I Hate the Internet: A Novel - Hardcover

Kobek, Jarett

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1781257612 ISBN 13: 9781781257616

Publisher: Serpent's Tail, 2016

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novella ATTA has appeared in Spanish translation, been the subject of much academic writing and was a recent bestseller in parts of Canada. He writes regularly for museums and galleries, with his essays appearing under the auspices of Frieze, the Hammer Museum and White Cube.

Review

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

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

I Hate the Internet may have answered one very important question for me: why I often feel so sick after I've logged in. -Fiona Helmsley, Vol 1 Brooklyn

"Like a mad priest presiding over the death of our disposable culture, Kobek has delivered a fitting eulogy for the digital age." --Zyzzyva

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, The New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Serpent's Tail
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1781257612
• ISBN 13: 9781781257616
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 290