Some of these opinions are complaints about the fantasies of fame and power in the songs, videos and social media of today’s pop stars. “A wide range of humanity believed that Beyoncé and Rihanna were inspirations rather than vultures,” we read. “Adeline had spit on their gods.” Adeline barely knows what Twitter is. Attack Bey and RiRi? She’s about to find out about its self-righteous side.

Image Jarett Kobek

Adeline’s story sits alongside that of a younger woman, Ellen, whose life is destroyed after an old boyfriend’s pictures of her, taken during sex, are splashed across the web. Each of these women, in Mr. Kobek’s hands, is interesting and sympathetic. But “I Hate the Internet” is fundamentally a platform for the author’s slashing social criticism.

There’s a bit of the French writer Michel Houellebecq in Mr. Kobek’s profane satire. There’s a bit of Thomas Piketty in his obsession with economic inequality. There’s a bit of the Ambrose Bierce of “The Devil’s Dictionary” in his ability to take words and ideas and invest them with uglier and thus usually more accurate meanings.

New definitions? Comics, here, are “subtle pornography for the mentally backward.” Comic-book conventions are “an excuse for people to dress up like the intellectual properties of major corporations.” Money is “the unit by which people measured humiliation. What would you do for a dollar?”

Amazon: “an unprofitable website dedicated to the destruction of the publishing industry.” Instagram: “the first social media platform to which the only sane reaction was hate.” Then there’s this about George W. Bush’s paintings: “Like peering into the shattered mind of a suicidal beagle that’s lost depth perspective.”

This is a shaggy and quite entertaining novel of ideas. The two most prominent of these are: Why are humans so eager, on sites like Twitter and Facebook, to give away their intellectual property to wealthy white men? And: What has happened to political activism? Do people think typing 140-character morality lectures is pushing society forward?

“One of the curious aspects of the 21st century was the great delusion amongst many people, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, that freedom of speech and freedom of expression were best exercised on technology platforms owned by corporations dedicated to making as much money as possible,” Mr. Kobek writes.