Claire Zakiewicz reviews New Adventures by Habib William Kherbek, published by left.gallery, Berlin, and available to download as an ebook: https://left.gallery/work/new-adventures
Hilarious, absorbing and sagacious Kherbek’s third novel satirically follows the adventures and misadventures of an Internet vlogger and her faithful sidekick.
Taking the format a pirated version of the epic classic, Don Quixote de la Mancha, Kherbek has produced an ingenious and original masterpiece of contemporary literature.
Reworking the roots of Modern Western literature for the post-modern, post-internet age, Kherbek has drawn parallels between the ‘fake it until you make it’ mentality of the 17th century delusional Spanish knight, Don Quixote and a 21st century delusional vlogger.
Donna Quesada, known to her fans as Donna Dulce, is on a quest to produce the greatest content the web has ever seen. Her vlog, Dunna Dulce’s Delicious Dinners, has catapulted her from little-known blogger to tier-1 influencer. With her sidekick, the faithful Pansy Szabo, they live stream their rise to the top of the vlogs. Along the way, Donna’s adventures take her to the dark kitchens of London, illegal bullfights in Spain and camel racing in Dubai. She begins to question the complexities of internet stardom as she witnesses fellow vloggers unable to handle the demands of their subs and fame.
William Habib Kherbek’s works characteristically deals with the intersection of technology and power. His first two novels centre on the role of state power and technologies that enter power relations without being fully understood. New Adventures is a critique on the contemporary experience economy and the interplay between heroic deeds, fame and madness. Kherbek is a satirical master, critiquing contemporary culture, technology and politics through a wide output as a writer, musician, poet, critic and artist.
In the below extract Donna wonders why the writers at a book party she attends seem so critical of vloggers. On her quest for clarification she finds Jeroen, who vents his views…
I found this one guy hanging around the cheese platter and I was like, “Hey, do you like vlogs?”
And he was like, “Uh, not really,” which was like an improvement overall, because at least I didn’t have to explain to him what a vlog even was and then have him sneer at me for knowing something he didn’t! And so he was like, to be polite I guess,
“What’s your vlog about?”
And then I told him, and he was like not just like “I think vloggers are stupid,” or whatever, but he was actually like, “I hate the internet .”
And I was like, “How the fuck could you hate the entire internet? What’s wrong with you?? Did you grow up in a cult?”
And he’s like, “No. I used to work at an internet company.”
So I asked him which one and he was like, “One of the big ones.”
So like I asked him what was so bad about it, and he’s like,
“We were building a prison, a global prison, for ourselves.”
And I was like, “Wait, like for the employees?”
And he’s like, “No! For everyone! For all of us. We’re all on our way to a digital prison run by people who don’t even know they’re building it.”
And I’m like, “Oh, OK, so it’s like a metaphor. You should have like said that to begin with. But like, if everyone was in prison, like what difference would it make you know? I mean what’s the bad part about a prison if every single person is in it?”
“Prisons have logics, and prisons have hierarchies. Everything that happens in prison happens by force. Every person is a potential enemy or victim. You can find ways to make your own experience better, but it always comes at the expense of somebody else. It’s the ultimate zero sum game. I win, you lose. I lose, you win. Try that on a global scale, that’s what’s happening. And then, the best part, once the prison is built, you remove the warden or the CEO of the prison. You put an algorithm in that person’s place, right? And then what happens?”
And I’m like, “Uh, I don’t know, actually I kind of still don’t get this metaphor because–”
And he’s like, “You get a prison that no person can understand. A prison that has an entirely opaque, non-human logic. The brutality is still there, but you can’t even use it to your advantage anymore, because the intentionality is different: an algorithm doesn’t have an agenda because it’s actions are the same thing as its intentions. Then, say you combine more and more algorithms, all of them having the same brutal, isomorphic logic, and you have a prison where you’re expected to do different, contradictory things just to avoid the worst possible outcome for yourself. Then your own intention just becomes to propitiate the machine, the algorithmic god that doesn’t even know it’s God.”
And I’m like, “Yeah, that actually sounds pretty bad. But like—”
And he’s like, “That’s not even the worst of it. In the early days of the internet, you could at least lie and tell yourself you were doing ‘innovation,’ or some kind of good, but there’s nothing innovative about today’s internet. SEOs are just tinkering around the edges, making money off your data however they can, trying to find ways to make you pay for what you used to get for free. The whole time, they’re funnelling your data into giant corporations that know more about you than the biggest IRL companies ever could. The idea of the panopticon, yeah? You know what that is?”
And I’m like, “Isn’t that like a tower somewhere in like…the Midlands?”
And he’s like, “It’s a prison where one guard in a tower can look at an entire prison population at the same time.”
And I’m like, “Yeah, exactly. Is it not in the Midlands, though?”
And he’s like, “Fuck the Midlands, the point is that we’re living in a panopticon, but the tower is empty, and we can see it’s empty, but we still behave, because we’re afraid of the fact that it’s empty: the only thing more frightening than somebody watching us all the time is nobody watching us any of the time. And so we keep doing what the guard in the tower would want us to do in the hope that the guard will somehow appear and notice. But notice what? Not that we’re not behaving, but that we are . That we exist. Well someone is watching. The tower is watching, and we’re telling it everything, and it’s listening but it doesn’t know that ‘listening’ is what it’s doing, and in the end, it will know more about us than our families, our spouses, almost certainly even ourselves. These companies are bigger than any corporation ever was in history, and they have to keep growing or they die. They’re digital megafauna, dinosaurs inhaling your data as nourishment and shitting it out to their corporate partners and advertisers, and everyone is just having this sick scat party where they’re covered in shit and rubbing it all over themselves thinking it’s going to make them even richer.”
And I’m like, “That’s fucking gross!”
“And he’s like, “You know what’s even more gross? Prison is also about free labour. You want to cancel slavery? Fine, we’ll just change the laws so we can put people in prison and make them slaves. Do you know how much unpaid labour goes into just keeping the servers running? That’s basically a war crime by itself. And the screens, they’re illuminated by rare earth metals minerals like coltan which we take from the DRC – which was the site of a war that nearly destroyed five countries but which most people in Europe and America never heard about. All this labour comes from poorest corners of the earth, all the metal for the bars of this prison is extracted from places that were turned into prisons through colonialism, but that was all old school, IRL, Meat Space. You had to go to a place to exploit it and steal things. Now, we sit in California, or Berlin, or Sweden, or wherever, mining digital currencies to pay the cut-out companies that find the labour locally, and then, when some company wants to do a product launch – the new phone, or the new watch, or the new phone that is a watch, or the new watch that watches your phone, or the new vibrator that’s a watch and a phone and lethal drone or whatever – everybody’s eyes glaze over and they clap like the trained seals they are, but nobody ever asks how the drone vibrator got there in the first place. But the tower knows. And the tower is happy because it’s being fed, and the cells it has to look out on just get stacked a little bit higher, and the prison keeps growing and it becomes even harder to escape.”
And so I’m like, “Like who would buy a vibrator that was like also a drone? Like it wouldn’t even be like logical, you know because -”
But he’s like on a roll and not like even listening at this point and he’s like, “And then, after we get all this rubbish that feeds the tower and creates smart prisons for other people, we use the product for a few months, and then we dump it in the bin, and it goes into the landfill, or it gets picked up with other rubbish by a cargo ship and then dumped, literally, probably in the same country from which the materials to make it originally came, and then the same people, or people living in similar poverty to them, harvest the same minerals they harvested in the first place, but this time from our digital waste, but by now those people are so broken from the first wave of labour exploitation that all they’re physically capable of doing is chipping away at the motherboards of these wasted devices for the fleck of coltan, or gold that’s left from the original mineral they spent their youth digging up, and then they pass that flake of gold along to some kid who can run it into the market – and that kid will be in the mines in a year’s time anyway, most likely – because nothing ever changes but the branding, and the logos, and the size of the plane the CEOs fly on.
“And so this kid takes the scraps of metal to some sunburned comptoir and they get it labeled as ‘ethically’ recycled, and it goes into a phone that you buy because it’s labelled ‘ethical’ and ‘fair trade’, and Al Gore or Leonardo DiCaprio or somebody’s face appears on the screen the first time you turn it on and says, “Thank you for caring!” And then you log your information in, and it goes right back to the tower. And then you post your vlog about how you bought a new ethical, organic, recycled, fair trade, cruelty free smart phone and all the clones who follow your vlog post #amazebollocks, and then they dump their own phones, and buy the same fucking mobile you bought, and now the market becomes so heated that they can’t rely on just broken down old miners; they need new minerals. So they find some corrupt official in some obscure prefecture who will say his minerals are recycled even though they spend more time wiping blood off them than they do digging for them, and pretty soon everybody’s got an amazeballs free trade, ethical, organic, self-sanitising mobile, but nothing changed, except that everything has gotten worse. And nobody cares because they’re too busy taking a selfie with a tribesman in traditional dress who they flew 2000 miles to see and who lives probably a mile from where the minerals are harvested for their new ethical smartphone and -”
And so that like rant when on for a while, but like you get the gist. Like obviously it was food for thought, and like when it ended, I asked him, “Like that’s all really like amazing and important. Like what are you doing to like fight all this?”
And he was like, “I’ve started a podcast. It’s called Brother Can You Spare a Diamond Mine. If you want to contribute, I’ll give you my Patroniser info.”
Bio:
Dr. Habib William Kherbek is a critic, writer, poet, theorist, musician and artist. His novels include ‘Ecology of Secrets’ (2013), ‘Ultralife’ (2016), ‘New adventures’ (2020), and the forthcoming ‘Best Practices’ (2021). Kherbek’s journalism has been included in several publications including Flash Art, Berlin Artlink, Aqnb and Map Magazine. In his project ‘Retrodiction’ (released in 2016 by left gallery, Berlin), Kherbek created video poems based on images of ‘second-hand’ language that he encountered in Berlin, over the course of three months. Other poetry collections include Everyday Luxuries (2018) and 26 Ideologies for Aspiring Ideologists (2018). His essay “Technofeudalism and the Tragedy of the Commons” (2016) appeared in the first issue of Doggerland’s journal, and he has contributed essays to the “Intersubjectivity” series from Sternberg Press. His journalism has appeared in the award-winning Block Magazine, Rhizome.org, Berlin Art Link, MAP, Flash Art, Spike Magazine, Sleek, Samizdat, AQNB and other publications. Kherbek is presently completing a research fellowship at the Critical Studies Department of the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam.
New Adventures is published by left.gallery, Berlin. The ebook is available to download: https://left.gallery/work/new-adventures
