I Hate the Internet

by Jarett Kobek

George Bush II had telephoned Chirac and said, “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East… The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled… This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

  Chirac got off the phone with Bush II. He asked his staff if they knew anything about Gog and Magog.

  As French people are hedonists who write actual graphic novels about people fucking on beds of their own shit, no one in Chirac’s office remembered that Gog and Magog were proper nouns which appear in the Bible.

  Chirac’s staff contacted a Professor at the University of Lausanne named Thomas Römer.

  Thomas Römer was an expert in Old Testament studies. They asked him for a report on Gog and Magog.

  “ARE YOU going to explore the metaphor?” asked Adeline, “Or will you bury it beneath a bunch of new words that no human tongue has ever spoke?”

  “I’m trying to get away from that,” said Baby. “I hate my audience.”

  “Are you sure calling it The Cupcake and the Pastry is a good idea? You’ll send Erik over the moon. He is your audience, darling. Did you know that he’s pressured Bromato into renaming one of their services after a word he found in Annie Zero?”

  “Which one?” asked Baby.

  “Oh, darling,” said Adeline, “my attention is too dreadful. Anyhow, all you need do is wait for when someone uses the service to kill a queer or bully a teenager into suicide. The news reports will draw the connection. And then, my sweetness, you’ll be ever so proud. You’re the guru of San Francisco, Baby, you’re the yogi with the mostest. Erik’s education was so poor. The child seeks profundity in your very big words. So are you sure about that cupcake and that pastry? Dost thou really want the influence to go both ways?”

  “I’ve got to call it something, don’t I? You can’t have a nameless book.”

  “But I didn’t call to talk about your book!” said Adeline. “I wanted your opinion.”

  “My opinion on what?”

  “On what I should do! Beyoncé’s fans hate me!”

  chapter fifteen

  The furor died on a Friday. Like Jesus Christ, it was reborn on a Sunday.

  JESUS CHRIST WAS A SOCIAL RADICAL from the Roman province of Galilee. Jesus Christ was executed in the Roman province of Judæa. He preached the radical ideas of total love and total forgiveness.

  J. Karacehennem was fixated on the idea that Jesus Christ was a White Magus initiated into a system of sexual magick by Apollonius of Tyana.

  Apollonius of Tyana was another mystic. Like J. Karacehennem’s family, Apollonius of Tyana was from the land mass now known as Turkey. No one really knows much about Apollonius of Tyana.

  The major theme in this imaginary system of sexual magick was the use of seminal fluid as a remedy for death. The idea was nonsense but Karacehennem had snuck it into almost all of his writing.

  ON SUNDAY, someone found an interview with Adeline that appeared in the July 1997 issue of Wizard magazine.

  Wizard was a news publication which covered the comic book industry. It told its readers about Marvel’s latest plans to exploit the intellectual properties created by Jack Kirby.

  Wizard folded in 2011.

  THE INTERVIEW OCCURRED when the true nature of Adeline’s pseudonym was not yet known. It was conducted over email not long after Adeline bought her first computer.

  Believing that Adeline was a Russian man living in Moscow, the interviewer asked some very stupid questions, like: Are the girls in Russia really as sexy as them seem?

  Adeline answered with even stupider answers, like: Russia girls are sexier than Americans! Here in Russia we have word блядь! It is nice word use on street with girl! American girls are very willing for sex! I come America for their sexy and see how they serve men!

  блядь was the Russian word for bitch or cunt or whore.

  Unlike the speakers of English, who had hundreds of words for degrading women, the Russians believed in economy.

  AYN RAND was a Russian who didn’t believe in economy.

  Her endless novel Atlas Shrugged was about 800 pages long. The book was about how money is awesome and rich people are awesome and everything is awesome except for the poor people who are garbage that should die in the gutter. The big thing that happens in Atlas Shrugged is an asshole named John Galt convinces all the world’s rich people to move to a valley where they can be rich together. Then he gives a speech that runs for 60 pages.

  THE PERSON who found the old copy of Wizard uploaded digital replicas of its pages.

  IN LIGHT OF THIS NEW MATERIAL, the original video of Adeline in Kevin Killian’s class was reanalyzed and reblogged and retweeted and retumbled and reshared. It was joined with links to the newly rediscovered interview.

  Amongst the outraged, there was the sense of a specific connection between Adeline’s appearance in Kevin Killian’s class and the objectionable opinions which she had expressed sixteen years earlier.

  Journalists were writing articles.

  They had noticed the trend.

  JEREMY WINTERBLOSS emailed Adeline a series of images which were circulating on the Internet. When she saw them, she knew that the situation had become impossible.

  The central visual was the same across the images. It was a screenshot from the video of Adeline in Kevin Killian’s classroom. The only variation between images came in the form of captions superimposed over the screenshot.

  The superimposition of captions over images was one of the Internet’s great pastimes. There was an explosion of free services ensuring that the world’s great wits could caption photos with ease.

  Most of the captions were stupid. Some called Adeline old. Some called her a whore. Some just quoted things that she’d said in Kevin Killian’s classroom or in her interview with Wizard.

  One image made Adeline furious. There she was in Kevin Killian’s classroom. Captioned over her own face were the words: PRETENDS TO BE A RUSSIAN MAN. HATES OTHER WOMEN.

  “How can anyone think that I hate other women?” Adeline asked her computer. “This is bullshit!”

  And then Adeline realized that she was talking to an inanimate object, as if by vocalizing her disgust she could somehow put the genie back in its bottle.

  The situation had become impossible.

  Adeline did the only practical thing that had been suggested.

  She opened her own account on Twitter.

  chapter sixteen

  For years, Adeline’s choice of pseudonym had worked out. She found something hilarious about having the name of a Russian man. It seemed distinct enough that no one would ever mistake the name for anything else.

  JOEL SILVER let slip the truth about both J.W. Bloss and M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch right around the time that the performance artist Marina Abramović, who didn’t have much eumelanin in the basal cell layer of her epidermis, went from being a star of the art world to being a flat out star.

  In 2010, Marina Abramović did a performance piece at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She sat in a gallery and invited the museum’s visitors to stare into her face. She in turn stared back.

  The performance was called The Artist is Present. It ran for several months and was broadcast live on the Internet, which was a wonderful resource for artist engagement, expanding a fan base, and reading about the feud between Alan Moore and Grant Morrison.

  Something about the piece resonated far beyond the normal impact of performance installations. The Artist is Present generated massive coverage. Print and digital.

  Then Lady Gaga showed up.

  LADY GAGA was a pop star without any eumelanin in the basal cell layer of her epidermis.

  The word GAGA had become the metonymy by which any person in the industrialized world could summon up a vague neurological image of Lady Gaga’s face. It was a magickal invocation. It was a brand.

  Lady Gaga’s songs were about the same six subjects of all songs by all pop stars: love, celebrity, fucking
, heartbreak, money and buying ugly shit.

  A COMMON ARC in the narrative of pop stars was their desire to be recognized as cross-platform successes.

  Clothing and accoutrement were the easiest. Every pop star sold shoddy clothing to their guileless fans. Many sold their own perfumes and jewelry. Many attempted acting in feature films.

  Lady Gaga went to the Museum of Modern Art and visited Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present. Lady Gaga did not stare into Marina Abramović’s face and Marina Abramović did not stare into Lady Gaga’s face.

  Lady Gaga just walked around. She was shitting gold and pissing honey and she wanted to be part of the Art World.

  A KEY ASPECT of pop stardom involved the creation of a lexicon for various aspects of the experience. Every pop star needed fans who were willing to adopt a slightly ridiculous group name.

  Lady Gaga’s fans called themselves Little Monsters.

  Lady Gaga called herself Mother Monster.

  By the time that Lady Gaga visited Marina Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art, over 5,000,000 Little Monsters were following Mother Monster on Twitter.

  A few months later, Mother Monster would become the most followed person on Twitter.

  By March 2012, she had over 20,000,000 followers.

  AMERICAN JOURNALISM was morally bankrupt and bereft of ideas. As a result, the number of a person’s followers on Twitter was treated as a metric of influence.

  To a certain degree, this was true. The tweets of Mother Monster did indeed reach a large number of Little Monsters.

  But other than endorsement deals, it was very difficult to turn tweets into money, which is the only measure of merit in a capitalist society.

  Mother Monster’s first album, The Fame (2008), sold 4,572,000 albums in the United States of America. Mother Monster’s second album, Born This Way (2011), sold 2,326,000 albums in the United States. Mother Monster’s third album, ARTPOP (2013), sold under 1,000,000 albums in the United States.

  All the while, her number of Twitter followers was on the increase. A follower was someone who received notification of the tweets generated by any given individual account.

  By the end of 2013, Mother Monster had about 40,900,000 Twitter followers.

  Letting I stand for influence, AS stand for total album sales, and TF stand for Twitter followers, now comes a general formula for calculating the waning influence of Mother Monster’s influence via Twitter:

  FOR ANOTHER METRIC, one might use the methodology invented by Zhang Xi, a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2012, Zhang Xi published a paper entitled Positiv/Negative Einfluß: Digitale Hebelwirkung entfalten mit Twitter. Zhang Xi had some eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis.

  Zhang Xi’s paper suggested that a user’s Twitter influence was best measured by establishing a connection between three principle data points: (1) The number of users following a Twitter account. (2) The number of users followed by a Twitter account. (3) The number of tweets sent from a Twitter account.

  As she was well read in the Frankfurt School, Zhang Xi had encountered the early works of Augustus Erhard Ernest Pfeiffer-Phol. Like all members of the Frankfurt School, Augustus Erhard Ernest Pfeiffer-Phol didn’t have any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.

  Zhang Xi admired Pfeiffer-Phol’s much ignored paper on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in which the writer repeated a phrase to dismiss much of what he found lamentable in the Prussian thinker. This phrase was Wenn alle Nerven kaputt sind!

  When Zhang Xi was writing her paper on Twitter, she had given a great deal of thought to the relationship between her writing and Pfeiffer-Phol’s work. The fundamental thesis of her paper was based on Pfeiffer-Phol’s idea that the most powerful person in any social situation is the one who speaks the least.

  As a tribute to the Pfeiffer-Phol, Zhang Xi had turned his phrase into an acronym which had unfortunate connotations in English. It appeared as such:

  The lower a Twitter user scored on the WaNks Index, the greater the influence. Users with very high scores had very little influence.

  On the day of March 8, 2013, Lady Gaga’s WaNks Index Score was 0.0000765202785228534. She was very influential.

  WHEN MOTHER MONSTER went to see Marina Abramović at the Museum of Modern Art, her media presence may have been at its very peak.

  It was between The Fame and Born This Way.

  Marina Abramović became very famous. She never looked back.

  MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ’S fame became a problem when people started to imagine a linguistic closeness between Marina Abramović and the pseudonym of M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch.

  Adeline even looked a little like Marina Abramović. They were both women over forty with long dyed black hair and a lack of eumelanin in their epidermises.

  Marina Abramović was older than Adeline by about twenty years, but this didn’t matter. People remember at most three characteristics about other people’s appearances. Usually, it’s two: the color of skin and the style of hair.

  Whenever someone like Kevin Killian introduced Adeline as M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch, it was almost inevitable that she would be mistaken for Marina Abramović.

  These conversations went something like this:

  “This is Adeline. You might know her better as M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch. The artist.”

  “OH MY GOD, YOU’RE MARINA ABROMOVIĆ? I TOTALLY WATCHED YOUR THING ON THE INTERNET.”

  “No, darling, I’m not Abramović. I’m M. Abrahamovic Petrovitch. I’m not a performance artist. I draw comic books.”

  “Oh. Like Spider-Man?”

  “No.”

  FOR THREE YEARS, this was the most annoying aspect of Adeline’s modest dose of fame. She didn’t find it that bad, really, as she was being mistaken for someone else and could easily shut down conversations.

  THE DAY BEFORE someone found Adeline’s old interview in Wizard magazine, she went to brunch with Erik Willems at a bakery near Dolores Park called Tartine.

  Tartine was a twee little place. Adeline tolerated it. Erik Willems loved it. Tartine was a tourist destination. There were usually long lines on weekends.

  Adeline and Erik Willems had experienced a very rare occurrence. They were able to find a table.

  Tartine’s renown was due to the high quality of its baked goods and the fact that it kept getting write-ups in a wide range of publications like Vogue and the New York Times.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES was transitioning from America’s newspaper of record into a website that catered to the perceived whims of affluent, youthful demographics.

  This meant a lot of articles about ephemeral music. This meant a lot of articles about ephemeral technology. This meant a lot of articles about Tartine.

  The New York Times was not very good at reporting on ephemeral music. It was even worse at reporting on ephemeral technology.

  It was excellent at reporting about Tartine.

  THE NEW YORK TIMES was extraordinarily bad at reporting on the run-up to George Bush II’s War in Iraq.

  After America was terrofucked, the New York Times had run all manner of ridiculous articles about how Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq, was building and stockpiling Weapons of Mass Destruction.

  The leaders of countries like America, who ran countries which possessed weapons capable of killing billions of people, disapproved of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

  Whereas a conventional bomb, like the ones that America dropped on Iraq, would turn a family of illiterate peasants into red mist and chunks of meat and then incinerate the chunks of meat, Weapons of Mass Destruction would poison entire families of illiterate peasants and cause them to choke to death. Weapons of Mass Destruction would cause entire families of illiterate peasants to blister and suffer chemical burns until they died.

  The moral being: when obliterating illiterate peasants, there’s a right way of doing things.

  Both George Bush II and the New York Times said that Saddam Hussein had a metric fuckl
oad of Weapons of Mass Destruction.

  This was the principle justification for the War in Iraq.

  GEORGE BUSH II’s War in Iraq should not be mistaken for George Bush I’s War Against Iraq, which was justified by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of the oil rich country Kuwait.

  Like his son, George Bush I had worked in oil. He knew the value of gas.

  America was a country where a father and son, both with the same name, had waged war against the same dictator.

  This is why more than half of the country forgot about their culturally imbued racism and decided it was time to elect an African-American to the Presidency.

  WHEN AMERICAN TROOPS under the command of George Bush II reached Iraqi soil, they discovered that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction.

  The administration of George Bush II was wrong.

  The New York Times was wrong.

  They had cocked-upped the story about Weapons of Mass Destruction. They had really fucked up.

  MOST OF THE WORST REPORTING on Weapons of Mass Destruction was done by a woman named Judith Miller. Judith Miller relied on bogus sources like the Iraqi exile Ahmed Chalabi, who had some eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis.

  Another reporter named Michael Gordon helped Judith Miller in her bad reporting.

  While Judith Miller was writing her intolerable bullshit, there was another reporter working for the New York Times named Jayson Blair. He was African-American. His basale stratum was loaded with eumelanin.

  Both Judith Miller and Michael Gordon had a conspicuous lack of eumelanin in their epidermises.