This past Friday, the Guardian published a long essay by novelist Jonathan Franzen titled “What’s Wrong with the Modern World.” This kind of thing is catnip to Franzen’s many detractors, who immediately took to the social media platforms Franzen decries to deride some of the novelist’s more annoying arguments: “He hates Twitter! He prefers PC’s to Macs! He called Jeff Bezos ‘one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse’! What an asshole!”

But did anyone pause to actually read the thing? I wonder. The reaction was fairly immediate, but the essay itself is quite complex, such that I had to read it a couple times before I was confident enough in what Franzen was saying to even comment on it. The essay weds Franzen’s take on technoconsumerism to a complicated reading of Karl Kraus, a cranky intellectual and satirist who took on fin de siecle Vienna in his own day and with whom Franzen evidently identifies. (The essay is either promotion or excerpt—or both—for Franzen’s new book on Kraus.)

What emerges, albeit slowly, is an essentially Marxist interpretation of the means of production in a digital age: Under an ideology of individuality, empowerment, and choice, content creators and consumers are in fact being enslaved to digital technocrats like Mark Zukerberg and Jeff Bezos—all while the world burns around us.

Here’s Franzen:

[Y]ou could argue that America in 2013 is a similarly special case: another weakened empire telling itself stories of its exceptionalism while it drifts towards apocalypse of some sort, fiscal or epidemiological, climatic-environmental or thermonuclear[…] We can’t face the real problems; we spent a trillion dollars not really solving a problem in Iraq that wasn’t really a problem; we can’t even agree on how to keep healthcare costs from devouring the GNP. What we can all agree to do instead is to deliver ourselves to the cool new media and technologies, to Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, and to let them profit at our expense.

It’s worth asking ourselves why this kind of argument bothers us so much when it comes from Franzen but not at all when it comes from, say, the late David Foster Wallace, Franzen’s former friend and rival. There’s no telling what DFW would say about Twitter or Facebook, but Infinite Jest poignantly illustrated the isolating and solipsistic effects of technology, and surely his warning in 2005 that consumer culture had yielded “the freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation” was prophetic on this level.

It’s also worth asking ourselves whether the fact that a complicated 6,000 word essay was boiled down to “Franzen hates Twitter!” may in fact accidentally prove the man’s point.

Franzen is, to be sure, far too glib when it comes to his dismissal of social media. And he is, to be sure, a pain in the ass. But I submit to you that he may be a pain in the ass worth listening to.