I read Nagle's Kill All Normies a while back, and it was almost great, but ultimately unsatisfying. It was like the author was afraid to cop to how much of an Internet addicted defective she really is, so she slapped a fake layer of sociological detachment on the whole thing.
boy those crazy 4channers sure hate BIPOCS. Couldn't be me
On the other hand, I'm currently reading The Disconnect: A Personal Journey Through the Internet by an Irish woman who makes no pretense of being a functional human being.
All she does is pound energy drinks, waste her life on fringe Internet sites, moon over her ex that won't love her but keeps emailing her, bang studs off Tinder and work out obsessively at 4am when the gym is empty and she won't have to see other humans.
The book is lifefuel for terminally online girlies. But there's foreshadowing that she's going to try to off herself, so I guess it was suifuel for her to live it.
But what are other books in this genre? What else can I read about the Internet in lieu of touching grass?
Also, what should I title my inevitable book about rdrama?
A Confederacy of Dunces: the deuxrama story?
Malevolent, cruel, coldhearted: an Internet love story
!metashit: the book
lmao bussy: queering the queer community
Turboautismo
Trainspotting 2: all the tragedy, but none of the cool heroin.
!bookworms help me out
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Not exactly what you're asking for but this book, Disrupted, by Dan Lyons, is pretty great:
https://www.amazon.com/Disrupted-My-Misadventure-Start-Up-Bubble/dp/0316306088
It's less about the internet though, and more about tech startups which I guess are tangential to the internet. It's a true story about the author going to work for some marketing startup called Hubspot, but he's in his forties and doesn't fit into the culture in any way, and he pretty much hates everyone he works for and thinks they're all stupid. They hired him to write on that show Silicon Valley afterward and he never worked in tech again.
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Hubspot is a frickin meme, on par with (same industry lol) Outreach as far as being a sweatshop for midwit millennial C-students who convince themselves they are geniuses because they once had sushi with a VC who personally visited Epstein Island 47 times.
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One of the things I found interesting about the book was that despite being an outsider and lampooning his employer, he provides some insight into the shift in VC culture that happened in the 3 - 5 years before he worked there. There was the time period before that, probably starting around the ascension of Facebook circa 2005 or so, where VCs dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into any startup that said the right magic words, and it lasted almost a decade. Hard to pin exactly when it shifted, but by the time Lyons got into tech, it was well into its hangover phase, and it was a lot tougher to get funded. He accurately describes the period where sites like Twitter could still get funding, despite a very obvious lack of ordinarily important business details like "revenue" or "profitability" because they could show progress in the one remaining metric that attracted capital investment: subscriber growth. The sweatshop you mentioned occurred because the only goal of these tech startups shifted from innovation to subscriber growth at any cost.
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Tech is such a a bizarre market. It's fascinating, and it's clearly the spot to be right now, but you have to take everything with a grain of salt unless you become a complete parody of yourself (which is fine, if you cash out, which some people do).
Otherwise you end up a totally washed mid-career professional who's been riding a wave of fluff for their entire adult life
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It kind of all depends on what you're trying to accomplish, I imagine. My career has been just IT shit, which is not really "tech" even though my job is very similar to the guys who do that stuff. Every developer who isn't just a lame desk filler has to play the same game. Once you've been in it for about 5 years, you should be smart enough to notice what's in demand or not. If you have a very entrenched job (which in this day and age is local and state govt and that's about it) you can coast, but otherwise you have to make sure you're changing your skillset in some way approximately every 5 years. You probably don't have to throw away what you learned and start over (unless you were like a ruby on rails expert 5 years ago lolol) so you're just hopefully adding on to what you already knew. As long as you're willing to accept that the career is a little janky at times in exchange for the (mostly undeserved) high salary, it's a good spot to be in.
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100% agree. I'm in a weird "adjacent" space to real tech, and it's great pay, I know enough to talk technology with anyone who's at least 1 layer removed from code (lmao) and it's such a strange Alice in Wonderland sort of industry where you know everything is kinda bullshit but you're committed and you sure as shit can't have the kind of career and income selling agricultural supplies or commercial vehicles so you just stick with it
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@JimieWhales read this one! @JimieWhales fricking hated everypony in that book, including the author. @JimieWhales could not believe what an insufferable prick he came across as -- in his own goddarn book!
He never ever lets the reader forget for 5 minutes...
he's a srs bzness journolist who wrote for newsweek! News! Week! He's above all this silly internet marketing...except they pay him ten times more money, so actually yeah, he's not above it he's just a whore that doesn't like being reminded of that fact.
he's an old boomer dude and so, so much more sophisticated than these dumb kids. can you imagine that he has to report to a boss in his 30s??? Imagine, making a serious wise journ*list report to some young whippersnapper who did nothing except succeed in a thriving industry.
Black trans lives matter more than tech industry wankers and journos.
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I'm going to choose to believe you're typing in all caps because you're SO MAD AT DAN LYONS and not because you got chudded.
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