Wasting Time on the Internet (6 page)

A nerdy hipster dude in black thick-rimmed glasses struts up to the podium. He sits down with confidence—perhaps even with a bit of smugness—cracks a browser and goes to a password-protected academic site where he downloads an essay by Heidegger. Next he opens Spotify, where he starts streaming some atonal string quartets by Schoenberg. You can feel the eyes beginning to roll in the room. Could this guy be more pretentious? He goes further by streaming a clip of a Godard interview with the sound turned off, at which point people start begging him to sit down. He's been caught in his performance, which, while it might not have been exactly how he wastes time on the Internet—doesn't he check
his Facebook like the rest of us?—belies some grain of truth. He knew his stuff and probably chose to perform a certain curated aspect of his personality. In its own way, what he did was take the opportunity to create a performance by curating a set of cultural artifacts that spoke perhaps of who he was, who he wasn't, or who he wanted us to think he was. Chances are it was a combination of all three.

The final time waster is a graduate student who begins admitting her nervousness by stating: “My pulse is jumping.” She settles in and logs on to Facebook. Scrolling through her feed, she pauses and says, “I feel guilty, like I'm exposing my friends on Facebook by doing this in front of one hundred strangers.” I make a mental note about how much guilt is inscribed in these exercises. She then cracks another tab, checks her Yahoo e-mail, and begins streaming Mumford and Sons' “Little Lion Man” (radio edit) on Pandora, which resembles a soundtrack for a spaghetti Western and gives her performance a cinematic quality; we now feel like we're watching a movie. Her browsing style is restless and jumpy. Quickly, she is back on Facebook, where she full-screens a clip from Ellen DeGeneres for a brief moment, then closes it. By now, she's losing her self-consciousness and her surfing becomes rhythmic: first she checks her e-mail, then Facebook, then back to YouTube, over and over. Both structured and restless, this cycle continually repeats with slight variations over the next ten minutes. Her ease and lack of self-consciousness is infectious: I can see the other participants' body postures change; some have stretched out
on the carpeted floor as they watch, their faces open and relaxed. Her online habits have a regularity, which remind me of breathing—drawing breath in, holding it, and expelling it in regular intervals—as she rhythmically circulates from one site to another. As she has gotten into her groove, her time wasting has become organic; everyone's become nearly silent. We're in a trance. This banal room, housed in the bowels of a brutalist concrete room in Berlin has now been transformed into something resembling a yoga studio, with one hundred strangers harmoniously enraptured, swaying together in a state of buzzing electronic tranquility.

A few weeks after returning from Berlin, I'm walking down Park Avenue on a beautiful midsummer evening. Armies of people are streaming out of their offices, most with their smartphones in hand. I am reminded of US Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.'s comment on the central role our devices play in the contemporary world: “They are such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” Part human, part machine, these masses peck away at their smartphones, deftly navigating the packed sidewalk the way colonies of bats traverse the night sky.

Gazing out on this technology-soaked urban landscape, I am also reminded of how fond the surrealists were of sleeping in public. Inspired by Freud, they wanted to bring dreams out of the bedroom and onto the streets. While most of us deem sleep to be a necessary remedy, a state of repair and restoration, the surrealists felt that having to be awake
was an unwelcome interruption to sleep. Their greatest wish was to exist in a continual dream state. “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality,” wrote André Breton, “which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.”

In his never-ending search to join these two disparate states, Breton started attending séances, which became required attendance for all aspiring surrealists. During the séances, Breton noticed several of his acolytes nodding off. One in particular, the poet René Crevel, revealed himself as a sleep talker, babbling nonsense in the twilight of consciousness. In Crevel's dozing, Breton discovered a sort of portable séance, one that could be whisked out of the tomb-like silence of the parlor and dropped into noisy public spaces, inserting the dreamer into the midst of the crowd. From then on, he convinced Crevel to start falling asleep in cafés where, once he was presumed to be fast asleep—there was always some doubt that this was just theater—he was peppered with questions by a circle of awake poets, who transcribed these conversations as the basis for future poems. Breton was delighted with the results: Crevel's answers were perfectly surreal; his responses never quite matched up with the questions, which he took as direct manifestations culled from the subconscious, a balancing act between wakefulness and sleep.

Rivalries grew among the surrealist poets as to who could be the best public sleeper. Commenting on this, Breton wrote: “Every day they want to spend more time sleep
ing. Their words, recorded, intoxicate them. Everywhere, anywhere, they fall asleep . . . In the cafés, and amid the beer-glasses, the saucers.” One aspiring sleeper posted a note on his door each night before going to bed that read:
THE POET IS WORKING
.

Proposing sleepwalking as an optimal widespread societal condition, Breton once asked, “When will we have sleeping logicians, sleeping philosophers?” It seems the surrealist vision of a dream culture has been fully realized in today's technologies. We are awash in a new electronic collective unconscious; strapped to several devices, we're half-awake, half-asleep. We speak on the phone while surfing the web, partially hearing what's being said to us while simultaneously answering e-mails and checking status updates. I can't help notice that we've become very good at being distracted. Breton would be delighted.

After a long day's work, I decide to go for a run. I throw on some shorts and sneakers, strap on some headphones, grab my iPhone, and I'm out the door. When I run I generally don't set out with a plan. Instead, I let the city take me: the traffic flows and crowds of Manhattan determine where I go. Getting going is always tough at first, but about ten minutes into it, I feel a breakthrough. Some seventies dub—King Tubby, streaming over Spotify—is rolling through my headphones, and I'm starting to get my groove.

As I start to feel the rhythm of the music and the rhythm of the run, good thoughts about the structure of a book I'm working on start to emerge. Wanting to catch them during my run, I take my iPhone out of my pocket, open up the Notes app, click on Siri's voice recognition, and begin to dictate. My speech is sent over the cell network to a server, where it's shot back to my phone in the form of text. To most people passing by on the street, I look like any other jerk multitasking. They grimace at me and shake their heads as if to say, “Why can't you just run? Must you always be tethered to that device, gossiping?” Little do they know that I am actually writing a book.

I'm in a semiconscious state: my feet are moving and my body is sweating. The thoughts are really flowing now, so much so that I almost forget I'm running as I float effortlessly above the pavement on a runner's high. In addition to the rhythms of the city, my run is determined by my interactions with technology. Every time I click voice recognition, King Tubby is paused. I change the way I speak to accommodate Siri. I want her to be able to recognize everything I'm saying, so I slow down my speech and tend to overpronounce words. I say the word “comma” every time I want to insert a comma and the word “period” every time I want to end a sentence. I say “new paragraph” when I wish to start a new thought. I happily adjust my speech to the constraints of the machine, which is now enmeshed with my heavy breathing and the system of traffic lights on Manhattan's grid. I pause self-consciously for a moment as I'm describing the way I'm again speaking and am embarrassed when I recall a voice message
that I left for a friend recently, where I said the words “comma” and “period” just as if I were speaking to Siri.

As I'm running, I'm also throwing off data to the cloud even though I don't wear a smartwatch or a fitness band. Instead, my phone is tracking every move my body makes and where I am. My Health app shows that I ran 4.49 miles today. In fact, my phone shows me every move I make in five-minute intervals all day long, every day. Today, for instance, from 5:05 to 5:10
P.M.
, I ran 0.5687 miles, whereas in the next five minutes, I ran 0.4918 miles. The app also shows me that I've taken 8,306 steps so far today and that on a typical day in 2015, I took 10,129 steps. And all of this information is stored deep in my privacy settings in the form of maps, which shows me gorgeously rendered visual representations of every single place I've been around the world over the past few years, along with the date and time I was there. On top of that, my phone's GPS is tracking every move I've made on this run and how fast I've been going. Since I've been running mostly in the streets, my data will be fed into the traffic reports on Google Maps. Since Google Maps can't tell whether I am in a car or running on the streets—to them, I'm just another pulsing GPS—my pathetic running speed will probably skew the results toward gridlock. Of course I am free to turn off these features but they're so buried I haven't bothered. I can assume that most of this data, if not all of it, is being sold to marketers and scooped up by government agencies like the NSA.

So my run, which I took to clear my head, is much more
complicated than I thought. I'm not just running; I'm throwing off an enormous amount of data, navigating the physical urban landscape, while structuring and writing my book. If I thought I was only doing one thing—running—I would be naïve. Even in my leisure, when strapped to a web-enabled device, I'm furiously multitasking and, in a very positive way, highly distracted.

Could we say that the act of running or walking in the city is what the act of speech is to language? Could we think of our feet as our mouth, articulating stories as we journey through the urban jungle? And in what ways are these stories written and communicated? When we walk, we tread upon a dense palimpsest of those who have traveled these same sidewalks before us, each inscribing on those pavements their own narratives. In this way, when we walk in the city, we are at once telling our own stories and retelling tales of those who came before us.

Walking the city invokes a text, one that is instantaneously written and read at once. The urbanist philosopher Michel de Certeau says, “They walk—an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers,
Wandersmänner
, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text' they write without being able to read it.” Walking, then, is an act of reading the city with our feet. The city itself is an
epic novel: each building a word, each street a sentence, and each block a paragraph. De Certeau's claim for unreadability is hinged on three facts: the blur of motion, the speed at which the tale is unwinding, and the sheer immensity of the text. When we speak of hypertexts, we usually mean those that exist online, but we might think of the city as the ur-hypertext, a dynamic, analog, predigital model of complex intertextuality.

In the twenty-first century, the story has entered a fourth dimension of data. As we walk, we emit streams of data, tracking where we're walking and how we're walking: how far, how fast, how many calories burned, and so forth. The air above the streets is thick with our narrative transmissions uploading to far-flung server farms where, parsed and analyzed, they reappear on our devices. We walk and we think; we read and we write. The rhythm of our walking influences the pace of our thinking. In a rush, we run/walk/think/read/write frantically and obsessively; at our leisure, casting aside logic, we let our feet instinctually caress the sidewalk's urban braille. Inspired by the surrealists, the situationists had a technique for urban sleepwalking that they called
dérive
, which literally translates as “drifting.” Their idea was for the
dériviste
to completely give themselves up to the tugs and flows of the urban street, letting the crowds take them where they will, revealing regions of the city that, in their more “conscious” or “waking” moments, they would most likely not have been exposed to. Similarly, when beset by his demons, the painter Willem de Kooning would wander the dark streets of New York for most of the night,
walking as far south as Battery Park at the southern tip of the island and then back. Often he went on these prowls alone, but friends occasionally accompanied him. The critic Edwin Denby said, “I can hear his light, tense voice saying as we walked at night, ‘I'm struggling with my picture, I'm beating my brains out, I'm stuck.'” Relieving ourselves of intention, we get unstuck; drifting through the streets with a purposeful aimlessness, we find ourselves reading the city for pleasure.

When we drift through the city device-bound, we are enveloped in our own data storm, similar to the
Peanuts
cartoon character Pig-Pen, an embodiment of cloud-based computing. As a completely quantified being, each motion he makes—every step and every shake of the head—generates more visible dust. He doesn't traffic in clods of turf or thick mud. Instead, his dust is atmospheric and crystalline, melding with the air. Like snow, it gently falls on whatever it touches, only to be whisked away just as quickly. He's a machine; his cloud functions 24/7, continuously spewing billows of dust. Regardless of the weather, his condition remains unaffected; even rainstorms can't rinse him clean. His is a networked cloud, affecting those who come into contact with him; he himself is a living social network, always eliciting a strong interactive response from those in close proximity to him. Like a Wi-Fi signal in search of a smartphone, dirt finds Pig-Pen. Stepping outside after a bath, in clean clothes, he is immediately coated in dirt, declaring to Charlie Brown: “You know what I am? I'm a dust magnet!”

Wherever Pig-Pen walks, he is met with repulsion. His
critics—the entire cast of
Peanuts
—often accuse him of wallowing in his dirt, of taking a hedonistic pleasure in his condition. They say he's as self-absorbed and insensitive to others as he is a bastion of filth. But he sees it differently, claiming that he has affixed to him the “dust of countless ages.” Deftly assuaging his critics, he turns the tables on them, forcing them to see value where before they saw none: “Don't think of it as dust,” he says. “Just think of it as the dirt and dust of far-off lands blowing over here and settling on Pig-Pen! It staggers the imagination! I may be carrying the soil that was trod upon by Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar or Genghis Khan!”