Wasting Time on the Internet (9 page)

Benjamin also wrote that “memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater.” If memory is but a stage set for events that once happened but can never be accurately and realistically recalled, then those props populating the stage must be stored somewhere after the play has ended. That space, in the twenty-first century, is the web. Ceding vast tracts of our memory to the web in the form of photographs, videos, and status updates that never vanish, we've created memory banks in finer detail than our brains are capable of conjuring. With the birth of hyperrealistic memory (a version of total recall through documentation) comes the death of poetic license and selective memory, upon which some of the greatest works of Western civilization—Proust and Nabokov come to mind—are built. Instead, in a time of information surplus, we find ourselves in a condition of “directed forgetting,” the selective forgetting of outdated or irrelevant information in order to clear space for encoding new information on our brain's hard drive. Like a surveillance cam, information is being scrubbed as quickly as it is being written, keeping us in an eternal state of Hausmannian presentism.

Many decry the loss of “real time” to capturing mo
ments on-screen, claiming that the recording of memories as they happen threatens to replace the actual memories you have of that moment. I've read many articles in which parents bemoan the fact their kids were seeing family vacations through GoPro cameras, rather than actually living them. After a day on the ski slopes, they edit their raw footage into action-packed greatest moments and post it to social media, where it's shared and commented on by their friends, hyperextending their time on the mountain. For a generation raised on reality TV to be able to replay those moments over and over through a mediated interface is a way of reliving an eternal present, loved for a moment then replaced by the next day's upload. In this way, we're simultaneously archiving and forgetting: archiving because we continuously upload media, and forgetting because we rarely go back to visit what we have uploaded. Today's upload is the best upload and keeps us very much present and mindful in the here and now.

The fear of outsourcing our memory to the web—known as “digital amnesia”—has ancient echoes. Plato was apprehensive about the transition from spoken language to the written word. He was fearful that those who wrote would stop exercising their memory and become forgetful; they'd rely on externalized graphical notation instead of their innate capacity to remember things. He derided writing as a
pharmakon
or substitute, a cheap imitation of speaking. As a result of writing, he feared knowledge would become information. Since there was no individual there to speak it—and speak for it—writing would literally dehumanize wisdom.
Speech, Plato felt, was high resolution and required full presence, whereas writing was low resolution and depended on absence. Memory was internal, writing external; speech carried the essence of knowledge, writing its appearance; spoken words were living, written marks were lifeless. We see similar fears in the digital age. Studies show that most people happily use the web as an online extension of their brains, and of those surveyed, half admit their smartphones are stand-ins for their memory.

Freud theorized rewritable memory when in 1925 he used a child's toy he called the “mystic writing pad” as a metaphor for the way human consciousness is structured. The pad consists of three layers: on the top there is a sheet of plastic, beneath there is a sheet of paper, and finally at the bottom there is a layer of wax. When you write on the plastic with a stylus, an impression is made both on the paper and on the waxy tablet. When you lift the paper up, the writing vanishes from it, but an impression is permanently embedded in the wax. Freud used this schema as a metaphor for how memory works: the stylus is the stimuli from the outside world, the two layers of plastic and paper are layers of consciousness, and the waxy bottom is the unconscious, where impressions are stored. Taken as an allegory for the digital age, the stylus is a metaphor for the material we're downloading (data), the paper and plastic are our data being currently used (random access memory or RAM), and the wax layer is the deep storage (read-only memory or ROM) of our hard drives or cloud computing, invisible but able to
be recalled on command. The paper and plastic memories are dynamic and rewritable, while the wax is accumulative.

There are two seemingly contradictory temporal metrics happening on the web: the archival and the hyperpresent. How many times have we cynically noted that someone has shared something we'd already seen posted a month, a week, a day, or even an hour ago? Social media's architecture insists that everything always stays new. Facebook's web interface turns every link, literally, into a newspaper headline. A feature photograph is captioned by a headline in large serif type, reminiscent of Times Roman, underneath which is a line of descriptive text in a smaller sans serif font. Below that, in all caps, but with a lighter font, is the name of the website. The entire link is bounded by a thin, one-pixel rule, making it feel just like an item in a newspaper. The result of this is that every link posted to Facebook, no matter how big or small, trivial or important, gives the sense that it's breaking news: Bored Panda has the identical visual weight and import as the
Washington Post
online. Social media's genius is its leveling quality: every voice has the same volume and every link is an urgent call to action. It keeps us glued: blink for a moment and you might miss something important.

The faster things get, the slower they become. In the midst of this dynamism, we are simultaneously archiving elements of each page in our browser's cache. Similarly, when I'm reading on a device, every move I make—from my “page turns” to the speed at which I'm reading—is tracked and sent to a database, converting the fleeting experience of reading
into something quantified. Automated spiders are also reading the web, silently and continuously. For them—the most voracious readers in history—reading is literally archiving as they indiscriminately index every word without ever “reading” any of it. The ecology of the web teeters on the cusp of the hyperpresent and the eternal: Just think of the legions of sites built for now-expired academic conferences or weddings that long ago ended in divorce that eternally linger, visited only by the occasional spider, who, sucking the dead data from these corpses, imprisons it in distant digital ossuaries.

While we have the illusion that things are speeding up, they've actually reached a point of stasis, of stillness. The technology theorist Paul Virilio claims that “there is a definite relationship between inertia and absolute speed which is based on the stasis which results from absolute speed. Absolute stasis leads—potentially—to absolute stasis.” When the speed of information moves at the speed of light, as it has with our fiber optic networks, accelerationism has bumped up against its speed limit, thereby ceasing to be accelerationist. Instead, it is static, signifying the end of the technological narrative of speed and the inevitable beginning of another: entropy.

Of all the things known about Andy Warhol, the fact that he curated a show called
Raid the Icebox 1
at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum in Providence in 1969 is one of the more obscure. In fact, combing my shelf of books by and about Warhol (twenty-eight in total), there's not a single mention of it. It's strange because, living his life as a celebrity under the glare of the media, not a moment was otherwise missed.

Back in the 1960s, Warhol traveled in wealthy circles and his great patrons John and Dominique de Menil had strong connections to the RISD Museum's young director, Daniel Robbins. While trying to raise some funds for the museum, Robbins gave the de Menils a tour of the museum's vast storage spaces, where they were wowed by the treasures that were languishing far from the public's view. Many of the objects were in poor condition and so they hatched a fundraising scheme, which involved inviting a hip artist into the storerooms to curate a show. The artist they chose was Andy
Warhol. They had no idea what they were getting into. In short, it was a total disaster.

Warhol treated the museum as if he were on a shopping spree at a flea market, grabbing everything he could—shoes, umbrellas, blankets, baskets, chairs, paintings, pottery—and then casually displaying them in the museum. The paintings were stacked on top of each other the way they are in a thrift shop; the antique shoes were crammed into cabinets, vaguely resembling Imelda Marcos's closet; the nineteenth-century parasols were hung from the ceiling, looking like a cross between slumbering bats and a surrealist assemblage; gorgeous colonial chairs were piled atop each other like in a cafeteria about to be cleaned; colorful Navajo blankets were stacked on top of a cheap table as if they were in a department store, with the cardboard boxes they came in shoved beneath the table. And that's just the beginning.

The museum's curatorial staff was offended by what they perceived to be Warhol's irreverence in handling their treasures. They saw his choices as indiscriminately lazy and his presentation as preposterous. What's more, Warhol demanded that only fake paintings be shown. “If that's real,” he said, pointing to a Cézanne still life, “we won't take it.” They thought Warhol was truly the ignoramus his public persona pretended to be. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. Over the next forty-five years, the art world would mold itself to Warhol's vision, celebrating commodities, the market, and consumer excess. His own studio work also explored excess: Why make only one Brillo box when the supermarket has
a stack? Why paint only one portrait of Ethel Scull when you can charge her for thirty-six? To a poor kid from the Pittsburgh slums,
more
was always better. And after Warhol's death,
more
was what they found in his Upper East Side townhouse, which was crammed to the gills with unopened boxes of coats, watches, diamonds, rugs—you name it—piled up in rooms so stuffed you could barely enter them. In 1988, a year after he died, all of Warhol's possessions were laid out for all to see on huge tables at Sotheby's in New York: the whole thing—ten thousand items, from cookie jars to precious gems—eerily resembled
Raid the Icebox 1
.

But why should we care now? There's something about Warhol's obsessive cataloging and collecting, his archiving and displaying, that resonates in the digital age. Many of us raid the digital icebox every day, downloading more cultural artifacts than we know what to do with. I think it's fair to say that most of us have more MP3s sitting on our hard drives than we'll ever be able to listen to, and yet we keep acquiring more, not so different from the way Warhol hoarded cookie jars or delighted in displaying the dozens of pairs of shoes he found at the RISD Museum. In some ways, Warhol seems to be saying that quantity is more important than quality; it doesn't matter what you have as long as you have a lot of it.

You could say that in the digital age, with its free flow and circulation of cultural artifacts, that the act of acquisition—raiding the digital icebox—has turned many of us into amateur curators and archivists. We dig into the deep reserves
of the web and arrange them, sometimes for a public (file sharing, MP3 blogs) and sometimes for oneself (the joys of collecting), and like Warhol, often for the sake of gathering itself. In this way, older arts of compiling such as commonplace books and scrapbooking have reemerged, inverting the predominant form of top-down cultural consumption of the twentieth century, when collections would consist as often of things bought—an LP or book—as things found. On the web, circulation has surpassed ownership: someone owns a material artifact, but who owns a JPEG? Commonplace books and scrapbooks combined democratic-based practices such as crafts, folk arts, and hobbies with the avant-garde tradition of the
objet trouvé
—found objects admired for their aesthetic qualities—which resonates with our current obsessions of archiving, arranging, hoarding, and sorting of digital readymades.

When asked, “How do you choose a readymade?” Duchamp replied, “It chooses you, so to speak.” One can imagine Duchamp drifting into the plumbing supply and letting the urinal choose him, one object among many lodged in a protosurrealist
wunderkammer
, unbelievably rich in its limited offerings. I think we can relate. How many times have we wandered into a record store, boutique, or bookstore and let objects choose us? In this way, Duchamp collapsed the distinction between artist and shopper and added a dash of surrealism. Yet if we really gave ourselves over to Duchamp's procedure and let objects choose us as we browsed the web, surely we'd be overwhelmed by the sheer number of arti
facts. To manage the vastness, we employ guided chance via search engines. Let's say I'm looking for a specific image. To wait until it found me—in Duchampian terms—would be ludicrous. Instead, I plunk my term into Google Images search and
then
let one of them choose me. In this way, the web is a push and pull of opposites: intuition and intention, conscious and unconscious, drift and determination.

The play of conscious and unconscious is extended into the structure of the web itself. We could say that the mechanics that runs the web—from the code to the server farms—are the web's subconscious, while the software—the graphical user interface and all the activities that happen there, on the surface—is the web's consciousness. The unconscious, which is pure apparatus, is all hung on a grid, starting with binary code, moving to the pixel, and resulting in GUIs (graphical user interfaces). In this way, the web is an extension of modernism, reiterating a stasis that Rosalind Krauss claimed to be the hallmark of modernity: “The grid announces, among other things, modern art's will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.” As an apparatus, the web is grid-like: static and even-keeled, a state more than a thing. On top lies a thin layer, the web's “content,” which Krauss refers to as “literature, narrative, and discourse.” All of the image archiving interfaces—Pinterest, Flickr, Instagram, Google Images—are gridded, from the rectangular format of the images to the lattices on which they are hung. While the images themselves may proffer organic subject matter, the interface and apparatus is entirely
industrial. When we use an apparatus extensively, it becomes invisible, as we become completely subsumed by content. In 2000, the media theorist Matthew Fuller wrote an essay addressing the dangers of this exact blind spot; the title of his essay was “It Looks Like You're Writing a Letter: Microsoft Word.” A decade and a half later, we still take apparatus for granted, the way we might take breathing or our body's circulatory system for granted; clearly, it's what makes everything function, but when I look in the mirror, all I can think about is how I need a haircut.

Pinterest is a human-driven image-harvesting engine, one that is fast becoming the largest single-source image repository on the web. When you pin an image from the web for one of your boards, Pinterest copies it to its own servers, providing you with a thumbnail and a link back to its original source. Therefore, should an image disappear from, say, a shuttered blog, it will remain on your Pinterest board. In this way, Pinterest is acting as an image redundancy and archive service, while at the same time building a vast proprietary image library. Because each image archived is pinned by human librarians, the signal-to-noise ratio is high as compared to Google Images, which are culled algorithmically. The darker side is that every user is ultimately working for Pinterest; with each pin, the company's image database grows richer—as does the corporation's bottom line.

Pinterest is Duchampian in that users don't generate any original content; instead, all images are drawn from elsewhere on the web. As opposed to Flickr or Instagram, every photo on Pinterest is a ready-made or a collage of preexisting images. To achieve this, the site uses a data compression algorithm called deduplication, which is a way of reducing the size of images by outsourcing redundant chunks of data to a single file that can be inserted into an image on demand. So, let's say that I've pinned an image of a dog with brown eyes. Housed in the Pinterest database is an untold number of photos of dogs with brown eyes. The algorithm scans all of those eyes and determines that in many cases portions of the pixel configurations are identical. So when I load my dog, the algorithm shoots a reference with that exact pixel set and inserts it where my dog's eye is. My dog, then, is not a photograph of a dog in the traditional sense but instead is patched together from a database of preexisting elements on the fly. Each image is at once both unique and cloned, reverberating with modernism's constructivist methods of collage and assemblage, as well as postmodernism's mimetic strategies of appropriation and sampling.

But Pinterest's emphasis on found and assembled materials also leads right back to the premodern notions of collecting and scrapbooking, which is no coincidence since the company claims that the platform is “built by hobbyists, for hobbyists” and that one of the partners' “boyhood bug collection is the touchstone inspiration and the company's founding myth.” Walter Benjamin, an obsessive collector himself, wrote about the close connection
between collecting and making when he said, “Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals—the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names.” Pinterest's CEO has described the site as a “catalog of ideas,” which echoes Benjamin's idea that “if there is a counterpart to the confusion of a library, it is the order of its catalog.” Pinterest's apparatus converts the confusion of an image library into an order of a searchable catalog. While the users of Pinterest curate photo albums, the algorithms are the librarians, bots that sort the profusion of content.

The alt-librarian Rick Prelinger has proclaimed archiving as a new folk art, something that is widely practiced and has unconsciously become integrated into a great many people's lives, potentially transforming a necessity into a work of art. Now, at first thought it seems wrong: how can the storing and categorizing of data be folk art? Isn't folk art the opposite, something predicated on the subjective handcrafting of an object into a unique and personal statement, oftentimes one that expresses a larger community ethos? One need think of, say, the magnificent quilts of Gee's Bend produced over many generations by a group of African American women who live in an isolated Alabama town. Each quilt is unique, while bearing the mark of that specific community. Or the spectacular cosmic visions of someone like Rev. Howard Finster, whose obsessive, emo
tional, hand-rendered religious paintings and sculptures could only be sprung from the unique genius of Finster himself.

Like quilting, archiving employs the obsessive stitching together of many small pieces into a larger vision, a personal attempt at ordering a chaotic world. It's not such a far leap from the quilt maker to the stamp or book collector. In the digital age, our relentless “pinning” of images on Pinterest, curating of Instagram feeds, or compiling of Spotify playlists are contemporary expressions of folk archiving, ones that hearken back to predigital technologies. Pinterest's main metaphor is the cork-lined bulletin board, itself a site of folk archiving, which John Berger wrote about in his 1972 book
Ways of Seeing
:

    
Adults and children sometimes have boards in their bedrooms or living-rooms on which they pin pieces of paper: letters, snapshots, reproductions of paintings, newspaper cuttings, original drawings, postcards. On each board all the images belong to the same language and are all more or less equal within it, because they have been chosen in a highly personal way to match and express the experience of the room's inhabitant. Logically, these boards should replace museums.