I Hate the Internet

by Jarett Kobek

  Sergey Brin, the other co-founder, was like Dionysius, the god of sex and drugs and revelry. Sergey Brin had rebranded himself as the head of Google X, Google’s nonsense experimental lab which developed faddish technologies like wearable computers and cars that could drive themselves and dogs that didn’t need to clean their genitals. These technologies would amount to nothing. They were banal visions of the future as imagined by the fans of Science Fiction. Google was an advertising company. Every time the company released a physical commodity, that commodity failed. Google X’s real purpose was an advertisement for the mythical vision of Google as a company of innovation. Google X was Google lying about the company’s actual function, using the methods of advertising to obfuscate its revenues derived from advertising. Google X was the pointless indulgence of one of the world’s richest men. It was Sergey Brin’s hobby. It was his awkward way of picking up chicks. It was the absolute heights of decadence. In any practical sense, Sergey Brin had left Google. He was a middle-aged party boy with weird mistresses and a habit of going to Burning Man every August. Burning Man was a big party in the desert where Sergey Brin would pretend like money didn’t matter and that he wasn’t a capitalist. He would surround himself with younger naked people who were high on drugs and dressed like low-rent circus performers and who were simply thrilled to be around someone famous.

  Eric Schmidt, who Brin and Page made CEO of Google long enough to shepherd the company through its initial public offering, was like Zeus, the king of the gods. Eric Schmidt was the man behind the scenes, the unmoved mover, the guy who made deals with the government and the CIA and the NSA, the guy who worked on various Presidential commissions and had a hand in the company’s Washington dealings. He loved that Google afforded him proximity to power. Like Zeus, he was weird and mysterious in a way that the others weren’t. He was always there but you never knew what he was really like. And let’s not get into his complicated romantic life, the servicing of which required a fuckpad on Manhattan island.

  Susan Wojcicki was the sister of Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Sergey Brin, and she was the Senior Vice President of Advertising. She was like Demeter, the goddess of the harvest and the growing earth. It was Susan Wojcicki who let Sergey Brin and Larry Page start Google in her garage, and it was Susan Wojcicki who really ran the show, overseeing the advertising which was the source of all the money. Susan Wojcicki had wanted to be an artist and Susan Wojcicki was even more mysterious than Eric Schmidt. No one knew much about her, which reminded Christine of the Eleusinian Mysteries, shrouded in darkness.

  And there was good ol’ Steve Jobs, better known as Hades. And not just because he was dead and rotting in the dank recesses of the netherworld, doomed for an uncertain term to watch projected images of impoverished factories workers on the rocky walls of oblivion. Basically, Steve Jobs was Hades because Hades was a total unyielding dick. The defining aspect of Steve Jobs was the marriage of his innate dickishness with gauzy Bay Area entitlement. This blessed union birthed a blanket of darkness which settled over the Western world. Steve Jobs grew up reading The Whole Earth Catalog, a publication dedicated to the proposition that by spending your money in the right way, you could become the right kind of person. This was the mantra of the post-WWII economy, an unspoken ideology that cut across the social classes. But because The Whole Earth Catalog emerged from the Bay Area after the death of several utopian ideals, the stench of its message was masked by patchouli, incense and paperback editions of gruel-thin Eastern spirituality. It was a new kind of marketing, geared towards the insecure bourgeois aspirant. Steve Jobs sucked it in and shit it out and transformed himself into Hades. The one god that can’t be escaped. His promise was simple: you have a choice. You can die ugly and unloved, or you can buy an overpriced computer or iPod and listen to early Bob Dylan and spin yourself off the wheel of Samsara. Your fundamental uncreativity will be masked by group membership. People will think you are interesting and beautiful and enlightened. One of us, one of us, one of us. Gooble gobble, gooble gobble. Nothing says individuality like 500 million consumer electronics built by slaves. Welcome to Hell.

  Then there were the minor divinities.

  Like Sheryl Sandberg, the billionaire who worked for Facebook and thought that the way women who weren’t billionaires could get respect in the workplace was to act more like the men that disrespected them in the workplace. Before she was at Facebook, she was at Google, and Christine decided that Sheryl Sandberg was like Iris, the messenger of the Gods. It seemed like Sheryl Sandberg had spent her whole professional life doing nothing but delivering messages.

  Like Ray Kurzweil, who Christine identified with Dolos, the Greek spirit of trickery and guile. Ray Kurzweil was the king of technological liberation theology. Or, in other words, he was king of the most intolerable of all intolerable bullshit. He believed in a future where computers would reach a moment of technological singularity. The technological singularity was a bullshit phrase invented by the Science Fiction writer Vernor Vinge. The technological singularity was the name for a theoretical moment in the future when computers would achieve a critical mass of artificial intelligence and wake up and change everything. The way that computers would change everything is by emerging into consciousness and telling people like Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge that they were fucking awesome. The computers and Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge would hang out and kick back and rule the universe forever. This is not an exaggeration. This is what Ray Kurzweil believed. This bullshit was reported by major American media outlets. This bullshit was taken as gospel by cub reporters who did not understand regular old intelligence, let alone intelligence crafted by man. So Ray Kurzweil was the god of lies. Who would deny the puissance of a man who thought that his computer was going to wake up and hang out with him and tell him he was awesome? Everyone in Silicon Valley loved Ray Kurzweil. He was their High Priest of Intolerable Bullshit. He was the Seer of Pseudoscience. He worked for Google. He was a director of engineering.

  Like Marissa Mayer, who Christine identified with Elpis, the Greek goddess of hope. There was no way you could be Marissa Mayer without hope. When she worked at Google, she had at some point dated Larry Page while helping out on all kinds of projects that went nowhere, like Google Books, which she called, “Google’s Moon Shot.” Google Books was Google’s attempt to steal the intellectual property of every writer in America by offering free copies of their work in an unusable system. Mayer had parlayed her experience with the unusable system of Google Books into being CEO and President of Yahoo!, which was a company that offered products which no one used. Yahoo! was a relic of the first tech boom. No one understood why Yahoo! still existed or what Marissa Mayer did at Yahoo! Yet there she was, making terrible billion dollar acquisitions and redesigning logos. There was no way you could be Marissa Mayer and not have any hope.

  None of these divinities had any eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises.

  THE MOST VISIBLE THING that Marissa Mayer did when she worked for Google was interview Lady Gaga for Musicians@Google.

  Musicians@Google was part of the larger Talks@Google series.

  Both Musicians@Google and Talks@Google were public presentations held in Google’s various offices around the world.

  The event with Lady Gaga was hosted at Google’s headquarters. This was in Mountain View, California. Mountain View was part of Silicon Valley.

  It was about forty minutes south of the city, depending on traffic. This is where the Google buses went.

  GOOGLE WAS KNOWN for distributing t-shirts amongst it employees. These t-shirts were made for software milestones, company events and any other thing that struck the fancy of the company’s emotionally bankrupt middle management.

  Google made t-shirts for the Lady Gaga event. They read: GOOGLE GOES GAGA.

  Marissa Mayer asked Lady Gaga questions like: “And also on the topic of style, you have tattoos. And one of the fans noticed that they’re all on your left side. So TaylorMonster15 would like to kno
w, why are all of your tattoos on the left side of your body?”

  “WHAT’S REMARKABLE,” said Adeline, “is that this ain’t no gag. Christine prays to each of these gods in her various times of need.”

  “I believe it,” said J. Karacehennem.

  “How does one pray to the living?” asked Adeline, “What happens if you meet Larry Page?”

  “The Greeks thought that the gods were living beings,” said Christine. “Who personified certain aspects of existence. The Greeks also ran the risk of running into their gods. There’s no difference.”

  “These aren’t gods. These are dreary little people who’ve spent their lives advertising insurance.”

  “At a certain point of mass celebrity, people stop being people,” said J. Karacehennem. “What is Madonna really? Madonna is a ray of light, an untouchable thing. It doesn’t matter that once she was a pop star who released a book of pornography. She’s become something else. You can never know Madonna because there is no Madonna. Even if you meet Madonna, you still wouldn’t know Madonna. You’d be talking to a physical being that carries all the weight of Madonna but the physical being of Madonna would not be Madonna. Like Atlas in Atlas Shrugged. What would happen if Madonna shrugged?”

  “I somehow doubt that either of you know this, but I’ve met Madonna,” said Adeline. “Right after the premiere of Don Murphy’s Trill, when there was a great delusion that the film might succeed. Madonna was as boooooring as you might imagine. She was most definitively not a ray of light. Somehow she knew that I had lived in the old New York. She asked if the Cubbyhole was still open. I said, ‘Darling, I haven’t stepped foot in the city in two years and even if I did, you may rest assured that I’d have the good taste to stay away from 12th Street.’”

  “It’s really no different than the Ancient Greeks and their gods,” said Christine.

  “Do you have an altar for these people?” asked J. Karacehennem.

  “Darling,” said Adeline. “Mine own eyes have rested upon it. It is fabulous.”

  “HERE’S MY PARANOID THOUGHT about the Bay Area,” said J. Karacehennem. “A few years ago this artist and sex-worker named Sadie Lune held an insemination ritual on 16th Street. I wasn’t there. I didn’t know anything about it, but from what I’ve been told it was a big orgy with an audience. At the end, Sadie Lune’s sperm donor, who was named Oberon, produced his sperm and it was inserted into Sadie Lune with the hopes of creating a child. Apparently it didn’t work, but I wonder if maybe by accident they created a demonic being that’s ruling over the city’s gentrification. An ethereal being, a Moon Child. Maybe that Moon Child is the spirit of the current tech bubble in all its evil glory, dancing on the rocks of Corona Heights. Maybe that’s the spirit of the age. Maybe it was created in an insemination ritual on 16th street.

  “But who knows? Maybe the tech people are all just Running to Mama.”

  “RUNNING TO MAMA” was the title of a recent short story by Baby.

  He’d written it a few months before Adeline’s flame-out in Kevin Killian’s classroom.

  On the surface, everything in the story is identical to our world, but a few pages in and it becomes clear that, in this parallel world, the Internet is very different than our own.

  After several creaky plot revelations that involve a woman addicted to Methamphetamine and obsessed with the 900 Theses of Pico della Mirandola, the reader discovers that the Internet on this parallel world is alive, a fully functioning intelligence, and that its primary purpose is not to enrich an oligarchy through a steady dose of celebrity gossip and destroyed lives, but rather to soothe and comfort its users by telling them that they’re all right, and that everything is going to be okay, and that the source of their distress is just a terrible person who’s jealous.

  The effect of the Internet on the citizens of this parallel world is complete and total infantilization.

  Whenever someone’s feelings are hurt, they go and complain to the Internet, which they have taken to calling “Mama.”

  Using the Internet is called “Running to Mama.” Hence the title.

  ADELINE AND J. KARACEHENNEM were standing outside of Sparky’s. Christine had disappeared into a taxi.

  “I’m proud of you,” said J. Karacehennem. “You made it through an entire evening without mentioning the cupcake or the pastry.”

  “A person may yet learn,” said Adeline. “Tell me, how did you find Christine?”

  “I don’t judge anyone’s religious beliefs because everyone’s religious beliefs are equally ridiculous. Besides, what can I say, really? My father believes in leprechauns. I’m very sympathetic. In my heart, beneath it all, I am a pagan.”

  “What did you think of Bertrand?”

  Bertrand was Christine’s boyfriend. He’d been at the reading and left in the middle. He had to wake up early. He worked for an architect with an office near the Presidio.

  “Are you asking because you think I didn’t like him?”

  “Honey child, I simply know that you didn’t like him.”

  “How could you tell?”

  “There was a point where you shied away, when he was distracted by that dreadful little creature reading poesy about Sarah Palin.”

  “He seemed okay,” said J. Karacehennem. “It’s only that he was too proud, really.”

  “Proud?”

  “He kept talking about how his girlfriend was a girl like any other but that she just has a dick. He said it to me. I heard him say it to two other people. Word for word in his accent. ‘My girlfriend is like any other, but my girlfriend has a dick.’ You could hear it in his voice. All the pride.”

  chapter twenty-three

  Time was passing. Summer arrived. J. Karacehennem had been chosen for a writer’s residency in rural Denmark and disappeared into Scandinavia. Christine was busy with Bertrand.

  Adeline had other friends. She saw some. She ignored others.

  Most of her time was spent with Erik Willems.

  Bromato was failing. The CEO was burning money at an unsustainable pace. There was a question about whether or not Bromato would make it to a Series C round of funding. They were not making money for HRH Mamduh bin Fatih bin Muhammad bin Abdulaziz al Saud, also known as Dennis.

  MoriaMordor had given Bromato millions of dollars before its CEO and other co-founders had graduated college. They’d been attending Stanford University when they made their pitch.

  Stanford University was yet another educational institution that wrapped a cloak of the humanities around its development of new weapons for future wars.

  ADELINE AND ERIK were eating dinner at a restaurant on Valencia called Cafe Ethiopia.

  Erik Willems had suggested eating at Local’s Corner. Adeline turned him down.

  “I think if I ate there, J. Karacehennem would simply murder me.”

  “Isn’t he in Denmark?”

  “If his emails are any indicator.”

  “How would he even know?”

  “His girlfriend might see us, darling. I simply shan’t take the risk.”

  Adeline liked Cafe Ethiopia because the food was both incomprehensible and delicious. The decor was spartan. She also liked that Cafe Ethiopia was next door to Borderlands Books, a specialty bookstore focusing on Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.

  She loathed the three genres but she liked checking to see if they had Baby’s full catalogue.

  They always did. They had everything. Except for Hot Mill Steam.

  Hot Mill Steam was out of print. So few copies had sold that it was difficult to find anywhere, even on the Internet, which was a wonderful resource for sexism, abusing the mentally ill, and libeling the dead.

  ERIK WILLEMS was stuffing brown paste into his mouth.

  “Darling,” said Adeline. “I have two questions for you. You can answer in whatever order you so please. Numero uno. Why in the blurry blazes did you give millions of dollars to college undergraduates? Numero dos. Have you read Hot Mill Steam?”

  Erik fin
ished chewing.

  “They came highly recommended. Some of their professors have steered us towards other investment opportunities that worked out. When they suggested we invest in Bromato, we ran the numbers and they made sense. That’s the problem, isn’t it? Numbers only tell you so much. You can’t predict the variables of human failure. People’s greed and emotion almost always get the best of them.”

  “Darling, aren’t we speaky many big words about people who are, effectively, teenagers? Aren’t they Emil’s age? If you gave my progeny millions of your dollars, it’d be gone gone gone, Daddy-o.”

  “To answer your other question,” said Erik, “I haven’t read Hot Mill Steam. I couldn’t find a copy and then I read the reviews online. It sounds terrible.”

  “There are clunky sections,” said Adeline. “I’m not sure that Baby quite understands what it is that he’s doing. Even with all of that, I think it’s his best book. It’s rather better than time travelers suffering from hyperintelligent gonorrhea.”