Jonathan Franzen wouldn’t know irony if he tripped over it. Last year, he declared that “serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves,” at a public reading. At a large university. In front of many people. And in 2006, he published a memoir—which is the print equivalent of yakking about yourself for five hours—called The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History.

Today, via an excerpt in the Guardian from his upcoming book The Kraus Project: Essays by Karl Kraus, he launched an attack on our “media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted” world. In it, he presents the Apple vs. PC commercials of the aughts as an apt analogy to Karl Kraus’s inner dichotomies. Never one to miss an opportunity for un-self-aware contrarianism, Franzen declared the PC (played by John Hodgman) similar to a character in a novel, with “actual desires.” But the personified Mac (played by Justin Long) was composed of “such insufferable smugness that he made the miseries of Windows attractive by comparison.”

He should know. On smugness, Franzen is a bit of an expert. Here are the seven smuggest bits from his rant against smugness:

1. The thing about Kraus is that he's is [sic] very hard to follow on a first reading — deliberately hard. He was the scourge of throwaway journalism, and to his cult-like followers his dense and intricately coded style formed an agreeable barrier to entry; it kept the uninitiated out.

But don’t despair: Franzen’s got intellectual might in spades and will help explain Krause’s complexities to your underdeveloped brains. In fact, he’s translated him from the German and written a whole 336-page book. And now he's adapted a section of the book into an article that aspires to be hard to follow on a first reading—deliberately hard.