After reading a lot of what Kobek mockingly calls "good fiction", this book felt like a splash of cold water in the face. Kobek has about zero interest in what are normally considered the hallmarks of good books, like lyrical descriptions of houses and parks or meditations on history. His book is deliberately simple in style, with lots of repetitions and explanations about just how Fucked the modern world really is, with people everywhere going lonely and destroying each other over social media platforms that really only serve to make a few people very very rich.

Kobek blasts through all TED-talk blah about how technology will change everything with a moral outrage that is rare if not just absent in basically all fiction these days. With everything he describes, he just keeps insisting that it's fucked. Not through literary irony or complex metaphors that always feel just out of grasp, but with a bluntness and a simplicity that I really welcomed. This is the novel about the internet that I've been waiting for.

I Hate The Internet often reminded me of that guy – it’s nearly always a guy – at a party, or at work, who not only acts as if he’s an expert about everything pop-culture but is keen to express his opinion on the things you enjoy by labelling them as shit. Sometimes that guy can be funny and even on point but usually he’s a tiresome bore.

I often found myself… not bored… but unmoved by Kobek’s satirical attempt to reveal the dark heart of the Internet. It’s not that I disagreed with his general argument, i.e. that the Internet masquerades as being a place of free expression and independent thought but really it’s just a money-maker for the Twitter, Facebooks and Apples of this world. Or that I had an issue with his claim that the big brands – whether they be comic book companies or tech companies – have been making money on the backs of cheap labour for decades (with the Internet an extension of this). And I won’t quibble with his assertion that San Francisco has become gentrified, that finding affordable living is nearly impossible and that much of the blame can be laid at the feet of Silicon Valley. But none of this is new or profound. Salon, HuffPo, the New York Times and countless other media outlets have published articles making similar arguments for years. The mistreatment of Jack Kirby is a good example of something that’s been known for ages, which makes me wonder whether this book is aimed at me at all. Could it be a guide for the baby boomers who need to have pointed out the shit legacy they’ve left for the rest of us?

Whomever the audience, as a novel, as distinct from a series of ranty essays, it’s not very good. The plot is thin, the characters are barely developed and in a book that pretends to have a social conscience about race and class it’s amazing how rich and privileged everyone is, especially our main star Adeline. But the biggest problem with I Hate the Internet – which is not entirely Kobek’s fault – is how dated it is. It’s set in 2013 and was published in 2016 (a self-published version may have come out earlier) and so there’s no mention of Russian bots, fake news, Trump or the rise of the alt-right, things that are all directly associated with our current perception of the Net. One of Kobek’s arguments is that the shit you write on social media has no real impact or effect, as evidenced by the Arab Spring. Of course, now it’s far more complicated. Those companies are still making money but what’s published on social media, how it’s shaped and who it’s directed to does have an impact. Elections can be won or lost because of the involvement of a horde of Pepe lovers on Twitter or a sensationalist bit of fake news on Facebook.

Still if you’re looking for a smug, cynical patronising novel about why the Internet is a bit shit, I suppose you could read this book.

Ovo je u suštini skroz dobra knjiga u koju je autor nagurao svega i malo je razvodnio, pa sam zato istu ocijenila sa 3 zvjezdice. I zbog stila koji je nekad malo naporan, a tu mislim prije svega na ponavljanje fraza kojim opisuje pojave i ljude i to stalno, pa mi je išlo na živce povremeno.
Ali je izrekao puno toga istinitog i uglavnom onog što valjda svi negdje u suštini i znamo ali sebi možda ne želimo priznati - o internetu, marketingu, tome da smo roba za sve one koji ga koriste pričajući priče o slobodi govora i sl. I poklopilo mi se i sa mojim nekim razmišljanjima koja se gomilaju, pa mi je bilo drago vidjeti da nisam usamljena u tome.
Uglavnom, preporuka za vas ako koristite internet, da biste ga bolje shvatili. A posebno ako ga koristite i za posao na bilo koji način.

Marmite. Some people will hate the repetitive prose but I liked it, and it's a pop culture bonanza with a story there somewhere.

I should have loved this book but in the end I just thought the author [redacted] Vonnegut [redacted] and the snark got to be a bit much . [Jim'll Fix It]

This book is so juvenile, so crude, so poorly written, and so completely terrible that it does not deserve the time spent to think critically about it and review it. The target of the author's satire is unquestionably deserving: such a pity then that this cretinous writer is too incompetent to capitalize on the rich target.

despite the Vonnegut pastiche, a brilliant fart in the current-day culture windstorm of San Francisco and tech. Cathartic.

I do hate the internet and I also kind of hated this book. I like my satire razor sharp and clever and with this book I felt like Kobek was hitting me over the head with the satire stick. I found his approach exhausting and repetitive. It's possible I'm just too old for this (I don't have Twitter or Snapchat) and I'm sure millenials will eat it up. What was so frustrating was in amongst all the exhausting hardwork attempts at biting satire there were moments of complete genius. But you have to survive the tedium to get to them.

A super depressing Vonnegut-ish take on the internet in the 2010s.