The Russians were the people who caused the CIA to fund literary fiction. There was the idea that literary endeavors could open up a valid front in the information war…The KGB were the Russian equivalent of the CIA. The KGB didn’t fund literary fiction. Mostly, the KGB just kicked the shit out of Russian writers.

-Jarett Kobek, I Hate The Internet, 2016

Smashing Up Local’s Corner

San Francisco has always been a hotbed of rebellion, a tradition that thankfully continues today, even when economic conditions are aligned against militant social movements. Over the past several years, San Francisco was hit by a massive wave of evictions, demolitions, displacement, and political repression. During the height of this volatile period, a new restaurant called Local’s Corner opened up in the Mission District, one of the most impacted neighborhoods of the housing crisis. Unsurprisingly, the owner of Local’s Corner was anything but a local, while his restaurant was taking the place of a genuinely local corner-store called La Placita. Between 2013 and 2014, a struggle against this man’s Local empire unfolded in the Mission and eventually found itself recorded in the pages of an international best-selling novel called I Hate The Internet by Jarett Kobek.

La Placita Market, 2010

In the novel, a character very much like the author moves to San Francisco in 2010 and begins living in an apartment on 23rd and Bryant with his girlfriend, two blocks away from the storefront. In 2011, he learns that the local corner-store La Placita is going to be replaced by a luxury restaurant called Local’s Corner, a decision that angered the actual locals. After his girlfriend signs a petition asking the City to block the move, a character very much like the author goes to a community meeting held by “The Owner” and asks “The Owner if he felt like his restaurant was a fait accompli and if he believed that the concerns of the residents were things to be brushed off.” After this question, “The Owner ended the meeting.”

Local’s Corner, 2012

As the author explains, “because he had been so obnoxious at the meeting,” a character very much like the author “was approached by other people in the area, none of whom he had seen before. They asked if he wanted to go to a smaller meeting about Local’s Corner. So he went…As a result of this clandestine rendezvous, the next few weeks of [his] life got very weird. He entered into a conspiracy with the other neighbors that necessitated his attending a secret rendezvous above a fried chicken store on 24th Street. He went to a contentious meeting in City Hall. He went to an even more contentious meeting in a nearby cafe. The Owner was in these latter two meetings. The one at City Hall happened in the office of David Campos, the neighborhood’s elected City Supervisor…it was unpleasant. [He] never thought they would win the fight against Local’s Corner.”

Local’s Corner, 2013 (Keep Mission Brown tag)

As a consequence of siding against Local’s Corner, the landlord of a character very much like the author began to make complaints about him and his girlfriend, putting their housing at risk. One morning in 2013, on his way to some literary event, the character very much like the author walks past Local’s Corner and sees that “the previous evening, someone had vandalized the restaurant. They had used purple spray paint to tag its windows with graffiti. The graffiti read: Keep Mission Brown.” This was the official start of a militant campaign against “The Owner” and all his other businesses, a long effort that began when a “woman named Sandra Cuadra and her family went to Local’s Corner. They were a party of five…They were turned away…There was Local’s Corner, the most obvious and tone deaf symbol of the changes wrought on the neighborhood. It had denied a Latino family service. On Cesar Chavez Day. Its owner had a bad reputation around the neighborhood. The matriarch of that Latino family was a beloved neighborhood fixture. So the vandalization and graffiti began.”

Local’s Corner, 2014 (Keep Hoods Yours tag)

This campaign stretched on for many months and targeted other businesses of “The Owner’s” until he eventually closed Local’s Corner in 2014. That year also saw the explosion of the Google Bus protests, the blockading of streets, the targeting of tech-overlords, multiple instances of vandalism, and several eviction resistance campaigns. In a moment where thousands were being displaced, the victory against Local’s Corner was a rare slap in the face to the ruling economy in San Francisco where “the civic statutes governing new businesses were written with the explicit purpose of encouraging as much commerce as possible.” This experience was powerful enough for Jarett Kobek that he included it in his novel I Hate The Internet, a book that would spread wildly far outside San Francisco.

I Hate The Internet, Serbian edition

Stupid Fucking Career

Despite being mercilessly critiqued in the book, The New York Times dedicated the front page of its books section to reviewing I Hate The Internet after its publication in 2016. This led to the novel becoming a small best-seller in the US and UK and it was soon translated into several languages, allowing I Hate The Internet to continue its best-seller status in places like Serbia. Thousands of people have now read this book and were able to learn about a very small, very local struggle that took place in the Mission District of San Francisco in the early-to-mid 2010s. Not only does the book place this struggle in the proper social and political context, it also outlines what ended up being an effective campaign against gentrification. In this manner, Jarett Kobek used his book to aid the militant struggle against capitalism, not mock it like his contemporary Maggie Nelson did in The Argonauts. One reason that Kobek was able to pull this off was because he intentionally set out to write a bad novel.

Sonnet by Wendy Trevino

As the author clearly states within the first thirty pages of I Hate The Internet, “the writer of this novel gave up trying to write good novels when he realized that the good novel, as an idea, was created by the Central Intelligence Agency. This is not a joke. This is true. This is church. The CIA funded The Paris Review. The CIA funded the Iowa Writers Workshop. The CIA engineered the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature. A person would be hard pressed to find three other institutions with more influence over the development of the good novel and literary fiction. Literary fiction was a term used by the upper classes to suggest books which paired pointless sex with ruminations on the nature of mortgages were of greater merit than books which paired pointless sex with guns and violence. The CIA funded literary fiction because people at the CIA believed that American literature was excellent propaganda and would help fight the Russians. People at the CIA believed that literary fiction would celebrate the delights of a middle class existence produced by American dynamism. The people who took the CIAs money were happy to help out.”

This is one of the clearest formulations of a long-ignored truth, although lately there have been more voices elaborating exactly how the CIA has historically been a manipulator of mass-culture. As one would expect, this type of political clarity isn’t rewarded in the US publishing industry, and Jarett Kobek was unable to find anyone willing to release I Hate The Internet. Exploiting a known loop-hole of capitalist logic, Kobek made a website, registered a small publishing company as part of an LLC, and prepared to mail out the company’s titles, including I Hate The Internet. At a glance, this novel didn’t appear to be self-published, allowing mainstream literature reviewers to keep reading instead of throwing the advance copy in the trash. A self-published book is the same as dog-shit to mainstream reviewers, and they tend to avoid these works unless they become organic hits like Fifty Shades of Grey or The Martian. Knowing that a “publishing company” is nothing more than some new books, a website, and an LLC status, Kobek infiltrated his subversive work into the mainstream with a simple deception: he convinced the literary world that his career was still good.

The major reason his career was good to begin with was because his novella ATTA had been published by the MIT/Semiotext imprint in 2011. Ever since they released The Coming Insurrection as the first volume of their Interventions Series, this imprint has continued to publish works from a variety of authors who generally share anti-capitalist values. Despite the imprint being a capitalist enterprise overseen by pro-capitalist forces, its many anti-capitalist writers have been granted a legitimacy that will help them publish in the future, if they didn’t posses that already. With the laurels of the MIT Press hanging over Jarett Kobek’s head, I Hate The Internet was taken seriously by the literary establishment and hailed across the ocean despite being self-published. At every opportunity since its release, Kobek has reminded the public that no one in the publishing industry wanted I Hate The Internet, a bad novel that repeatedly reminds the reader how “the CIA, which had funded the good novel, had also funded the crack cocaine epidemic and the meteoric rise in crime, both causing unfathomable suffering for people with eumelanin in the basale strata of their epidermises.”

Unable to deny that Jarett Kobek had written a best-seller, one of the five main publishing houses paid Kobek a nice advance for his 2017 novel, The Future Won’t Be Long. Kobek described the large work as a “Victorian-novel” and the prequel to I Hate The Internet, charting the lives of a few characters as they navigate the 1990s NYC party scene. Once it was published, The Future Won’t Be Long failed to bring in much money, nor did it sell, nor did it become a best-seller. In short, it ended the career of Jarett Kobek, who quickly went on to reveal that his major publishing house had once worked directly with the Nazis by printing their fascist propaganda. As he now freely admits, Kobek went all out once his career was officially bad. His most recent novel, published in the UK, has the glorious title of Only Americans Burn In Hell. It’s so far been ignored by the US literary hegemons who’ve written off Kobek as the creator of bad novels.

Writing Bad Novels

To help promote Only American’s Burn In Hell, we’ve released a video partially composed of a filmed interview between Jarett Kobek and Alan Moore, anarchist magician and author of the now infamous V for Vendetta. The interview is interspersed with clips from related contexts and ends with a history of how social media and social conflict in the US appeared to rise together between 2007 and 2016. This momentous ascent corresponds not only with the Obama administration, but with the rapid growth in smartphone use following the release of the iPhone in 2007. Our video hints at the possibility that this might not have been the best long-term fusion, especially with the Democratic Party now calling for an even more draconian social-media landscape. While it may have been a useful tool at various moments, social-media has not only become a heavily-policed geopolitical battlefield, it exists solely to make money, gather data, create addictive behaviors, and generate ordered maps of social networks. In contemporary Russia, using social-media is equivalent to yelling at an FSB officer while standing with your friends and demanding they keep tabs on all of you. It’s no different in the US, people just pretend it isn’t, mostly because of an event they call the ‘Arab Spring.’

As the author of I Hate The Internet describes it, “the Arab Spring was a name given by people in America to events that occurred between the years 2010 and 2012. The citizens of various Arabian nations had staged a series of protests and revolts against their governments. Americans called this the Arab Spring. Some of these protests and revolts lead to the toppling of social orders. Other protests and revolts lead to the re-entrenchment of social orders and brutal civil war in Syria. American journalists loved the Arab Spring. The narrative of the Arab Spring in the American media was the same narrative that the American media perpetuated whenever any country went into revolt…In other words, all revolutions happened because everyone everywhere wanted to be Americans.” In I Hate The Internet, a character very much like the author goes to Egypt during these events and talks to people in the protests. As he observes, “no one mentioned Facebook. No one mentioned Twitter. Mostly people talked about money and how they had none.”

Social media, especially as it’s been used by social movements, has now reached a crisis point that can either be ignored or dealt with, and we provide these words, these images, and these links to help navigate the ever-changing tech-dystopia stretching away in each direction. No matter how useful it might appear at a given moment, “the only purpose of freedom of speech and freedom of expression on Twitter was to make money for the people who had founded and invested in Twitter.” At a certain point, it will be just as easy to convince people to destroy capitalism as it will be to convince them to get off Twitter, Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and the like. We hope this day will come soon, and we hope you do, too.

More bad novels! More vandalism! More career suicide! More anti-capitalism! More imagination!