„i hate the internet“ – Jarett Kobek

Dieses Buch ist eines der seltsamsten, das ich seit langem gelesen habe. Es gibt keine wirklich durchgehende Erzählung, sondern Absätze und Kapitel in loser Assoziation. Außerdem gibt es ziemlich viele über Ecken miteinander verbundene Figuren, die ich nicht immer gut auseinanderhalten konnte. Im Zentrum steht die Comicbuch-Illustratorin Adeline, alias M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch, die wegen eines viralen Videos berühmt wird, woraufhin sich ihr Alltag ziemlich verändert.

SO THERE ADELINE was in a classroom on the CCA campus over by Mission Bay, talking to a bunch of kids.
They were decades younger than her.
She was in her mid-forties. She was kind of famous. She was expressing a series of unpoular opinions. She was in public. It was 2013.
It was here that she made the one unforgivable mistake of the early Twenty-First Century.
She neglected to notice that someone was recording every word that she said.

Jarett Kobek: i hate the internet (p. 34)

Der Autor verwendet bestimmte Formulierungen – eher enzyklopedische Definitionen – so oft, dass sie trotz ihrer vermeintlichen Neutralität zu zynischen Kommentaren werden. Hautfarbe wird gleich zu Beginn als soziales Konstrukt beschrieben, jeder neu eingeführte Charakter über die Menge an „Eumelanin in the basal cell layer of her epidermis“ positioniert. Mit nüchternen, repetitiven Sätzen erzielt Jarett Kobek einen ähnlichen Effekt, bei Figuren genauso…

LIKE MANY OF THE MEN who worked with technology in the information economy, Erik Willems had a deep affection for juvenile literature.
Which is to say that he liked Science Fiction.
Which is to say that he also liked Robert Heinlein.
Which is to say that he also liked J.R.R. Tolkein.
Which is to say that he also liked Ayn Rand.

Jarrett Kobek: i hate the internet (p. 35)

…wie bei der Beschreibung unserer digitalisierten Umwelt:

JEREMY MET WOMEN through a website called OKCupid.
OKCupid asked Jeremy banal questions about his hobbies and religious beliefs. Then the website compared Jeremy’s answers with the answers of its female userbase. The website calculated a percentage of shared banality.
Jeremy would send messages to attractive women with whom he shared a high percentage of banality. Or the women would message him.
If the messaging worked out, Jeremy would meet the women in person.
If he met a woman in person and the interpersonal interaction worked out, Jeremy and the woman might hav esex.
If Jeremy and the woman had sex, then they would be sharing a new banality beyond their original shared banality.

Jarett Kobek: i hate the internet (p. 222)

Alle paar Seiten ließen mich einzelne Sätze auflachen:

Adeline went into her kitchen and made some breakfast. Yogurt and uncooked oats.
It was about one in the afternoon.
She underwent an enforced social ritual necessary to her professional life.
She checked her email.

Jarett Kobek: i hate the internet (p. 56)

Der Autor arbeitet viel mit Texten im Text, wie Werbeanzeigen, Buzzfeed-Titeln oder Tweets (was mich an Elias Hirschls CONTENT erinnerte, vgl. Zuckersüß 506).

Bay Area men + Eames lounge chairs. Simply can’t fathom why tech ppl might want to look as if they’re about to drop Napalm on Vietnam.

Jarett Kobek: i hate the internet (p. 207)

Und er schlägt eine erstaunliche, zufällige Brücke zum KI-Chatbot Grok von X (das zum Erscheinungszeitpunkt von i hate the internet 2016 noch Twitter hieß und noch lange nicht von Elon Musk übernommen war). Lustigerweise las ich diese Stelle just an dem Tag, an dem ich bei einer News-Schicht eine Meldung über die antisemitischen und rassistischen Ausfälle des Chatbots schrieb (Grok wird bald in Tesla-Fahrzeuge integriert – futurezone.at).

Perhaps the most famous example of a Science Fiction writer inventing a new word occurs in Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Part of Heinlein’s vision of horny decentralized alien sex involves the Martian word grok.
To grok something is to comprehend that something with effortless and infinite intiuition. When you grok something, that something becomes a part of you and you become a part of that something without any troublesome Earthling attempts at knowing.
A good example of groking something is the way that members of the social construct of the White race had groked their own piglet pink.
They’d groked their skin color so much that it became invisible. It had become part of them and they had become part of it. That was groking.
People in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially those who worked in technology like Erik Willems, loved to talk about groking.
With time, their overusage stripped away the original meaning and grok became synonymous with simple knowledge of a thing.
In a weird way, people in the Bay Area who used the word grok did not grok the word grok.

Jarett Kobek: i hate the internet (p. 40)

Das Internet, das Jarrett Kobek in i hate the internet beschreibt, existiert in dieser Form nicht mehr, bzw. ist eine nur noch schlimmere Version seiner selbst geworden. Ich frage mich daher, wie lange es dauern wird, bis die bissigen Seitenhiebe, die sich in einzelnen Worten und Nebensätzen verstecken, so ähnlich wie memetische Layer, unverständlich werden. Wer zwischen um ~2015 nicht ~extremely online~ war, kann mit dem Buch vermutlich ziemlich wenig anfangen. Ich habe mich jedenfalls gut amüsiert.

Jarett Kobek: i hate the internet. Serpent’s Tail (2017), 280 Seiten.