![\"Infomaniacs\"](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/01\/Infomaniacs.jpg\")
<\/a><\/center><\/p>\nI met cartoonist and musician Matthew Thurber six-odd years ago somewhere in Prospect Park (a s\u00e9ance? a picnic?), and then saw him play alto saxophone in his Muzak-jazz-punk trio Soiled Mattress and the Springs<\/a> at the New York Art Book Fair. We kept running into one another in odd places; or, since New York City is now lacking in odd places, at places where subculture obsessives go to convince themselves there\u2019s still oddness in the world. Soiled Mattress broke up in 2008, but Thurber\u2019s \u201cAnti-Matter Cabaret\u201d act Ambergris has continued, and sometimes he plays with artist Brian Belott as Court Stenographer and Young Sherlock Holmes. In 2011, after years of publishing minicomics, zines, and books on tape, Thurber collected his serial <\/em>1-800-Mice in graphic-novel form. It\u2019s about a messenger mouse named Groomfiend, a peace punk named Peace Punk, and a cast of thousands. More recently, Thurber wrote a culture diary<\/a> for this blog, and started Tomato House<\/a> gallery with his girlfriend, Rebecca Bird, in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn.<\/em><\/p>\n Thurber\u2019s new graphic novel, <\/em>Infomaniacs<\/a>, is about the singularity and the end of the Internet; it\u2019s also the final book from the great comics publisher PictureBox<\/a>, which serialized parts of <\/em>Infomaniacs online<\/a> starting in 2010. The book\u2019s heroine is Amy Shit, a punk rapper who sometimes lives off the grid\u2014in a subway tunnel, even. Her brother\u2019s a neo\u2013Ned Ludd who goes around smashing iPhones. Meanwhile, Ralph is an Internet addict who escapes from reality rehab, then embeds in an immortality cult run by a libertarian oligarch who wants to eat the brain of the last man who\u2019s never seen the Internet. A horse and a bat, both intelligence agents for the ATF (Anthropomorphic Task Force), wonder what the singularity will look like\u2014a 1950s computer, a crystal, a cell phone, a tree branch?<\/em><\/p>\n Thurber\u2019s video trailer<\/a> offers a sense of the comic\u2019s raucous hugger-mugger and subterranean surrealism, but doesn\u2019t touch on its Underground Man againstness. For that, perhaps this quote, from an early, uncollected strip<\/a>: \u201cAll bundled up and no place to go \u2026 The man who hates the Internet is a man who hates the world.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n Thurber and I met in the office I share with a puppet theater, near the Barclays Center. Giant heads hung from the walls. I don\u2019t have Wi-Fi and don\u2019t know anyone\u2019s password.<\/em> <\/p>\n When did you quit Facebook?<\/strong><\/p>\n The beginning of 2013. It was my New Year\u2019s resolution. I was an addict, checking it twenty, thirty times a day.<\/p>\n And you were off Twitter for a while, right? You half-quit.<\/strong><\/p>\n I deleted my account<\/a> and then I couldn\u2019t stay away. I don\u2019t think I lasted more than two weeks, but I still get to the point where I\u2019m completely furious at the way people are packaging their identities, and then I\u2019ll make some kind of horrible statement like, I can\u2019t, this is shit, this is \u2026<\/p>\n A lot of people are able to use social media more casually than I can and feel less conflicted about it. You go to an art-marketing class, and they tell you that you have to constantly remind people of your existence. Even if you\u2019re not directly telling them to buy your thing, you should be promoting yourself ambiently. This is a picture of my studio, or This is something I\u2019m reading, or This is somebody I bumped into at a party. It\u2019s interesting when you see literary celebrities doing that, like Salman Rushdie or Margaret Atwood or Joyce Carol Oates. They\u2019re constantly on Twitter, and it makes me wonder if they\u2019re actually really lonely or bored.<\/p>\n The few first drawings in Infomaniacs <\/i>are more primitive. I can almost imagine your having drawn them with a stylus on a 1993 Apple Newton.<\/strong><\/p>\n Those are unedited sketchbook pages where I was trying to launch the story. I didn\u2019t do any scripting at the beginning. I just started developing a plot around characters I\u2019d intuited. I knew about their attitudes and how they looked, but I didn\u2019t know who they were. I was working from subconscious images and then trying to construct a plot or story line around them. At first the strips were gags about technology\u2014the name Infomaniacs <\/i>was there, but the characters weren\u2019t. Starting off with nothing is a tactic I\u2019ve used before just to get going\u2014start with a title and write backward, trying to fill in the space between the clauses.<\/p>\n Infomaniacs<\/i> is meant to be like It\u2019s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World<\/i>, a caper\u2014big, messy, overbudget.<\/strong><\/p>\n The epic-comedy genre. 1-800-Mice<\/i> was a soap opera, where I was cutting between all these little stories. And when I saw Mad, Mad World<\/i> and Around the World in 80 Days<\/i>, it made sense to go in that direction, because it\u2019s all soap-opera story lines directed at a MacGuffin. Everybody\u2019s going after some prize.<\/p>\n There\u2019s another quality to your storytelling, though, a kind of unending proliferation of narrative. It makes me think of role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.<\/strong><\/p>\n I did pre-Internet role-playing games from age seven or eight through high school. I used to make my mom play D&D with me, and I was the dungeon master. There are preset stories you can follow, but there\u2019s also the more improvisational school of D&D where you make things up and it\u2019s a shared fantasy with your friends. We would come up with great plots, like a man with anthrax running after you trying to pee on you, or you find a truck in the middle of the dungeon. That\u2019s when it gets really surreal. As the DM, you\u2019re trying to be like Scheherazade, keeping everybody interested. You never want the game to end.<\/p>\n I wonder if college or high school students\u2014kids who are born into the Internet\u2014can relate to Infomaniacs<\/i>. I\u2019m teaching college kids now and they\u2019re constantly online, dependent on technology, and if they\u2019re drawing they always want to use images from the Internet as references. I had thought of them as my audience\u2014<\/p>\n Or were you imagining them as your characters and thinking about how they might use the Internet?<\/strong><\/p>\n The Ralph character is definitely just a confused college student, somebody I\u2019ve seen in one of my classes. Infomaniacs<\/i> is not a kids\u2019 book, but in my mind the ideal audience is a confused teen or confused college student\u2014a college student who\u2019s angry at everything and doesn\u2019t know why. Or maybe this is<\/i> a kids\u2019 comic. It\u2019s pretty PG. There might be some swear words. Well, a character\u2019s name is Amy Shit.<\/p>\n The comic reads like a fever dream of tech anxieties. Did you read up on singularity literature, or just make it up based on what had come to you ambiently?<\/strong><\/p>\n I had to make it up or respond to a made-up version of what the tech utopians were thinking. There was a New Yorker<\/i> article about Peter Thiel\u2014that was my main research. He\u2019s driving around and going to the Methuselah Foundation to meet with the life-extension researchers he\u2019s funding. It\u2019s like post\u2013Ayn Rand, this is the next step you can take. Now that you\u2019re the master of the universe, now you can behave like an immortal. And Thiel gave Facebook a huge angel investment when they were starting out. But what an incredible character. He was my idea of an Ayn Rand character come to life. He\u2019s like a Bond villain in his nascency.<\/p>\n Then I started actually reading Atlas Shrugged<\/i>, and I thought, This is a great science-fiction novel. For the first fifty pages, it felt like a neat Philip K. Dick story. And then I got bogged down and stopped.<\/p>\n I like not-knowing in general. And if I\u2019d waited until I\u2019d read all of Ayn Rand and all of the singularity literature, I wouldn\u2019t have been able to work fast enough to get this comic done. I felt an urgency to get it out before it became completely irrelevant. YouTube has been around for a decade. The Snowden stuff happened when this book was coming out. But I felt like it would be funny if I didn\u2019t know what those things were. Writing a book responding to the singularity but not really knowing what it was. It was just a rumor. Ineptitude can be funny, too.<\/p>\n What about the singularity made you feel like you wanted to reply to it? Because it feels like the endpoint of technology?<\/strong><\/p>\n The escalation of culture and technology to a certain messianic goal. Is there a point to all this time-wasting activity, or is all this confusion that we feel with technology and all of the metaphysical torture from social media\u2014is it all going to be okay in the future when the singularity happens? We\u2019ll just have evolved?<\/p>\n The idea that people might be poor now, but in the future the technology that\u2019s making them poor will make them rich.<\/strong><\/p>\n Yeah, which is a MacGuffin. Everyone\u2019s in pursuit of this thing, and it\u2019s a mirage. We\u2019re all just going to be competitive on these platforms forever.<\/p>\n In Infomaniacs<\/i>, the singularity is a thing, but it\u2019s also a person. It\u2019s a character.<\/strong><\/p>\n That\u2019s what I mean about making it up. Because I don\u2019t know what the singularity really<\/i> is. I understand that it involves the hybridization of humans and technology, or A.I. Or actually, no, I don\u2019t know what it is. A robot? Like the movie D.A.R.Y.L.<\/i>? Or any movie where there\u2019s a robot who has feelings?<\/p>\n As far as I understand it, there are a few different versions. One is Ray Kurzweil\u2019s\u2014predictably exponential technological growth, and that means we\u2019ll all become hybrids. And then there\u2019s the idea that there\u2019s a point beyond which we can\u2019t really know anything, it\u2019s unimaginable, like traveling into a black hole, totally unknowable to our tiny human minds.<\/strong><\/p>\n And maybe it already happened? Do people think it already happened?<\/p>\n There are some people who would say, Oh, obviously we\u2019re self-improving intelligences and we have been for a long time, so we\u2019re already on that road. Most singularitarians don\u2019t think it has already happened. They think it\u2019s going to happen around 2045.<\/strong><\/p>\n I have the cranky old misanthropic personality of every stupid cartoonist or artist, which is that everything is getting worse and people are disempowered and can\u2019t draw, can\u2019t write, can\u2019t think. They\u2019re dependent on technology, so then it\u2019s less a religious awakening than a Matrix<\/i>-y dark future. My definition of utopia is technology-free, probably more like the Garden of Eden than like having infinite knowledge.<\/p>\n Maybe constant communication has its benefits. People become sophisticated pretty quickly, they figure out what\u2019s a good aesthetic to have, and they get feedback more rapidly. On the other hand, while it\u2019s not necessarily great to be on your own and trying to figure stuff out for yourself, sometimes it means you make something that\u2019s super weird and amazing, even if it\u2019s totally flawed.<\/strong><\/p>\n Real freaks can\u2019t help it. Sometimes you\u2019ll meet somebody, and you\u2019re like, This person is undersocialized, but they\u2019re incredibly smart, and they\u2019re talking enthusiastically and they\u2019re not afraid to be talking about it. I don\u2019t want people to have their freakishness crushed by constant socialization, which creates conformity. Even on Twitter there\u2019s stuff you can\u2019t say or you wouldn\u2019t say, and that sucks, but you would say it if you were Mike Diana or Dame Darcy making a comic book.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n