THE END IS NEAR: Jarret Kobek’s I Hate the Internet and the Catastrophe of the Present

This article offers a reading of Jarret Kobek’s 2016 novel, I Hate the Internet, which will unpack its speculative mechanisms and suggest that its use of speculation works as a partial counter to the (also) speculative abstractions of capital. Second, I argue that I Hate the Internet is one of many contemporary examples of an emerging esthetic focused on the urban. Speculating on the erasure, destruction, and disappearance of the contemporary city, even the contemporary world, has become a resistant esthetic movement whose aim is to intervene in the already arrived catastrophe of informational capital’s regime of destruction (ecological, social, and spatial) on our increasingly urban world. This esthetic, visible in urban interventions across the globe, in both outsider and canonical contemporary art, and too, in recent discourse in media, literary, and cultural studies suggests that there may be a politics of doomsday speculation–a politics that is deeply rooted in the material, messy stuff of the present.