I Hate the Internet

by Jarett Kobek

  “WHAT EVER should I do?” asked Adeline.

  “Well, what do you want?” asked Jeremy.

  “I’m not certain,” she said.

  “You could always get an account on Twitter and apologize.”

  “But darling,” said Adeline, “I’m can’t. I’m not sorry about anything I’ve done.”

  THE NEXT PERSON she called was J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell.

  “It’s simple,” he said. “Viral content works like joke writing. So, okay, basically, a joke functions through the contrast of ideas. The first idea is the assumed one, the second idea is a tweak on the first. Here’s the set-up to a joke: ‘I just flew in from Pittsburgh.’ Here’s the punchline: ‘And, boy, are my arms tired.’ The humor rests on the tension between the assumed idea of flying in an airplane and the punchline’s verbal tweak which reminds the listener that there are different forms of flight.”

  “Are you talking down again, darling?”

  “Only a little,” said J. Karacehennem. “Bear with me. So, okay, viral video works along the same principle. Things go viral when the action within the video exists as a tweak of the cultural assumptions embedded within the video’s visual signifiers. Any time you have a grandmother who behaves in a strange way, like a grandmother who sings the latest hit song or talks about sex or does a backflip, that will have some inherent virality, because there is a standing set of cultural assumption about old people in general and grandmothers in specific. These are violated by hit songs and backflips and frank discussions of sex.”

  “This is getting terribly borrrrrrring,” said Adeline. “What does any of this have to do with me?”

  “The thing is,” said J. Karacehennem, “And I hate to break it to you, but you’re the god damned weirdest person alive. There you are in this video, an attractive woman of some years, a dressed-up version of those rock n’ roll women in their mid-forties that you meet at the Rainbow Room—”

  “Darling, are you calling me rockabilly?”

  “—Then you open your mouth and you sound like a drugged out Dianna Vreeland and you’ve got an erudite range of insane opinions on every possible topic. It’s fascinating. And you’re kind of famous. People love watching celebrities self-immolate. People fucking love it. It’s the spectator sport of the New Millennium.”

  “That’s all very well and good,” said Adeline, “What do I do?”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “In two days, no one will remember. In six months, most of the links will depreciate. Just be glad you’ve published books. The only powerless people on the Internet are the ones with nothing to sell. Imagine being a spotty Paki chav in London. You’d be a suicide. There’s a guy I know whose friend uploaded a picture of him when he was 15. He looks awful. This was almost twenty years ago. It’s still the first image result for ‘ugly nerd.’ Did you talk to Jeremy?”

  “Of course,” said Adeline.

  “Did he say anything about the impact on sales?”

  “We’ve re-entered the Amazon Top 500. Not since the trailer for Don Murphy’s Trill has our book sold so many copies.”

  “Ride the wave,” said J. Karacehennem. “Everything is advertising. I wonder if you guys could push it any further.”

  “Sirrah,” said Adeline, “Thou must knowest that this is one cow that don’t need no milking. I only want the horror to end.”

  “Wait it out.”

  “Jeremy said I should acquire my own Twitter and argue my position.”

  “Trust me, the one thing you do not want to do in this situation is engage. I’d suggest following the rule of all celebrities who have successfully cultivated an air of mystery. Never explain or complain.”

  ADELINE’S NEXT CALL was to Baby. Baby didn’t answer.

  Baby was terrible with his phone.

  ADELINE’S NEXT CALL was to Erik Willems.

  “I don’t grok virality,” he said. “It’s very mysterious to me and yet I’ve helped many startups based around viral content. One of the things that we try to pursue is a blue ocean strategy. What did you say, anyway?”

  “Haven’t you seen the video?” asked Adeline.

  “I don’t really care,” said Erik Willems. “I’m not that interested in the content so much as the delivery.”

  “Yet we’re sexually intertwined,” said Adeline. “And still you can’t be bothered to give two tosses of a tuppence?”

  “It’s all just gossip,” said Erik Willems. “It’s all just a solsitre.”

  Solsitres are one of the challenges that Annie Zero faces in Annie Zero, Baby’s book about French Neo-Maoists in the Megaverse.

  A solsitre is a difficult situation that has no solution but proves to be ultimately irrelevant. The danger of the solsitre is that, much like this bad novel, it wastes time.

  Solsitres stand in the way of the Neo-Agrarian cypherpunk revolution. The mark of a good leader is her ability to tell solsitres from genuine problems. Problems that require attention are called reprotens.

  “Great good God Almighty,” said Adeline to Erik Willems. “You are making me run through my memories like some little Fräulein bolting in a Bavarian field, desperately searching for her runaway Schnauzer. I’m dying, darling, simply dying, to remember why it is that I fuck you.”

  ADELINE’S FINAL CALL was to Christine.

  “I have no idea what I could tell you,” said Christine. “This isn’t my field of expertise. I’m more of a general Google person.”

  chapter eleven

  While Adeline was learning what it was like to use the Internet, other people were suffering from technological platforms dedicated to freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

  And unlike Adeline, they weren’t kind of famous.

  And unlike Adeline, they had nothing to sell.

  A PRIME EXAMPLE would be Ellen Flitcraft, a twenty-two year old woman living in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. She had no eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis.

  Truth or Consequences was called Hot Springs until the 1950s, when the city elders changed its name as part of a radio contest. People tended to call it T or C.

  It was small. It was flat. It was in the desert. It was near Elephant Butte Lake, which was both beautiful and embarrassingly named.

  Almost everything was painted a shade of brown or white. Less than seven thousand people lived in the city. No building was over two storeys. There were two main roads. Everyone knew everyone else.

  The major feature distinguishing Truth or Consequences from other small cities was the plethora of spas near its southern border. Truth or Consequences was loaded with hot springs. Hence the spas. Hence the earlier name.

  Spaceport America was about twenty miles out of the city. This was a facility constructed with tax payer dollars and private funding.

  In the future, Spaceport America would be a staging ground for private space travel, which was a luxury targeted towards rich people who wanted to bring the wisdom of Ayn Rand to the Red Planet of Mars.

  IF YOU WERE YOUNG and smart, you abandoned Truth and Consequences and went to college.

  Ellen Flitcraft was class valedictorian at Hot Springs High School. She had a killer admission essay. She had high SAT scores.

  She matriculated into the University of California, Los Angeles. She paid out the nose with student loan money. There was also a small merit scholarship.

  She’d gone to UCLA thinking that she would major in biology, but upon arriving in Los Angeles, the city’s culture seeped into her bones. She transferred into UCLA’s film program.

  The idea was to finish her degree and stay in Los Angeles and scrounge work in film production.

  Ellen wasn’t egotistical. She didn’t expect to end up as a director, but she did hope that she’d eek out a middle class existence working on film and television productions.

  Computers and an insane tax structure were shrinking the job market. But Ellen had hope.

  Anyway, it beat being back i
n Truth or Consequences.

  ELLEN FLITCRAFT was raised by her grandmother, who didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale strata of her epidermis.

  Ellen’d never met her father, who presumably didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale strata of his epidermis.

  Her mother, who didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale strata of her epidermis, spent much of her life wrestling with Methamphetamine, the drug of choice for workers in the American Rust Belt and members of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei.

  Ellen’s mother died when Ellen was very young.

  Ellen’s grandmother did the best she could with the little that she had. Truth or Consequences was a poor city. The cost of living wasn’t high.

  ELLEN GRADUATED FROM UCLA. Her grandmother didn’t attend the ceremony. She was too old for travel.

  A few days after receiving her degree, Ellen’s cellphone rang.

  The call was from her grandmother’s neighbor, who said that Ellen’s grandmother was up in the Sierra Vista Hospital.

  Ellen’s grandmother had suffered a stroke.

  Ellen drove her ancient grey Toyota Camry back to Truth or Consequences. Normally, the drive took about eleven hours but Ellen did it in eight.

  She found her grandmother in the hospital. Her grandmother recognized Ellen but her grandmother couldn’t speak. The left side of her body was crippled.

  A doctor told Ellen that the effects of the stroke were less severe than they appeared. Her grandmother would never fully recover but with rehab and physical therapy, the old woman could return to a decent life.

  It was clear that Ellen would have to return, temporarily, to Truth or Consequences.

  IT WASN’T HARD FOR ELLEN to pack up her life and go back home. She’d been planning on moving.

  “It’s for a year, at most,” she said to her Los Angeles friends. “I’ll be back. Lots of people take a year off.”

  She offered her furniture to a wide circle of acquaintances. What wasn’t adopted was put out on the street. To be honest, most of it was pretty shitty.

  Ellen packed the rest of her belongings and drove back to Truth or Consequences.

  HER LIFE NOW REVOLVED around her infirm grandmother. Much of this was simple chores like cleaning and helping the older woman perform bodily functions.

  The harder stuff was taking her grandmother out of the house, ensuring that the older woman made her twice weekly appointments for physical therapy.

  Her grandmother’s Social Security cheque wasn’t enough to pay for both Ellen and her grandmother. Not with the student loans.

  A friend of her grandmother’s neighbor’s son had an opening at his place of business. He sold insurance. The pay wasn’t great but the work was mindless. Anyway, it was only temporary. Ellen would be going back to Los Angeles.

  When Ellen was at work, the neighbor would come in and check on Ellen’s grandmother.

  ELLEN HADN’T GOTTEN IN TOUCH with any of her high school friends. The few times when she’d come back from Los Angeles and hung out had been awkward. Whenever she talked about her life in Los Angeles, it sounded like bragging.

  None of her old friends knew that she was in Truth or Consequences. This was a difficult feat to manage, as Ellen was connected with all of her friends on Facebook and Instagram.

  Instagram was a social media platform acquired by Facebook in 2012 for $1,000,000,000. Instagram allowed its users to share photographs with the world. Come, children, Instagram said to its users, upload your photographs of the world’s beauty!

  Mostly, Instagram’s users uploaded photographs of things on which they’d either spent money or wished to spend money.

  It was an infinite sexless orgy of cars, guns, food, clothes, dogs, cats, yoga, bikinis, money clips, works of art, breast implants, buttocks implants, dream vacations, tattoos, vinyl records, cellular phones, footwear, laptop computers, country estates in England, airplanes, piercings, exotic pets, mid-century modern homes, bongs, crockery, bathroom mirrors, cameras, mojitos and other delicious alcoholic beverages, lip augmentation, handbags, watches, spiral staircases, suicidal ideation, caffeinated drinks purchased at Starbucks, motorcycles, protein supplements, suntan lotion, fake moustaches, novelty mugs, children’s toys, sunglasses, guitars, Sno-cone machines, vape pens, scooters, crystal pendants and imported Japanese junk food.

  Uncoincidentally, Instagram was also the first social media platform to which the only sane reaction was hate.

  AFTER SHE RETURNED to Truth or Consequences, Ellen curtailed her activities on both Facebook and Instagram. She didn’t want anyone to know she was back in town, which was a hopeless idea in a community with a population below seven thousand.

  Still, it was worth a try.

  WHEN A FEW WEEKS had passed, Ellen realized that she couldn’t spend every night in the house with her grandmother. The older woman was particularly insistent that they watch re-runs of Two and a Half Men, an awful sitcom about the sexual innuendo which emerges from the unconsummated homosexual desire between two brothers. It was enormously popular with senior citizens.

  Ellen made the decision to have a drink at Raymond’s Lounge, a small dive bar next to the Circle K gas station. Its standing signage read: RAYMOND’S LOUNGE PACKAGED GOODS.

  There were other bars in town but the lounge loomed in her imagination, from way back in high school when the other kids whispered about the place, bragging of exploits within its four walls.

  She ordered a drink. She sat at the bar. She kept to herself. The clientele was the expected mixture of rummy desert rats and young men in cargo shorts. The ceilings were low. The ceiling fans rotated.

  Ellen finished her drink and ordered another.

  Somewhere through the second drink, she heard a voice calling her name.

  “Ellen? Ellen?”

  She turned around. She saw her high school sweetheart, Maximiliano Rojas, who had some melanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.

  MAXIMILIANO AND ELLEN got to talking. He started buying her drinks.

  “Don’t get too excited,” said Ellen. “I’m not going to fuck you.”

  “That’s okay,” said Max. “I couldn’t anyway. I’m practically married.”

  “Who with?” asked Ellen.

  “I don’t know if you remember her. Ashley Nelson?”

  Ashley Nelson didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis.

  “Ashley,” said Ellen. “You’re lucky. Ashley’s cute.”

  Ellen and Maximiliano dated from grade ten to grade twelve. They broke up about a month before graduation. Maximiliano had called it off.

  Following the split, she saw him at school and occasionally ran into him around town. Each time was like being stabbed.

  UCLA and Los Angeles were her salvation. Once Ellen was out of Truth or Consequences, she was amazed at how little she thought about Maximiliano. Time dulled the pain.

  But the questions had never gone away, all the wherefores and whys. She’d always thought that if they met again, she’d make him tell her the reason he’d ended it.

  Now, having their first conversation in four years, Ellen couldn’t remember why she cared. So much had happened. There’d been a series of pointless sexual encounters in Los Angeles and one very bad relationship. She was so beyond Maximiliano. He was the past.

  They talked. Mostly about their families. Maximiliano’s sister had moved to Albuquerque. His dad still drank too much and still had his model trains, although he’d given up HO scale for O.

  “I love your mom,” said Ellen. “She was so sweet to me.”

  “You can always go see her. She’d love it.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  ELLEN FINISHED her fourth drink. It was time to go home.

  “This was really nice, Max,” said Ellen. “It was really great seeing you again.”

  “You’re in town for a while, though?”

  “Yeah, at least a year.”

  “We should hang out together aga
in. Maybe we’ll go bowling.”

  “Is that place still open? I haven’t been bowling in forever.”

  “Hit me up on Facebook.”

  Ellen went home. Her grandmother was sleeping but otherwise fine. Ellen went into her bedroom and fell asleep.

  She had a dream about someone falling from a high platform and cracking their skull. It was a clean break beneath the skin, running vertically from the forehead to the jaw.

  ELLEN DID GO and visit Mamá Rojas, who had a fair amount of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. The woman was sweeter than ever, taking Ellen into her house and insisting on feeding her. The food was unbelievable.

  “I missed your cooking,” said Ellen. “Los Angeles is okay but there’s nothing like this.”

  “You need to eat, eat,” said Mamá Rojas. “Too skinny.”

  Ellen noticed that Mamá Rojas’s English was much improved.

  When Ellen and Maximiliano were dating, the older woman had peppered her Spanish with a few English words and nothing more. This had been useful for Ellen, as she picked up a great deal of Mamá Rojas’s native tongue.

  “And how do you find my English?” asked Mamá Rojas.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” said Ellen. “I didn’t want to be rude. But you’ve learned so much!”

  “I take the courses online,” said Mamá Rojas.

  They talked about Los Angeles. They talked about Ellen’s grandmother. They talked about Maximiliano’s hooligan cousins on his father’s side, the boys who Mamá Rojas called dos perros hermanos.

  When Ellen was leaving, Mamá Rojas asked Ellen if she’d met Ashley.

  “In high school. I didn’t know she was dating Max.”

  “I wish he stayed with you,” said Mamá Rojas. “Ashley is no good. I tell him all the time. You lost the one good girl who will ever love you.”