosophical and novelistic minds have tried to answer these questions and all the best philosophical and novelistic minds have failed to produce a working answer. Facebook is amazing because finally we understand why we have hometowns and why we get into relationships and why we eat our stupid dinners and why we have names and why we own idiotic cars and why we try to impress our friends. Why are we here, why do we do all of these things? At last we can offer a solution. We are on Earth to make Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg richer. There is an actual, measurable point to our striving. I guess what I’m saying, really, is that there’s always hope.”
chapter four
Having worked in the belly of the beast, Jeremy Winterbloss understood the comic industry’s traditions of racism and sexism.
Any product not delivered by White men would receive less orders than products offered by White men. Which meant less sales, which meant a smaller audience, which meant less money.
Many people in the comics industry remembered Jeremy. He stood out. Many people in the comic industry remembered the eumelanin in his basal cell layer.
Back in the early 1990s, Jeremy worried that if he and Adeline published Trill under their own names, then it would be seen as a Black book drawn by a White woman.
Which meant less sales, which meant a smaller audience, which meant less money.
Jeremy wanted to be recognized for his contribution but Jeremy also wanted to make money. He wanted to do meaningful work and be paid for it.
In this, he was different than Sheryl Sandberg. He had no interest in advertising baby powder and asking people about their favorite music.
JEREMY DEVISED AN IMPERFECT SOLUTION to the issues of racism and sexism in the comic-book industry. He suggested that both he and Adeline adopt pseudonyms.
The adoption of pseudonyms was another of the comic industry’s time-honored traditions. Jack Kirby, who had no eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis and pretty much created the comic-book industry, was born Jacob Kurtzberg. He chose his pseudonym to sound less Jewish.
Adeline, who was then suffering from many strange habits including an affected Transatlantic accent and a terminal disinterest in making a statement, agreed with Jeremy’s suggestion.
“Darling,” she asked, “won’t it be simply frightful to pretend that we’re other people?”
Jeremy went with J.W. Bloss. Adeline picked the somewhat more baroque M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch.
MONTHLY PUBLICATION of Trill ceased in 1999. A series of unforeseen events, including the collapse of several distributors, made it very difficult for comics’ creators to self-publish their own work. The money just wasn’t there.
TRILL CEASED PUBLICATION at the exact moment when the greater English-speaking world became interested in trade paperback collections of comic books.
Sometimes these collections were called graphic novels.
This was a misnomer. The trade paperbacks were not novels and very rarely contained any graphic material.
An example of an actual graphic novel was Les 120 journées de Sodome¸ an Eighteenth-Century book written in prison by an obese French nobleman without any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.
Like most actual graphic novels, it succeeded wonderfully at being graphic but failed miserably as a novel. It was a book about people in a castle who fuck each other to death while throwing their own shit around like a bunch of caged monkeys.
By contrast, the graphic novels of the comic-book industry were mostly Marvel or DC getting new money for old rope by binding together reprints of ancient material.
Typically these graphic novels contained nothing more than images of volleyball-sized breasts and Spider-Man smashing Doctor Octopus through a brick wall while saying, “Ol’ sourpus sure made a mistake messing with his friendly neighborhood webhead!”
THE TRADE PAPERBACK EDITIONS of Trill continued to sell after the final monthly pamphlet was printed. Each year, the trade paperbacks sold a little more than the year before.
Then two things happened in the mid-2000s: (1) On the basis of their success with Bone, a book by a guy named Jeff Smith who didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale strata of his epidermis, Scholastic offered to print color trade paperbacks of Trill, granting access to the voracious children’s and education markets. (2) Don Murphy, a producer of Hollywood films without any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis, optioned the cinematic rights to Trill. [JIM’LL FIX IT]
UNLIKE MANY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTIES that are optioned by Hollywood producers, Trill was actually financed and turned into a film.
Half of the money came from a Hollywood studio. The rest was raised from private investors, including a very sizeable chunk of change via the Saudi media group Fear and Respect Holdings Ltd.
Fear and Respect was run by His Royal Highness Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud, who had a small amount of eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. The principle purpose of Fear and Respect was to invest in new media companies and old media opportunities.
HRH Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud liked film, and he could see the future. He could see that intellectual properties derived from the comic-book industry were on the verge of providing very lucrative revenue streams.
Trill was his first foray into the world of cinema.
He had high hopes.
ADELINE AND JEREMY were not involved in the filmmaking process, but gave their tacit support by saying nothing against the project. They did not attend the film’s premiere.
The film was computer-animated, which meant scores of underpaid technicians in Asian countries spent countless hours working on devices assembled by even lower-paid workers in other Asian countries to produce crude replicas of artwork that had cost Adeline about $54 a month in materials.
When the film was released in 2007, it did what Adeline considered a ridiculous amount of business: about $25,000,000.
This was $25,000,000 less than its production budget, which did not include the tens of millions more dollars spent on marketing.
Trill was a flop.
HRH Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud was sad.
But the publicity was great for sales of the trade paperbacks.
NEITHER ADELINE NOR JEREMY had wanted their identities revealed, but another producer of Trill, a man named Joel Silver, let the truth slip during a press conference.
Joel Silver, who didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis, later said it was a mistake.
Adeline assumed it was intentional.
She’d spent most of her early life in Los Angeles. She always assumed the worst about Hollywood people. Anything to increase tracking.
THE REVEAL OF M. ABRAHAMOVIC PETROVITCH as a woman belonging to the social construct of the White race was treated as the more interesting story than that of Jeremy Winterbloss as a man belonging to the social construct of the Black race.
Nearly ten years after finishing the last issue of Trill, Adeline was in demand. For her self, as her self. The details of her life became fodder for public discourse.
People were fascinated that she had lived through the grimy old East Village. People were interested that her best friend, Baby, was a gay writer of Science Fiction and the author of Annie Zero. People wanted to know how Adeline had kept the secret for so many years. People were fascinated by a woman working in genre comics and doing it so well. People were interested that she lived in San Francisco and wanted her opinions about the tech industry and the dotcom boom of the late 1990s.
Basically, she got kind of famous.
chapter five
Despite never appearing as a character within its pages, Jack Kirby is the central personage of this novel. He died in 1994. He was born in 1917.
Jack Kirby is the central personage of this novel because he was the individual most screwed by the American comic-book industry, and the American comic-book industry is the perfect distillation of all the corrupt and venal behavior inherent in unregulated capitalism.
The business practices of the American comic-book industry have colonized Twenty-First Century life. They are the tune to which we all dance.
The Internet, and the multinational conglomerates which rule it, have reduced everyone to the worst possible fate. We have become nothing more than comic-book artists, churning out content for enormous monoliths that refuse to pay us the value of our work.
So we might as well revere the man who was screwed first and screwed hardest.
JACK KIRBY WAS BORN Jacob Kurtzberg in 1917 at 147 Essex Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He was a New York Jew at a time when being a Jew in America was a ticket to suspicion and abuse.
He was a creative genius working in a medium that disrespected the intelligence of its readers. He was a creative genius working in a medium that hid objectionable words behind strings of symbols like $#!+ and @$$.
He smoked cigars and he spoke in a Noo Yawk accent. He never graduated high school. He fought in World War Two. He was a Jew who wrote and drew comics about kicking the shit out of Nazis and then went to Germany and kicked the shit out of Nazis.
WHENEVER THERE WAS AN IMPORTANT MOMENT in American comic books, Jack Kirby was present. Always creating, always making new things, always with the new ideas.
He was one of the lamed vavniks, one of the thirty-six righteous who kept the world running.
Here is a list of some characters that he either created or co-created: Captain America, the Fantastic Four, the original X-Men, the Avengers, Thor, Loki, Iron Man, the Incredible Hulk, Doctor Doom, Galactus, Ant-Man, the Black Panther, Nick Fury, The Demon, Kamandi, Klarion the Witch Boy, OMAC, the New Gods, M.O.D.O.K, the Eternals, the Inhumans, the Forever People, the Newsboy Legion.
Here is a list of the above characters that he owned:
BY THE TIME that Adeline made her unforgivable mistake, Marvel Comics had transformed itself into Marvel Entertainment, which was a film-production company. The films that Marvel produced were based on the comic books which it had published in earlier decades.
Marvel had released the following films: Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2, Captain America: The First Avenger, Thor, The Avengers, Iron Man 3. All of these films were based on intellectual property created by Jack Kirby.
Marvel had done $5,289,863,327 worth of box-office business with films based on intellectual properties created by Jack Kirby. This does not include merchandizing or DVD/Blu-Ray sales.
This was more money than the respective annual GDPs of fifty countries.
BEFORE MARVEL TRANSFORMED itself into a producer of films, the company was run by individuals of dubious business acumen.
These individuals had licensed away the media exploitation rights to many of Marvel’s best-known intellectual properties, including the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, both of which were co-created by Jack Kirby.
The creation of the X-Men was complicated, but Kirby was there with the original concept. He did everything on the Fantastic Four.
By the time that Adeline committed the only unforgivable sin of the Twenty-First Century, the Fantastic Four and X-Men had been exploited in the production of eight films, seven of which were based on the work of Jack Kirby. These seven films had taken in $2,136,662,237 at the box office.
Combined with Marvel’s take of $5,289,863,327, this totaled out to $7,426,525,564 of business derived from media properties that Jack Kirby had either created or co-created.
JACK KIRBY had worked-for-hire, when the prospect of billion dollar films of any kind, let alone those starring superheroes, was inconceivable.
Work-for-hire was one of the many bad deals that businesses offered to creative people. The terms of work-for-hire were: we pay you enough to eat and we keep everything you create.
So Jack Kirby had worked-for-hire and created a plethora of intellectual property which developed immense value while he himself held no legal ownership over that property.
He spent the last years of his life fighting with Marvel over his intellectual property and the return of his physical artwork. He went to his grave with no stake in his life’s work.
He got screwed.
JACK KIRBY is also the central personage of this novel because this is not a good novel. This is a seriously mixed-up book with a central personage who never appears. The plot, like life, resolves into nothing and features emotional suffering without meaning.
The writer of this novel gave up trying to write good novels when he realized that the good novel, as an idea, was created by the Central Intelligence Agency.
This is not a joke. This is true. This is church.
The CIA funded the Paris Review. The CIA funded the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. The CIA engineered the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature.
A person would be hard pressed to find three other institutions with more influence over the development of the good novel and literary fiction.
Literary fiction was a term used by the upper classes to suggest books which paired pointless sex with ruminations on the nature of mortgages were of greater merit than books which paired pointless sex with guns and violence.
The CIA funded literary fiction because people at the CIA believed that American literature was excellent propaganda and would help fight the Russians. People at the CIA believed that literary fiction would celebrate the delights of a middle-class existence produced by American dynamism.
The people who took the CIA’s money were happy to help out.
The result was sixty years of good novels about the upper middle class and their sexual affairs.
Generally speaking, these good novels didn’t involve characters with much eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises.
A SIDE EFFECT of the CIA’s funding of the good novel was to ensure that American literature was hopeless at addressing the pace of technological innovation. This is because the defining quality of any good novel was the limit of its author’s imagination.
And the authors of good novels were terminal bores. The writers of literary fiction were the people who’d come to your party and pass out in your bathtub and then spend years dining out on the tale.
For more than half of a century, American writers of good novels had missed the only important story in American life. They had missed the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the developing communications landscape, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television.
And so too had they missed the full import of the last fifteen years. The symbolism sustaining the aesthetic and intellectual pursuits of the Twentieth Century was now meaningless. It was empty air. It was gone, vacant, missing, collapsed beneath the weight of two towers.
So much of the dialogue around literature and writing had become about the embrace of human rights, but a massive shift had happened and no one ever mentioned it.
For thousands of years, people had written with a wide variety of materials. Some used pens. Some used pencils. Some used typewriters. Some used papyrus. Some used foolscap.
Now writers used computers, which were the byproducts of global capitalism’s uncanny ability to turn the surplus population into perpetual servants. All of the world’s computers were built by slaves in China.
The business of American literature had become the business of exploiting slave labor. An example of this is the book that you are reading.
This bad novel, which is a morality lesson about the Internet, was written on a computer. You are suffering the moral outrage of a hypocritical writer who has profited from the spoils of slavery.
THESE LACUNAE meant that American writers were hopeless at writing about the Internet, which was nothing but the intellectual feudalism produced by technological innovation arriving in the disguise of culture.
By the time it became clear that the Internet was the dominant story of Twenty-First Century life, the survival strategy of many writers was to use the computer network as a marketing device.
In a curious approach for people whose intellectual and financial lives depended on the use of words and grammar, the primary Internet marketing technique of these writers involved the pretense that they, the writers, possessed worse literacy skills than a fifth grader.
“Luv u!” wrote the writers.
“Who r ppl?” wrote the writers.
“C u l8r bb!” wrote the writers.
The thought, anyway, was that these misspellings would help to sell books about tea-time affairs in New York State.
OF COURSE, the good novel was a historical artifact and all the world’s misspellings couldn’t trick citizens of the future into caring about the sexual rutting of the useless.
The citizens of the future didn’t care about the empty symbolism of the previous century. They had rejected the good novel and its false vision of American complexity. The citizens of the future had adopted the pop sizzle of the comic book and Science Fiction.
They wanted to read about the sexual rutting of supranatural creatures like werewolves, succubi, vampires, boy wizards, mermaids, minotaurs, centaurs, witches, fairies, jinn, ghosts, zombies, angels, incubi, hacktivists, genetically modified teenagers and ultrawealthy oligarchs.
There was only one solution if you were a writer who wanted to write about the Internet and you didn’t want to write a good novel, and you weren’t interested in pretending that your facility with language was worse than that of a fifth grader, and you didn’t care about the sexual rutting of supernatural creatures like werewolves, succubi, vampires, boy wizards, mermaids, minotaurs, centaurs, witches, fairies, jinn, ghosts, zombies, angels, incubi, hacktivists, genetically modified teenagers and ultrawealthy oligarchs.
The only solution to the Internet was to write bad novels with central personages who do not appear.
The only solution was to write bad novels that mimicked the computer network in its obsessions with junk media.
The only solution was to write bad novels that mimicked the computer network in its irrelevant and jagged presentation of content.