I Hate the Internet
Jarett Kobek
ISBN: 978-0-9964218-0-5
Price: 15.95 American
February 2016
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, The Scofield
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
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.
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."
New Cover for the Third Edition
About I Hate the Internet
What if you told the truth and the whole world heard you? What if you lived in a country swamped with Internet outrage? What if you were a woman in a society that hated women?
Set in the San Francisco of 2013, I Hate the Internet offers a hilarious and obscene portrayal of life amongst the victims of the digital boom. As billions of tweets fuel the city's gentrification and the human wreckage piles up, a group of friends suffers the consequences of being useless in a new world that despises the pointless and unprofitable.
In this, his first full-length novel, Jarett Kobek tackles the pressing questions of our moment. Why do we applaud the enrichment of CEOs at the expense of the weak and the powerless? Why are we giving away our intellectual property? Why is activism in the 21st Century nothing more than a series of morality lectures typed into devices built by slaves?
Here, at last, comes an explanation of the Internet in the crudest possible terms.
Audio from an I Hate the Internet event at City Lights Books
Further Praise for I Hate the Internet
Like a mad priest presiding over the death of our disposable culture, Kobek has delivered a fitting eulogy for the digital age.
I Hate the Internet may have answered one very important question for me: why I often feel so sick after I've logged in.
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
About Jarett Kobek
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.
