Jarett Kobek Quotes

Sometimes it feels like there are only eleven people in the world and the rest are paste.

Adeline had moved to San Francisco in 1996, which was a defining moment in the city's history. 1996 was not defined by Adeline's arrival.

1996 as defined by being the year during which the Internet economy exploded into the collective consciousness.

San Francisco had spent much of the Twentieth Century in decline, which meant that it was a bad place for people who liked doing business but a wonderful place for people who were terrible at making money.

San Francisco had been defined by the culture of people who were terrible at making money. It had become a haven for the misfits of America most of who were living in the city's fabulous old houses.

When the Internet economy exploded into the collective consciousness, these people proved that resisting social change was the only thing at which they were less adept than earning money.

He was also one of the twelve Presidents of the United States to own slaves, which is a larger figure than the number of Presidents who had beards.

Like many of the men who worked with technology in the information economy, Erik Willems had a deep affection for juvenile literature.
Which is to say that he liked Science Fiction.
Which is to say that he also liked Robert Heinlein.
Which is to say that he also liked J.R.R. Tolkein.
Which is to say that he also liked Ayn Rand.

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 CIA's money were happy to help out.

Both of Tolkein's books were about elves, wizards and magic. Both books were read by morons. Both books had been turned into a series of idiotic films featuring a lot of flatulence.

In 2012, President Barack Obama ran for re-election against Mitt Romney, the former Governor of Massachusetts, who didn't have any eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. It was the usual bargain for J. Karacehennem and other people of the Loony Left. You supported a person whose policies you agreed with, sort of, but who you felt was too beholden to corporate interests and whose foreign policy made you sick. If you didn't support this person, the alternative was something even worse. Voting was little more than triage.

More than anything, The One True God was a potent weapon used by sexually repressed members of society to inflict misery on everyone else.

Adeline hadn't owned a television since 1992.
She'd suffered fifteen years hearing about how the Internet would transform American culture and open new avenues of expression.
But in the end, it was only more people talking about television.

The most uninteresting thing in the world is watching narcissists fuck each other.

It's so easy to demonstrate your own righteousness and it's so easy to challenge the social order when all you're doing is picking on idiots who are better off ignored and left to wither in the stench of their own lives! You

THE CURIOUS THING was that Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and Blogspot, a media platform owned by Google, were the stomping grounds of self-styled intellectual and social radicals. It was where they were talking. It was where, they believed, the conversation was shifting.
They were typing morality lectures into devices built by slaves on platforms of expression owned by the Patriarchy, and they were making money for the Patriarchy. Somehow this was destroying the Patriarchy.
So there is always hope.

The Internet was a wonderful invention. It was a computer network which people used to remind other people that they were awful pieces of shit.

You can't live that wild, in public, without the collective consciousness figuring out a way to suicide you.

Adeline lived in San Francisco. San Francisco had two distinctions: (1) It was the most beautiful city in America. (2) It was filled with the most annoying people in America.

It had always been like this, from the beginning.

The merit of any moment in San Francisco could be measured by a simple question: was the beauty of the city outweighing its annoying citizens?

Uncoincidentally, Instagram was also the first social-media platform to which the only sane reaction was hate.

JACK KIRBY is also the central personage of this novel because this is not a good novel. This is a seriously mixed-up book with a central personage who never appears. The plot, like life, resolves into nothing and features emotional suffering without meaning.

The only effect of the words of powerless people on the Internet was to inflict misery on other powerless people.

As part of his long-winded bullshit, Baby fell into a genre trope that he had avoided in his first two novels.

He started inventing new words.

This was a common habit amongst Science Fiction writers. They couldn't help themselves. They were always inventing new words.

Perhaps the most famous example of a Science Fiction writer inventing a new word occurs in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Part of Heinlein's vision of horny decentralized alien sex involves the Martian word grok.

To grok something is to comprehend that something with effortless and infinite intuition. When you grok something, that something becomes a part of you and you become a part of that something without any troublesome Earthling attempts at knowing.

A good example of groking something is the way that members of the social construct of the White race had groked their own piglet pink.

They'd groked their skin color so much that it became invisible. It had become part of them and they had become part of it. That was groking.

People in the San Francisco Bay Area, especially those who worked in technology like Erik Willems, loved to talk about groking.

With time, their overusage stripped away the original meaning and grok became synonymous with simple knowledge of a thing.

In a weird way, people in the Bay Area who used the word grok did not grok the word grok.

Baby had always been popula

What disturbs and compels about pornography is not the sex, which is always a snooze, but that the medium addresses every social issue in the absolute wrong way. Not long after any social event or trend, a pornographic response emerges. It will be incredibly creepy and wrong headed, an underbelly view of public life via the worst excesses of capitalism in which the answer to every social problem is the commodification of desire.