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This is a collection of essays from a debutant bookwriter. The essays are intertwined mainly by Internet, human interaction, sexuality, and searching.
Where Hunter S. Thompson scraped barrels in order to find truth, writers can now tap keys to find the same stuff. Having said that, this book shows how ultra-availability is not the same as having the world at your fingertips. Tap, tap.
When not writing about her own human experience, Kiberd paints hyperkinetic cultural portraits by tying ends together. One page is about how in 1995 Bill Gates danced to The Rolling Stones's Start Me Up (licensed for three million US Dollars) at the premiere of Windows 95, and in the same year, also about how The New York Times and The Washington Post published Ted Kaczynski's Industrial Society and Its Future.
Kiberd displays the gestalt that Internet now is: a handful of companies that hoards most of the money in the world uses our personal experience, movement, thought, and, ultimately, take charge of what we decide to do before we have done it; this is not what Internet was built for, not in its infancy as ARPANET nor what geeks envisioned.
Social media users are dependent on the very thing that stifles them: the filter bubble, which skews and disguises the truth. The bubble closed in, gradually, throughout the 2010s, a decade which, ironically, began with calls for a new era of transparency in governments and in media. Wikileaks was part of this shift; everything could be documented online now, and subsequently every lie could be exposed.
Today it is obvious to me that this drive for transparency was hijacked, and led us into the arms of surveillance capitalism. If the 'democratised' online media is Facebook, then as a society we have settled for less. It's dangerous to assume neutrality of technology. It's dangerous not to scrutinise the people who build it. It's dangerous, also, to believe that simply by having the tools to change the world social media platforms we will automatically make the world a better place.
It takes a deft and talented writer to describe her motherland and home city while swathing it in descriptions of technological breakthrough in the 2000s and 2010s, without it becoming all flair or braggadocio. Thankfully, Kiberd manoeuvres on the side of that.
The book navigates through what is an exploded rent rate - £1,620 per month is the current average Dublin apartment rent cost - tech startups, and tech bros. Underpaid social-media workers and a work cycle that resembles very little of what our parents did for a living.
Kiberd writes of why she goes to the gym at night and what that entails. Of writing from a café, attempting to work, failing at it, listing prescription drugs that she takes, while dating via an app that promises a feminist culture in a capitalist world. Your choices on how you navigate through prospective dating choices are recorded.
Oddities are commonalities; Jack Dorsey (CEO of Twitter), Mark Zuckerberg (former CEO of Facebook), Elizabeth Holmes (former CEO of Theranos), Steve Jobs (former CEO of Apple), all dressed alike, yet carefully sculpted to be the face of their companies and display very little of themselves. When they actually do, it's either horrific or estranging.
Kiberd carefully unveils the fact that most 'social companies' have CEOs who rarely shares anything, and when they do, are very restrictive about what they share. Zuckerberg, for example, has built a one-mile long and six-feet high wall around his enormous property on a Hawaiian island. He's filed lawsuits against hundreds of Hawaiians in order to settle disputes over land. In 2011, his new year's resolution was that he would only eat what he hunted. He has also said 'They trust me, the dumb fucks', about Facebook users. Kiberd points out that Zuckerberg has said that using more than one Facebook account is 'lack of integrity', while (and I quote Kiberd) 'The striking irony; here, is that at the same time he has gifted one-third Of the world's population with new online 'self', one that's rarely an accurate reflection of the person it represents in real life, Mark Zuckerberg has become a kind of latter-day Andy Warhol, every bit as blank and vastly more boring.'
Part of what makes Kiberd's collection of essays exciting is also, to myself, its downfall; I'm a hyperkinetic person who tires after having dipped my chips in bowl after bowl, in search of another flavour: this book has a lot of those moments. Even though this book is a collection of essays it reads as a book.
Debuting writers can easily find their different materials dragged into the light and just as easily find them incinerated when subjected to the harsh light of being viewed as a whole.
This book holds up, mainly on the strength of her writing of technology, personal experience, perhaps mainly in the personal and the male-sexual. It's easy to draw a straight line between how men with money and men with little sexual nuance function; this book reeks of both, and Kiberd lightly digresses into interesting areas: her text about vapourwave is the most interesting I've ever read and is highly interesting, even solely from a music-theory perspective.
How much of life is algorithmic now?
On the other hand, her essay about energy drinks feels, to me, slightly a countdown as sorts.
She writes of her ex, of how they exchanged thousands of emails and messages yet never really knew each other. Staying awake. Can't sleep. Drugs. Netflix. Netflix's CEO boasts of how Netflix makes people lose sleep. Technology promises to fix broken sleep patterns. Buy a heavy quilt. Of one date:
The first thing I notice in his room is the zombies: posters of zombies, zombie action figures and other zombie paraphernalia on every wall and shelf and surface. I don't ask about it. He doesn't want to have sex on the bed, and pulls a mattress from against a wall on the other side of the room, saying something about preferring it. I realise instantly that he's renting a shared room, that the mattress is his bed and that his roommate is away, but I don't comment. A series of thoughts flash through my mind; I tell myself not to think less of him, then I tell myself it's bad to have even considered thinking less of him for renting a shared room in the first place, when I live at home with my parents.
Moments later, lying on the mattress, I look up and notice a baseball bat fixed to the wall, still in its box and sealed under transparent plastic. The bat is a replica, wrapped in plastic imitation barbed wire and smeared with red blotches of paint made to look like blood. It's a prop from The Walking Dead, hung up next to a framed picture of Apocalypse Date #4 standing next to a man with long grey hair who, he tells me, later, is the show's special effects artist.
The following morning, I will find out that the bat has its own Wikipedia page; it's a symbol of violence, but also of undying matrimonial loyalty. Its name is Lucille, after the dead wife of the character who wields it. He keeps her spirit alive by talking to the bat, lovingly, as he uses it to bash other characters' heads in. You can buy replica Lucille bats online for €59-49; they're sold as 'The Walking Dead Lucille Bat - Take It Like a Champ Edition'.
I believe Kiberd's second book will be more constrained, albeit not on the hyperkinetic side of things. I look forward to it.
Roisin Kiberd's The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet is out 2021-03-04.