Wasting Time on the Internet (10 page)

In this passage, Berger positions the folk art of scrapbooking as high art, but the two have long been intertwined. Many artists in their studios have inspiration boards, not
too different from what Berger is describing, pinned with postcards, inspirational notes, photographs, and so forth. And in the twentieth century, many libraries had “clipping libraries,” where cabinets were bursting full of photographs clipped from magazines, glued to cardboard backings, and arranged by subject. Berger's deduction regarding the obsolescence of museums rings true for many; Pinterest's images are more integrated into their daily lives than the occasional visit to the museum is. For many, the postcard or JPEG, in essence, has become the painting.

The founder of
Whole Earth Catalog
, Stewart Brand, has stated that “like everything else, [curating] has been democratized by the Net, in one sense, everybody is curating: whether you are writing a blog, it is curating . . . So we are becoming editors, and curators, and those two are blending online.” Even something as simple as bookmarking kicks off a chain of curation. When I instapaper a long-form article so I can read it later, it is added to my archive of articles. Oftentimes, due to the fact that things disappear from the web, if it's an article I think is particularly worthwhile, I'll convert it to a PDF and save a copy of it in my articles archive on my computer, creating my own personal library. As many users of MP3 blogs, file locker services, and streaming services know all too well, things vanish all the time. Sometimes users kill their blogs; other times, as in the case of Netflix, studio contracts expire, resulting in the disappearance of specific films, or regional geographical differences make their service unavailable in various countries. I went
to a conference in China a few years ago where several of the conferees “brought” their papers on Google Docs, only to find out that once they arrived in mainland China, Google was blocked. Same with their Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. And as much as Wi-Fi is ballyhooed, it's still locked down in many places, making it less than reliable. Creating a robust local archive of digital artifacts is perhaps the most effective means by which to protect yourself against cloud-based instability.

Our archiving impulse arises as a way to ward off the chaos of overabundance. And yet even in the predigital age, the collector could never actually consume the sheer volume of cultural artifacts that could be collected. Anatole France (1844–1924), for instance, when asked of his vast library, “You have read all these books, Monsieur France?” answered, “Not one-tenth of them. I don't suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?” The condition of too much far precedes the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. René Descartes (1596–1650) claimed that “even if all knowledge could be found in books, where it is mixed in with so many useless things and confusingly heaped in such large volumes, it would take longer to read those books than we have to live in this life.” The Harvard historian Ann Blair relates how Kant (1724–1804) and Wordsworth (1770–1850) were among the earliest authors who described an experience of temporary mental blockage due to “sheer cognitive exhaustion . . . whether triggered by sensory or mental overload.” Blair charts the rise of various indexing systems—as well
as the invention of commonplace and reference books—as a way to order the impending chaos of overproduction and underconsumption. And like today, the ever-accumulating knowledge and the various attempts to manage it was felt globally across the centuries, from medieval/early modern Europe to the Islamic world and China.

The managing and sorting of information became an industry hinged on the illusion of control, which grew alongside increasingly codified systems of knowledge and rhetoric. Eventually, it evolved into a booming and lucrative industry, with the rise of everything from Johnson's
Dictionary
—for which he was paid roughly the equivalent of $350,000 in today's money—to the current crop of paywalled archives such as LexisNexis, ProQuest, and JSTOR, for which academic institutions spend between $10 billion and $20 billion annually. Information—who produces it, who consumes it, who distributes it, and, in short, who controls it—has been a contested space for centuries. While this is nothing new, when placed in the replicating digital ecosystem of the Internet—with its array of pirate and legitimate venues—these tendencies go into overdrive, creating new and unintended consequences in a variety of related areas such as copyright, intellectual property, historical contextualization, free culture, archiving, taxonomies, distribution, artistic practices, and curating, to name but a few.

Prior to the digital age, a common metric for expressing the infinite was the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges's short story “The Library of Babel” (1941), which imagines
a vast library that contains every book that could be written about every subject known to mankind. But one problem with Borges's library was information management—finding anything was nearly impossible. In his story, such drudgery was ceded to teams of weary human librarians who perished in their lifelong efforts to locate specific books in the labyrinthine library. And yet Borges was an optimist: with the right combination of fortitude and luck, there was a chance that a librarian could overcome the greatest odds; even though it's vast, his library is not infinite. And there are no duplicate copies of any books; every book is unique. But the problem is that many books are nearly identical, differing only in a single letter or a comma. Somewhere in that library, still yet to be found, would be one book that could contain all the world's knowledge between its covers printed in minuscule type and on an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves. That book of books—the Library of Babel—turned out to be the Internet.

A twenty-first-century version of Borges might resemble an author named Philip M. Parker, who, with the help of computers, has churned out more than a million books on a wide range of arcane subjects. When someone wants to buy a book of his, an army of spiders is sent out to crawl the web for content. Upon being hauled in, algorithms determine and sequence the most relevant information. They are then assembled into books (slightly shifting the semantic order to avoid direct plagiarism), chunked into predetermined print-on-demand formats, and automatically posted to Amazon,
where titles are fabricated only if someone wants to buy the book. The process is so automated that titles are listed that haven't yet been written; if someone desires to have a book written on any subject, it is produced for them on demand. Parker's is but one of many such projects, where perfectly semantic accounts of sporting events and financial transactions are generated from generic data sets and published in newspapers all over the world; no one has any idea that there isn't a human writing these things. Both Parker and Borges play down content and quality, choosing instead to focus on quantity and the challenge of wrangling meaning—and in the case of Parker, money—out of such vastness.

Today we're confronted with the abstraction of big data—large data sets, expressed in equally large and equally abstract numbers—and it's assumed somehow that we can comprehend these. For instance, the WikiLeaks site contained 1.2 million documents a year after it was launched; and in 2010, it released almost 400,000 documents related to the Iraq War alone. The United States diplomatic cable leaks totaled 251,287 documents consisting of 261,276,536 words. A common complaint was that WikiLeaks released
too
damn much, prompting the journal
Foreign Policy
to call the release of such a vast amount of data “information vandalism”:

    
There's a principle that says it's OK to publish one-off scoops, but not 250,000—or for that matter 2.7 million—of them all at once? The former feels like journalism; the latter seems
grotesque and irresponsible, more like “information vandalism” . . . And even if responsible papers like the
New York Times
have a chance to review and contextualize them, there's no way they can dot every
i
and cross every
t
in the time allotted. There's just too much.

And with every new leak, comes a new metric of immensity: it is said that Edward Snowden initially leaked between 1.5 and 1.7 million documents.

To give an idea of how much this is, in 1969, the conceptual artist On Kawara (1933–2014) embarked on a project entitled
One Million Years
, which was a twenty-volume set of books that printed the name of each year in closely typeset columns (1856 AD 1857 AD 1858 AD, etc.). Each page contains five hundred years, and each book contains 2,068 pages. As an absurdist gesture, live readings of the work are occasionally given; the complete reading of the years could never be finished in one's lifetime. If recorded, 2,700 CDs would be needed to complete the readings; if read aloud, it would take a hundred years to enumerate aloud the names of one million years.

Too much
was the same accusation that drove the young hacktivist Aaron Swartz to take his life after being hounded by the United States Department of Justice for attempting to liberate approximately 4.8 million articles (or seventy gigabytes) from JSTOR, the paywalled academic database. It's hard to imagine exactly what constitutes, say, 10,000 documents let alone 250,000 or 5 million. And yet it's this
metric that is propelling public discourse, not to mention legal policy. The immensity of the digital is hard to imagine. I shudder to think what my apartment would look like if every MP3 and PDF on my drives were to manifest itself as an album or a book, or if every video on my hard drive were somehow converted to film stock, wound on reels. I wouldn't be able to move. Each day, as we shuffle our data from one place to another, we have the illusion of mastery, when in fact we are drowning in our own riches. Our data—the management, storage, organizing, and moving of it—owns us. Ask anyone who's had to maintain a blog, Facebook page, or Twitter account: it's a second job. In effect, many of us have unwittingly become both the authors of Borges's “Library of Babel” and its lowly librarians.

I began to get curious about what
immensity
might look like and went in search of Swartz's cache, which—predictably locked down by the Department of Justice—was nowhere to be found. However, a tribute action dedicated to Swartz the day after his arrest in 2011 appeared on the Pirate Bay in the form of a thirty-three-gigabyte torrent that consisted of 18,592 PDFs from the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
, a prestigious scientific journal with a history extending back to the 1600s that was illegally downloaded from JSTOR and posted publicly by a user named Greg Maxwell. The torrent was accompanied by a free culture statement, which, in part, read: “This archive . . . should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers
like JSTOR. Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, though some of the older ones are as low as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
*

A day later, upon unzipping one of the many files, I was faced with an overwhelming number of PDFs, ranging from 1 to 254 pages long. I couldn't absorb more than the smallest fraction of what I had just downloaded—and what I had just downloaded was but a fraction of the 4.8 million documents that Swartz had liberated. The sheer size of this smallest corner of the Internet verged on a cosmic scale. This scale itself is an abstraction: certainly we can't conceive of what Swartz's 4.8 million “articles” might look like, never mind what we would do with them were we to actually have them in our possession. It seems that all we know for sure is that Swartz downloaded
a lot
. Maxwell's gesture is at once a ghost of, and at the same time the only concrete realization of Swartz's vision, one that is both symbolic and instructive. No one will ever read Maxwell's trove (same with Swartz's), but the fact of this material—and, in Maxwell's case, its ever-present availability—competes with what practical applications we might render from it. The media critic Darren Werschler feels that content might be the wrong place to look for meaning:

    
It feels like the end of the modernist notion of “information.” Modernity brought with it the idea that there was this thing that could be extracted that represented the most valuable part of a text. Swartz's gesture suggests that there's no “information” in places like JSTOR and Elsevier. Any paper is as good as any other for a gesture like his, because individually these papers literally have NO audience—an average academic paper is read by maybe two or three people. So the gesture only matters when it's done in bulk and it doesn't matter of what the bulk consists. The offense is a corporate one; it has relatively little to do with individual authors because it assumes from the outset that the individual author isn't all that important.

Aaron Swartz's gesture was a conceptual one, focused on the power of making available sealed-off information. He wasn't concerned with what he was liberating; he was interested in using the model of moving masses of information as a political tool, as if to say that the gesture of furiously pushing, moving, gathering, sharing, parsing, storing, and liberating information is as important as what's actually being moved.