Haterz

I think this is the book that Dave Eggers wanted to write when he started The Circle (though, to his credit, I think it would have come together better at the end). It's an interesting premise: Dave is a serial killer, who takes orders from a mysterious cabal (via MySpace chats) to pick off the most annoying people on the internet. You know that girl who's always making drama and Instagramming her lunch? He'll put an end to that, right quick.

I'm on the fence about it, honestly. There's wry discussion of all the worst people you meet on the web, from Nigerian scammers to the people who post incendiary stories/columns simply because hatred fuels pageviews, and Internet Points are the end-all, be-all. But for satire, it feels a little on the nose. It gets better when he branches out from the straight murdering into more creative punishments/correctives, but there's still a dark stain that spreads across every page detailing his thought processes and justifications.

It's essentially trying to take the language of the internet (LOLs when no one's laughing, death threats simply for having differing opinions [or two X chromosomes, in some cases]) and manifesting it. I'm successfully convinced the internet is a cesspool, but then I already thought that anyway. I would think it better that such hatred is confined to the laptop and the cell phone. We'd all much prefer it didn't exist, but isn't anonymous vitriol preferable to physical violence?

I think my biggest reservation comes from the fact that the whole thing starts because Dave's afraid he's going to be embarrassed on the internet. For all his vigilantism (and it's clear, by the end of the book, that's at very worst supposed to be an antihero, if not downright heroic), he's motivated by exactly the same forces that, in others, antagonize him: The power of popularity, the leadership by likes. Maybe it's a literary argument that he's a product of the internet, but it certainly seems odd for the problem to be the solution.