Why I Hate the Internet found so many readers

Among the poetry racks on the second floor of San Francisco’s legendary City Lights bookstore, an audience member is confronting the author Jarett Kobek with a spirited defense of the revolutionary power of Twitter and Bernie Sanders. His harangue, delivered during a book reading in February, was in atavistic beatnik dialect. “I do Tweet about it, Jack!” he shouted, stirring an erstwhile polite audience to shout things like “Sit the fuck down!” and “Let him talk!”

It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate reception for Kobek’s second novel, I Hate the Internet, a savage satire of internet culture set in 2013 San Francisco.. It centers on the fallout from a surreptitious recording posted to Youtube, its narrator describing real-world events of the city rendered in the hyperbolic language that has come to represent online interactions, and diverging into off-topic invective to expose its “ intolerable bullshit”.

More funny than obnoxious, the novel has become a sleeper sensation – a more or less self-published book that landed a favorable review above the fold on the front page of the New York Times’ arts section (something Kobek believes is a first for a self-published book). It has dipped into the Amazon top 500, and appears set for a wider international release in six languages.