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.