The comments said two things.
“Jarett Kobek is a rapist” or “Jarett Kobek is a pedophile.”
Hello, said I to myself, you’re neither a rapist nor a pedophile! Why, these comments on the Internet are simply not true!
Because I am good with computers, I was able to figure out that these comments had been posted from Woodland Hills, California, which was about twenty miles from my apartment in Los Angeles.
I was also able to figure out that they had been posted by Oyster the Clown.
This was not a happy moment.
It’s difficult to be libeled as a rapist and a pedophile on the Internet and not feel as if the sky is collapsing on your head.
It is an awful thing to experience.
Someone is out to get you, said I to myself.
At the time, reader, I didn’t know it but I was encountering the very strange and new experience of someone writing Jarett Kobek fanfiction.
Generally speaking, fanfiction is written whenever someone decides that they want to tell a story about an intellectual property to which they have no legal rights.
A good example would be when a Batman true believer wants to offer up a prayer and types a little story about Batman kicking the shit out of The Joker.
Or snogging The Riddler.
Or whatever.
These stories tend to go into the Internet.
Alas, many of them, like the Jarett Kobek fanfiction, are about pedophilia and rape!
And, reader, as we’ve read about someone else’s Jarett Kobek fanfiction, I shall write a bit of my own.
I’ll tell you a story about the failure of The Future Won’t Be Long.
You’ll have to pardon me, as this fanfiction will be short on both pedophilia and rape.
But it will employ the grotesque language of business.
Which is almost as bad.
If you believe in brands, then you must also believe that the success of any brand derives from its ability to reflect and be defined by its core values.
If, following the self-published US release of I Hate the Internet, you can conceive of a Jarett Kobek brand, then you must also conceive that its core value was this: fuck you.
Self-publishing meant that I Hate the Internet had erupted into the world with no permission, no rules, and disconnected from the social and class strictures dominating American writing.
And the novel’s text had done something nearly impossible: it had shit on the rich not from a sense of envy but rather one of superiority.
The brand said this: I denounce thee.
I denounce thee, publishing.
I denounce thee, civility.
I denounce thee, you masters of reality.
Fuck you.
After I Hate the Internet was released and succeeded beyond his wildest ambitions, Jarett Kobek couldn’t imagine any direction other than going to one of the five major publishers.
At the moment of his triumph, Jarett Kobek suffered a failure of imagination.
He flung himself at Penguin Random House with all the vigor of a dog returning to its own vomit.
He allowed himself to be published in the trade dress of a literary writer.
He revealed himself as a class pretender, as someone who believed that he could operate on the level of Jonathan Franzen, as the kind of fraud who’d take that misbegotten Treblinka money and run run run.
It was the smart decision.
But the smart decision was what it always is.
The anti-life equation.
The death of fuck you.
And, boy, did Jarett Kobek ever pay the price.
In the end, his ultimate fuck you was to himself.
Anyway.
Vice deleted the comments.
I spent the new few weeks Googling my own name, obsessively, wondering when Oyster the Clown would strike again.
But nothing happened.
Silence.
In early April of 2010 AD, I visited San Francisco, where I delivered a paper on the underground comix artist Rory Hayes at a comic-book convention.
During my visit, I received an email informing me that I’d been subscribed to the mailing list of Biggayfrathouse.com, a website dedicated to a Big Gay Frat House in San Francisco’s Castro District.
The email carried the IP address of the person who subscribed me.
An IP address is the individual marker of any point of access to the Internet.
The IP address in the email resolved to a Comcast Cable account in Washington DC.
In about 1,000 words, this will be an important detail.
I Googled for my own name and discovered that a few minutes after I’d been subscribed to the mailing list of Big Gay Frat House, someone had gone to the website of CNN and posted two comments on an article about the screenwriter Diablo Cody’s pregnancy.
The first comment was from someone calling themselves, “oyster.”
The first comment read: “Abort it now!”
Just below, “Jarett Kobek” had commented: “I do enjoy a good fetus rape.”
Things again fell silent.
On May 3rd, 2010 AD, an article that I’d written was published both in print and online.
It detailed a visit that I’d made in 2009 AD to northern Iraq, where I’d spent a small amount of time at Lalish, the central religious shrine of the Yezidi, who are a persecuted religious culture from Syria and Iraq.
Getting the article published was a total pain in the ass.
This was well before the Yezidi were genocided by the Islamic State in 2014 AD, which meant that the Yezidi were not yet a story that appealed to the editorial class.
And the ultimate thrust of what I wanted to write was an unpopular message on the verge of America’s supposed withdrawal of military troops from Iraq.
The thrust was this: We’ve made a huge mess and these people will pay the price.
It took a year, but I ended up publishing with the NYU Alumni Magazine on the advice of my friend Rich Byrne, who said that glossy alumni magazines tended to pay serious money.
He wasn’t kidding.
I got $1,800 for a 1,500-word piece.
The editorial process was tortured, and the article was a disaster, and somehow the whole thing ended up as a holiday in other people’s misery.
It functioned in the exact same way as videos on Vice.
Someone shows up in a crisis zone and leaves anointed with a superficial knowledge of other people’s pain.
On the night of the article’s publication, the situation with Oyster the Clown exploded.
Hundreds of comments were left across a wide spectrum of websites.
These were the usuaclass="underline" gay/rapist/pedophile.
The really dangerous stuff was the accounts opened in my name.
Facebook accounts.
Accounts on one of Google’s early attempts on social media.
And most insidious of all, an account on YouTube, which contained a surprising amount of personal information in the profile data.
The YouTube account had been used to leave endless comments on videos of children.
These comments were not savory.
There was other stuff too.
I’m not going to bother to recount it here.
This went on for about a month.
New comments, new accounts.