THE END IS NEAR: Jarret Kobek’s I Hate the Internet and the Catastrophe of the Present

ABSTRACT

This article offers a reading of Jarret Kobek’s 2016 novel, I Hate the Internet, which will unpack its speculative mechanisms and suggest that its use of speculation works as a partial counter to the (also) speculative abstractions of capital. Second, I argue that I Hate the Internet is one of many contemporary examples of an emerging esthetic focused on the urban. Speculating on the erasure, destruction, and disappearance of the contemporary city, even the contemporary world, has become a resistant esthetic movement whose aim is to intervene in the already arrived catastrophe of informational capital’s regime of destruction (ecological, social, and spatial) on our increasingly urban world. This esthetic, visible in urban interventions across the globe, in both outsider and canonical contemporary art, and too, in recent discourse in media, literary, and cultural studies suggests that there may be a politics of doomsday speculation–a politics that is deeply rooted in the material, messy stuff of the present.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In an interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kobek describes his own unpleasant relationship with a gentrified San Francisco, a city he left shortly after the time period covered in the novel. He describes it as “an unbelievable clusterfuck. Being there was just the worst.” LaGambina, Greg. “What Do You Do if You’re a Useless Man? An Interview with Jarett Kobek.” The Los Angeles Review of Books, April 28, 2016.

2. Of course, as Terry Eagleton has pointed out, “Marx himself was perfectly aware of the ever-changing nature of the system he challenged. It is to Marxism itself that we owe the concept of different historical forms of capitalism” (2). Eagleton, Why Marx was Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).

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Notes on contributors

Allison M. Schifani

Allison M. Schifani is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami. She is also a founding member of the urban design and research collaborative, SPEC (https://cargocollective.com/speccities).