Wasting Time on the Internet (11 page)

In 2010, Pamela Echeverria, owner of the LABOR gallery in Mexico City, held a conference called Who Owns the Im
age? that focused on the way images and their reception have been changed by digital culture. Echeverria, like so many of us, was living a double life: on one hand, she dealt in unique fine art objects at the gallery; on the other hand, she was downloading scads of infinitely reproducible artifacts from file sharing. The conference sparked numerous heated conversations, many of which Echeverria and I continued to discuss long after the conference ended.

In early 2013, shortly after Aaron Swartz passed away, Pamela asked me to curate a show dedicated to his memory at her gallery. When I began working on the show, I pondered the sort of immensity that Swartz and Assange (and later Snowden) were dealing in. What would it look like if their leaks were somehow materialized? And how would it make us think differently about them if we could physically comprehend their magnitude? With a more conventional exhibition in mind, I began by seeking artworks that explicitly sought to concretize digital data into physical objects. For instance, I discovered a huge book that consisted of every photograph of Natalie Portman on the Internet. I also found a series of twelve books that recorded all changes made to the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War; the volumes covered a five-year period from December 2004 to November 2009, with a total of twelve thousand changes. The set of books was nearly seven-thousand-pages long. Along similar lines, I came across a piece by an Iraqi American artist that was a collection of every article published on the Internet about the Iraq War, bound into a set of seventy-two books, each a
thousand pages long. Displayed on long tables, they made a stunning materialization of the quantity of digital culture.

But somehow these gestures, although big, were not big enough. They were too precious, too boutique, and too small to get at the magnitude of huge data sets that I was seeking to replicate. I wondered how I could up the ante. The Iraq War books showed that printing out even a small corner of the Internet was an insane proposition. My mind made a poetic leap: what if I were somehow able to crowdsource printing out the
entire
Internet?

I leapt on social media and put out a call:

            
LABOR, UbuWeb, and Kenneth Goldsmith invite you to participate in the first-ever attempt to print out the entire Internet.

            
The idea is simple: Print out as much of the web as you want—be it one sheet or a truckload—send it to Mexico City, and we'll display it in the gallery for the duration of the exhibition, which runs from July 26 to August 31, 2013.

            
The process is entirely open: If it exists online and is printed out, it will be accepted. Every contributor will be listed as a participating artist in the show.

            
What you decide to print out is up to you: As long as it exists somewhere online, it's in. We're not looking for creative interpretations of the project. We don't want objects. We just want shitloads of paper. We're literally looking for folks to print out the entire Internet. We have over 500
square meters of space to fill, with ceilings that are over six meters high.

            
There are many ways to go about this: You can act alone (print out your own blog, Gmail inbox, or spam folder) or you could organize a group of friends to print out a particular corner of the Internet, say, all of Wikipedia, the entire
New York Times
archive, every dossier leaked by WikiLeaks for starters. The more the better.

            
Print out the Internet. Post it to Mexico City.

            
At the conclusion of the show, the entire archive will be recycled.

The response was overwhelming. More than twenty thousand submissions poured in from every corner of the globe, manifesting themselves in a ten-ton heap of paper that was nearly five meters high. The pile looked a lot like the Internet itself, crammed with spam, credit card reports, memes, in-boxes, news sites, and porn—lots and lots of porn. Overnight, countless blogs and international media outlets ricocheted the idea across the globe, sparking intensely negative reactions, accusing me of everything from igniting an arboreal holocaust to cynical careerism. An online petition sprung up pleading: “Kenneth Goldsmith, please don't print the Internet,” which petered out at less than five hundred signatures. The project grew so furiously that in July 2013, it was made an official meme on the website Know Your Meme. By the time it was over, more than a thousand pages of commentary had been generated—ironically, making a
thousand more pages of the web that needed to be printed and thrown onto the pile. As most people never made it to Mexico City to see the actual show, the idea itself and the conversation it generated became a stand-in. Fueled by rumor and hearsay, the pile of papers grew to monumental proportions in the public's mind. It's fair to say that the conversation around the show was more real than the show itself.

As speculation about the project grew, I couldn't help but wonder what made people actually take something so ridiculously impossible so seriously? If you stopped even for a moment to think about it, printing the entire Internet is simply impossible. How can one even define the Internet, never mind freeze it for a moment to be able to print it? In the time it took me to write this sentence, an untold number of new web pages were generated, never mind the gajillions of photos, videos, and music that were just uploaded—each expandable to miles of source code, which in alphanumeric terms would mean oodles and oodles more pages. Trying to print out the entire Internet sounds like punishment meted out on a Promethean scale. The alarms tipped to near hysteria, resembling a twenty-first-century version of Dutch tulip mania more than the supposedly logical, levelheaded, contemporary world we imagine we live in.

Printing out the Internet was a physical manifestation of every skeleton in our digital closet, tumbled out, and splayed across the floor, pushing us out of house and home, forcing us to confront the fact that we are hoarders of the worst sort, even if that hoarding is now invisible. Printing the Internet was a grade-B zombie film, a cheap version of
War of the
Worlds
, the return of the repressed, a physical expression of the irrational fear that all this stuff will one day come back to haunt us. I'd like to believe that
Printing Out the Internet
was an unarticulated fear of abundance, of
too much
, of trying to comprehend a scale so large that no human brain could process it. Instead, we needed to invent, imagine, and enact the smallest slice of this problem in order to even contemplate purging ourselves of it.

The project was a slanted and swerved tribute to Aaron Swartz, filtered through the poetic lens of Jorge Luis Borges. It was a fleeting “dialectical constellation” of the Internet, materialized and frozen for a moment in a gallery in Mexico City, only to be blown apart, pulped, recycled, and reconstituted into some other form. The outcry from the public was misplaced, having demanded real solutions to what was an imaginary problem—imaginary because it never really happened. What happened instead was a global conversation about a proposition—a tear in the curtain—one of those strange moments when strands of magical realism, pataphysics (the science of imaginary solutions to imaginary problems), and meme culture collided, fleetingly materialized, and just as quickly vanished from the face of the earth.

In his introduction to his short story collection
Ficciones
(1941), Borges wrote: “The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for
five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a résumé, a commentary . . . I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.” It's no surprise that both “The Library of Babel” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the
Quixote
”—in which an author spontaneously re-creates
Don Quixote
word for word, having had no prior knowledge of the book—appear in this collection. Textuality is objectified, not to be tampered with, frozen into baubles to be handled either by librarians or duplicate authors. The last thing on Borges's mind is the text itself and what it means; what it means is implicit in the managing of it. In “The Library of Babel,” we never know what books the librarians are searching for and
why
, rather they're concerned with
how
to locate, extract, and manage preexisting knowledge. Similarly, it's taken for granted that
Quixote
is a classic text and therefore unassailable; instead, the emphasis is on the hermeneutics of how such a perfect replica came into being in the first place. As early as 1941, Borges is proposing that content is no longer king; instead context and reception are the new sites of meaning, an idea that was explored in the theoretically authorless practices of 1960s conceptual art.

There's a Borgesian slant on artist Lawrence Weiner's famous 1969 declaration: “
THE ARTIST MAY CONSTRUCT THE WORK
/
THE WORK MAY BE FABRICATED
/
THE WORK NEED NOT BE BUILT.
” There's a Borgesian twist as well in Sol LeWitt's 1966 notion that “in conceptual art the idea or
concept is the most important aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.” As if to say that if all fictions are, in fact, fiction, then perhaps it's just as good to propose them as to realize them. Borges questions labor and value in a realm where perspiration is plentiful and remuneration is scarce. Why bother? Borges echoes the Parisian radical May '68 sloganeers, when they scrawled across city walls: “
NEVER WORK
” and “
PEOPLE WHO WORK GET BORED WHEN THEY DON'T WORK. PEOPLE WHO DON'T WORK NEVER GET BORED.”
Perhaps, then, in a Borgesian sense, it's best
not
to write but to propose: propositions are gateways to utopias.

All of this is a far cry from the activism of Aaron Swartz, Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, where theoretical propositions are not an option. These four individuals enacted Michel Foucault's notion of
parrhesia
—the impulse to speak the truth at whatever cost—and they paid dearly for it: Manning in prison, Snowden in exile, Assange in limbo, and Swartz with his life. And it's here where the distinctions between activism and art, politics and poetry, fact and fiction become clear. I am reminded of Ludwig Wittgenstein's admonition: “Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, it is not used in the language-game of giving information.” Such is the freedom and beauty of poetry. Politics, however, is another matter.

A figure is staring intently at a device cradled in his hands. His shoulders are rounded, his back is hunched, and his head is bowed at the neck. Both elbows are flat against his body, bent at forty-five-degree angles. His fingers are moving about the surface of the device. While the world goes on with its business around him, he is completely oblivious; he can't stop staring at the device. This is a magical device, for it has the ability to transport him to exotic and faraway places: exciting sea adventures, lumbering hippopotamuses wading in rivers, colorful rice fields halfway around the world. The device completely engulfs every inch of his being, when suddenly, in an instant, he raises his head, pauses for a moment, and places the device—a small book—on top of a jumble of other books in a cramped bookstall on the Seine. The camera zooms out, showing us rows of men in the same exact posture, all of them, heads bowed, deeply absorbed in small books they're reading, oblivious to the world around them. These men, in formation, posture, countenance, and
absorption bear a striking resemblance to the lines of people I see hunched over their devices on the platform of the West Fourth Street station waiting for their rush hour trains home.

This film,
Bookstalls
, is by Joseph Cornell, the American surrealist, and was cobbled together at his kitchen table on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York, in the late 1930s. Like most of Cornell's films, he didn't shoot a thing; this silent film was assembled from found footage taken from his vast collection of early cinema reels that he kept in his basement. What Cornell shows us in this film is that dreaming in public is nothing new. Be it books or smartphones, these wondrous devices have the capability of lifting us out of our everyday circumstances and transporting us elsewhere without our ever having to move an inch. Although Cornell rarely traveled—in his lifetime, he never journeyed farther than New England—he was able to span the globe and time travel across centuries through his artworks: films, boxes, assemblages, and collages. Peer into a tiny Cornell box and you'll be magically transported to some other world created entirely from scavenged flotsam and jetsam—old prints, maps, Ping-Pong balls, shattered wineglasses, sand—that Cornell salvaged from his ramblings in junk shops and bookstores, which he then assembled into his famous dream machines.

There's much about Joseph Cornell's life and work that anticipates our digital age. The origins of our computer interfaces and operating systems, with their delicate balance of logic and absurdity, mirror the surrealist aesthetics of Cor
nell's boxes. The Internet's grassroots ethos of sharing, open source, and free culture were in full swing on Utopia Parkway. His varied artistic output could be called multimedia some seventy-five years before it became the digital norm. An early adapter of indie culture, his living room became a pop-up cinema for like-minded film buffs in the 1930s who had no access to already-forgotten silent classics from the turn of the century. Even after he became world famous, Cornell was a one-man gift economy, giving many of his boxes away to neighborhood children as toys. He was self-educated before it became common. Although he became one of the most famous artists of the twentieth century, he didn't attend art school or have any other formal training. In fact, he never even finished high school, preferring instead to teach himself philosophy, poetry, history, and aesthetics by devouring books from libraries, the way we harvest web-based educational resources from the comfort of our couches. Our relentless management of information—downloading, cataloging, tagging, duplicating, and archiving—was expressed in this early modernist's working and collecting habits. By the time he died, his little house had become his own library—his private Wikipedia—prompting one observer to quip that he was “a kind of curator of culture, and his house on Utopia Parkway a bureau of which he was trustee, director and staff.” And, like many Internet fanboys, he was a geeky loner, more comfortable with distant correspondence than he was with face-to-face encounters; although his meatspace social network was wide, he died a virgin.

Born in 1903 into an upper-middle-class family, his father, a traveling salesman, died young, sending Cornell, his handicapped brother, and mother into a downward spiral of poverty. They ended up in a modest working-class house on Utopia Parkway where Cornell spent the rest of his life. Devoted to his mother and acting as a caretaker for his brother, Cornell eked out a living for the family by working a series of low-level jobs during the day and working on his art at night. Due to his familial and financial burdens, he didn't travel much farther than Manhattan—a twenty-minute train ride from his home—so he invented a series of self-sustaining measures that made it possible for him to create and live in a world of his own.

Cornell was a massive collector, verging on hoarder, who stockpiled all types of ephemera and meticulously organized them by arcane but precise systems so that anything could be retrieved at a moment's notice. By the time he died in 1972, his tiny house was jammed with cultural artifacts: three thousand books and magazines, a comparable number of record albums and vintage films, enough diaries and letters to now fill more than thirty reels of microfilm, and tens of thousands of examples of ephemera—from postage stamps to clay pipes, from theatrical handbills to birds' nests. When he wasn't working his job, he was out gathering materials for his boxes, trolling the vast used bookstores of Manhattan's Fourth Avenue, hunting for illustrations that might be incorporated into his work. He became an ardent collector of media—films, in particular—making trips to New Jer
sey warehouses where Dumpsters' full of reels were being unceremoniously tossed, regarded as artistically worthless, salvageable only for the silver nitrate they contained. In this way, Cornell was able to assemble one of the largest collections of early cinema in America. The steady stream of cinephiles who passed through his house trading films with him in the 1930s hadn't a clue that Cornell was an artist. To them, he was an eccentric homegrown archivist.

He was most famous for his box constructions. Made of wood, they're often no wider than a laptop, and no deeper than a few inches. Often they are divided with wooden slats into multiple compartments. Each compartment contains an element, object, or image: in one section is an image of a bird clipped from a Victorian lithograph, in another is a collection of small seashells, in a third a few strands of ribbon. Depending on the theme of the box, the images tangentially relate to one another. In one box, most of the elements are naturally themed, in another they are celestial, in yet another they are classical. But not always. There are always odd things thrown in—compasses, clay pipes, marbles—that gently disrupt the overarching themes, nudging the box into the realm of dreams.

The same way our devices are launching pads for web voyages, Cornell's boxes are launching pads for interior voyages. Each box has an interface, its own operating and navigational systems through which we may experience it. It's no coincidence that Cornell extensively used maps and globes in his work. From the repeated rows of iconic imagery to the
way the space is divided into small windows, they are structurally reminiscent of the way our desktops are ordered. In a way, they seem like primitive computers. The names of web browsers—Navigator, Safari, and Explorer—could equally be applied to Cornell's boxes.

My desktop resembles a Joseph Cornell box. It's at once a coherent space and a fractured one. My operating system unifies everything, but each window has its own agenda, shattering any real sense of accord. Like Cornell's boxes, I never have just one window open, I always have many. And like his compartments, each window represents its own world. Sometimes those windows contain related content—right now my Facebook page and Twitter app are showing much of the same stuff—and other times, they're really disjunctive: in one window is a dull spreadsheet, while another is streaming a slick music video.

My screen is cluttered with graphic images, from the icon-festooned dock at the bottom to the pull-down menus at the top, where various icons show me the time, weather, my battery life, Wi-Fi strength, and so forth. The windows on my screen are piled on top of each other so thickly that I can only see fragments of each. Yet, there's nothing confusing about this. Somehow, I understand where everything is and what each window does, even in this chaotic, cluttered, and shattered environment. And then there are worlds within worlds. In one of my windows, I'm streaming CNBC's
Squawk Box
, whose video stream itself is divided into no fewer than fourteen windows all going at once, each
showing something different. The main window has an image of the three hosts sitting around a table in a studio that itself has dozens of screens, computer monitors, and whose physical stage set is crowded with reflective surfaces. The hosts' window is ringed by more boxes showing various stock charts and numbers; there's a clock, a logo, and a title box. Along the bottom are two crawls, one with news, the other with market numbers, one on top of the other. On the right side of the window are stacked boxes with market numbers and charts. The entire landscape is moving and fluid: new words and numbers continue to appear and just as quickly disappear. A network logo and HD+ symbol reside in the lower-right corner. There's a strong visual connection between both Cornell's boxes and what my computer screen looks like at this very moment. My screen and the many windows contained therein feeling like an M. C. Escher drawing—worlds within worlds within worlds.

Cornell predicted this. Boxes and screens are everywhere, from guys that work on Wall Street literally enveloped in flat-screen monitors to sports bars where every surface is showing a different game. In 1969 Andy Warhol said, “Everybody should have two television sets. So you can watch two at a time. Every time you see the President, he has three.” Sometimes I feel like all this distraction is life training for a distracted world—which is not always a bad thing. Running contrary to popular opinion that we're losing our ability to concentrate, the Princeton historian Michael Wood calls distraction another kind of concentration: “The
distracted person is not just absent or daydreaming, he/she is attracted, however fitfully, by a rival interest.” Wood says that distraction contains certain elements of concentration, but not enough to make it respectable. When we concentrate, we're no longer curious—we're concentrated, after all—foreclosing on surprises that distraction can bring. True, distraction might mean missing the main event. But what if nobody knows anymore what or where the main event is?

Seeing ourselves and our lives reflected in our interfaces is a key part of the reason we stay so attached to them. Cornell thought it was important to include his viewers in his boxes, which is why they often contain mirrors. Glimpse into his boxes and in one or two of his “windows” you'll find an image of yourself. The myth of Narcissus, who mistook his own reflection in the water for another person, underlies the success of social media. The psychologist Jacques Lacan had a name for this, the “mirror stage,” which says that when an infant sees him- or herself in a mirror for the first time, there is an immediate identification with that image. Up until that point, the baby has no knowledge of itself as an individual, unified being; instead, wholly dependent on others, it has only a fractured sense of self. From that time on, according to Lacan, the image of oneself as a whole person is intoxicating; we become hooked on external representations of
ourselves, which goes a long way toward explaining why we love to find ourselves tagged in Facebook photos or have our tweets retweeted. If the Internet is a giant copying machine, then every time we see ourselves reflected in it, we are more drawn to it. It's no surprise that we can't stop self-googling or try as we might, we can't leave Facebook. There's too much of
us
reflected in it to walk away from.

Interface designers know this well. Each time I open my Twitter feed, I see an image of myself—a flattering one, after all, I chose it—in the navigation bar. And on Facebook, my little avatar shows up next to every comment box at the end of every single thread. Scrolling down my Facebook feed on my computer, I see me—rendered as an icon—repeatedly and endlessly. It's no wonder I feel I have a vested interest in every conversation happening there. Every time I open a social media app, the first thing it shows me is how I am reflected in it: how many times I'm mentioned in comments, how many likes I got, how many retweets and favorites I have amassed. This accumulation is social media's capital, a symbolic currency for which “I” is the metric of valuation.

McLuhan theorized that the insertion of one's self into media was a basic precept of electronic media. Commenting on the myth of Narcissus, he claimed that “this extension of [Narcissus] by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed
system. Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.” If there's a better description of the mechanics of social media, I don't know it.