Back when I first began reading pieces of I Hate The Internet, I honestly thought it was one of the worst books I had read in a while. The title of the book, the “trigger warning” and first chapter did draw me in to want to read, but after the third chapter I was fairly annoyed. One of the several things I hated was the over repetitive things, for example, how much eumelanin is in the basal stratum of our epidermis, which was Kobek’s way of saying what race a character was.
I first saw of these annoying little additions to the novel as ways to just make the reader waste their time. Like taking nine words or so to describe skin color instead of one. Another example would be his lengthy explanation of who Kobe Bryant is.
As I began the blog, read more and scoured the internet for more articles about this book, I discovered that the novel excellently explains why we should hate the internet. For example, when Kobek takes us down a two page description of who Kobe Bryant is, he is likely showing how annoying it is for our repetitive hyperlinks on the internet to take us page to page with more useless information.
As a computer science major, I often notice and learn about how technology is negatively and positively shaping our culture. In chapter 5, I think Kobek delivers likely, his greatest quote…
“This bad novel, which is a morality lesson about the Internet, was written on a computer. You are suffering the moral outrage of a hypocritical writer who has profited from the spoils of slavery.“
Our culture, including myself, who doesn’t have eumelanin in the basal cell layer of my epidermis, has created a capitalistic, selfish culture that has the good of only ourselves in mind.
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Literature & the Internet 