6 Books in Which the Internet Helps Destroy the World

Adjustment Day, by Chuck Palahniuk
Palahniuk’snew novel harkens back to Fight Club, again profiling disaffected youths, a violent underground movement, and an absurd world that’s less absurd the more you think about it. The United States is moving towards war, re-instituting the draft as part of a plan to kill off Millennials before they rise up in anger. As an actor begins appearing on television and radio promising a new world order is coming, an underground movement distributes a book and whispers about a coming Adjustment Day, as an online site called The List begins compiling a database of people who threaten society. When Adjustment Day arrives, the people on The List are brutally murdered, and the world is remade in blood and chaos. The violent are elevated, everyone else is enslaved—and it all started on the internet.

The Circle, by Dave Eggers
When first published, Eggers’ divisive novel read almost like it was written by an alien observing internet culture from a distant star, but his story of a privacy armageddon has only grown more chilling as we find out what the real-world tech titans have long known about us—and what they’re doing with that data. The Circle sweeps the world with concepts like TruYou that make any sort of false identity impossible, pushes people to give their every moment over to pervasive cameras—to go “transparent” in the name of openness. Secrets are a thing of the past, but so is privacy. While the world doesn’t exactly end in The Circle, society is damaged and made worse, contemplating the chilling idea that someday even our private thoughts might be made public knowledge.

American Gods, by Neil Gaiman
Gaiman’s novel imagines that gods are brought into existence and given power through belief. Thus old gods like Odin are failing, while new and sometimes bizarre ones are rising up thanks to modern innovations. That the god of the internet—known as Technical Boy—is one of the main villains is significant, even though the gods, whether old or new, aren’t presented as good or bad in any rational sense. Technical Boy, growing more powerful as the old gods fade away, wants to not just defeat his rival deities, but to delete them from reality altogether. The idea of the internet (with an assist from the internet’s older mirror, Media) erasing all that came before is effective precisely because we’re already living in a Fake News world.

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood
The role of the internet in the end of the world isn’t made explicit in Atwood’s novel, but it’s clear that the violent entertainment consumed online by Crake and Jimmy is linked to the state of society pre-apocalypse, one ruled by immensely powerful biotech corporations. This future values technical capability above all else, and casually creates life in order to experiment on it, ultimately inspiring Crake to destroy the world entirely. His motivations are up for debate, but the role the internet plays in it is clear, and damning.

Analog, by Gerry Duggan and David O’Sullivan
This graphic novel kicks off with “The Great Doxxing,” as secrets hidden across the internet, are exposed. While those with truly horrifying things to hide find their lives destroyed and their connection to society severed, many people find having all their shameful secrets exposed grants them a sort of freedom. After all, once everyone knows what you do in the shadows, why not start doing it wherever you like? Whether this counts as destruction of society or an upgrade depends on your personal point of view, but consider a world where people no longer feel the need to hide things.

Daemon, by Daniel Suarez
Matthew A. Sobol, brilliant computer programmer and businessman, is dying of a brain tumor and worried about the future viability of the human race. His solution is to create a daemon—a computer program designed to run noiselessly in the background (the device you’re reading this on has a bunch of daemons running on it right now)—that will work to create a New World Order, by any means necessary. Using the internet, the Daemon soon takes over companies and directs their resources towards creating deadly robots, enlisting human agents, and creating a secret other internet for hidden communication. While the Daemon itself isn’t exactly the Internet, without a globally-linked system like it, Suarez’s world might not actually implode. Let’s hope ours avoids a similar fate.
What’s the scariest internet novel you’ve ever read?