Wasting Time on the Internet (7 page)

As he moves through the world, he inscribes the contemporary into his cloud, adding the dirt of the day to his already thickly layered historical record. In this, he at once performs the roles of geologist, archeologist, and archivist. Like Homer, who transmitted his sagas orally, Pig-Pen is the bearer of a certain historical record, told in his own specific tongue. As an outcast, he assumes the role of the trickster, a figure who, defying normative community-based behavioral standards, is the keeper of a database of deep and secret knowledge. He is at once physical and ephemeral, omnipresent and local, site specific and distributed, time based and atemporal. His cloud is a haze, an ambience, a network that can't be defined by specific boundaries. It is without beginning and without end: a pulse, a stasis, a skein, a caliphate.

Going against the grain, his self-image is strong. Violet shows him a mirror and tries to humiliate him by asking,
“Aren't you ashamed?” Pig-Pen replies, “On the contrary. I didn't think I looked this good.”

A few months later, on a cool autumn evening after work, I'm sauntering down Madison Avenue. I walk lockstep a few paces behind a woman who is thumbing her Facebook page as she languidly ambles. She is oblivious to anything else going on around her, including my shadowing her and looking over her shoulder. Like many of us, she has honed and fine-tuned her peripheral vision to animal strength, stopping with the crowds at corners, waiting for red lights, never looking up. When the lights change, she crosses the street, neither crashing into anyone nor stumbling on a curb. We walk together for about five or six blocks, at which point my attention is drawn to a man stopped dead still in the middle of the sidewalk texting. As a sea of pedestrians flow around him, he doesn't budge. He just stands there still as a stone. He's a human piece of street furniture, a public impediment to others—many of whom are also glued to their devices.

Everyone is in their own world, but it would be unfair to say that just because they aren't interacting with people on the street they're antisocial. In fact, they're aggressively social, but their interrelations are geographically distributed. Like sleepwalkers, they're both present and absent. I'm reminded of how the surrealists' ideal state for making art
was the twilight between wakefulness and sleep, when they would dredge up images from the murky subconscious and poetically juxtapose them on the page or canvas. A few days later, I'm walking up Sixth Avenue with a buddy who almost collides with a digital sleepwalker. “Fucking zombies,” he says, something I often hear used to describe them. He's right: “zombie” is an accurate way to depict our digital somnambulists. Zombies seem self-motivated, even purposeful, but it's an illusion. Completely lacking in awareness, zombies don't make choices. They're preprogrammed by drive, similar to the way consumers are. In fact, by nature, zombies are insatiable consumers. As reactivated corpses, zombies are living bodies rendered soulless, lobotomized by sorcery (which is itself a kind of programming), automated to consume living flesh.

It's been said that social media has turned us into ravenous consumerist zombies. Nothing has voracious brand loyalty the way social media does, which keeps us refreshing our feeds the way zombies crave flesh. On August 27, 2015, Facebook reported for the first time that one billion users logged on in a single day—and many of us compulsively log on several times a day. Each time we click Like on a status update we add to an already shockingly accurate profile of our consumerist selves—highly valuable information that's eagerly harvested by the network. Edward Snowden said that if we want to protect ourselves against government agencies scraping our data, we should get off Dropbox, Facebook, and Google and that we should “search for encrypted
communication services” because they “enforce your rights.” Few have taken his advice. Zombies can't be deprogrammed. The social media apparatus beckons us and we become addicted, joining the billion-plus strong for whom a life without social media is an impossibility. Social contacts, dating prospects, job opportunities, communications with loved ones—just about every interaction we have—flows through social media. For most of us it isn't a choice; it's a necessity. Even Snowden couldn't resist: on October 6, 2015, he joined Twitter.

Much of the web itself has been colonized by zombies that automatically churn pages, entice us to click on them, sometimes phishing for passwords, other times accumulating page views to generate ad revenue. At the same time, spiders—another type of zombie—crawl the web and consume all they can, indiscriminately sucking up files. Casting the widest net possible, they trawl data, passwords, and media that are warehoused in distant servers with the hopes of salvaging something of value, ultimately to be resold by yet more zombies. Every move we make on the web is tracked, transforming our digital peregrinations into data sets. Truly, our online lives—intersections of flesh and machine—are daily feasts of extreme digital consumption.

The zombies in George Romero's 1978 film
Dawn of the Dead
, were also hyperconsumers. Descending on a suburban shopping mall, they're doing all the things shoppers normally do—wandering aimlessly through the aisles, pushing their brimming carts to the piped-in strains of Muzak. A
swarm of individuals who are unaware of each other, they act entirely out of self-interest. They are driven by the fierce desire to consume, in this case, the flesh of the living humans who have barricaded themselves inside the mall and who have also fallen prey to the dazzling array of products in this depopulated mall, all free for the taking. As much as the zombies have no real use for the consumer goods overflowing their shopping carts, neither do the humans. Trapped indoors, they can't play golf with their new shiny clubs or go anywhere fabulous in their recently liberated couture. Yet both—the humans and the zombies—are consumed by the act of consumption. And the human consumers may themselves ultimately be consumed—literally eaten—by the hyperzombie consumers.

Zombies replicate virally. Similar to the metrics of our social media accounts—your number of Twitter followers moves strongly in one direction—their numbers are always gaining in strength. Their power is in numbers: the more of them there are, the more powerful they are. Our power is also in numbers: the more followers we have, the more powerful we are. When we gain a follower, we don't gain a person; we gain a metric. And yet, many of our followers might in fact truly be zombies or bots—programs on a network that often appear to act and interact like humans—who follow us so we'll follow them back. A trick to swell our ranks is to buy followers, acquiring legions of zombies who will do our consuming on our behalf. Romero's zombie shoppers may have filled their shopping carts with stuff but they can't
use it the same way you can't use all the data you download. However, someone else can: our computers are invaded by agents that turn them into zombies as part of a botnet—a swarm of bots—performing nefarious deeds without us even knowing it.

We are the walking dead, passive-aggressive, human-machine hybrids who are under the illusion that we're in control. But it's not that simple. We are collaborators with the zombies: sometimes wittingly, other times coercively, but always codependently. We are at once identified and self-identified with them, which might not be such a bad thing because the apparatus through which all of this flows—the network—is the ultimate zombie. The network appears to be more resilient than the waves of global epidemics and terrorism that continually engulf us. In spite of extremism, wars, mass migration, climate change, and market meltdowns in which fragile human bodies are decimated, our robust networks remain unbreakable in ways that bodies aren't.

A great inspiration for the dreamy surrealists was the nineteenth-century flaneur, an idle man-about-town who was the opposite of the zombie. Like a
dériviste
(the situationists also claimed the flaneur as a predecessor), he roamed the city alone, allowing himself to be pulled by the flows of the crowds on the grand boulevards. With no goal in
mind, he was a spectator of the urban landscape, viewing the goings-on from the shadowy sidelines. Whereas the zombie was obsessed with consuming, the flaneur assiduously avoided it, feeling that to buy something would be too participatory. Instead, he was a world-class window-shopper, haunting enclosed arcades and narrow winding streets, browsing the displays. His was a stance of studied ambivalence. When asked about a certain topic of the day, he would feign indifference and recuse himself by simply saying, “I don't know” or “I don't care.” The flaneur exemplified a position that Roland Barthes called “the neutral,” wherein one intentionally places oneself in a state of uncertainty or indecision—living in a state between states—like sleepwalkers, ghosts, vampires, androids, and androgynous persons.
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Neutrality was at the heart of the flaneur's resistance; fiercely individualistic, he resisted any attempts to be programmed or enlisted to join movements or groups. Uninterested in power, he was bereft of the kind of hungry desire that drives consumers and zombies.

The flaneur is hardwired into the ethos of the Internet: we “browse” the web with our “browsers,” “surfing” from site to site, voyeuristically “lurking” from the sidelines. The digital flaneur obsessively frequents comment streams but doesn't dare leave a comment; he browses the great online shops and bazaars but doesn't buy anything; he googles
strangers but his online profile is studiously all but invisible. He is a peripatetic digital wanderer, pulled by the tugs and flows of his feeds, carelessly clicking from one spectacle to the next. Instagram is his Louvre, YouTube his Ziegfeld.

The flaneur has a buzzing, hovering presence, at once visible and unnoticed, not unlike the dozens of Wi-Fi networks crowded into the air we breathe. He is an embodiment of Marcel Duchamp's concept of the
infrathin
—a state between states. When asked to define the
infrathin
, Duchamp claimed it couldn't be defined, only described: “the warmth of a seat (which has just been left)” or “Velvet trousers / their whistling sound (in walking) by / brushing of the 2 legs is an / infrathin separation signaled / by sound.” The
infrathin
is the lingering warmth of a piece of paper just after it emerges from the laser printer or the chiming start-up sound the computer makes, signifying its transition from death to life. When composer Brian Eno was commissioned to compose the Windows 95 start-up sound, he had to fulfill the requirements that it be “optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional.” He did that and more, coming up with a three-and-a-quarter-second pocket symphony. Eno, an artist familiar with Duchamp, invented an
infrathin
genre, “ambient music”—a hovering static music that is barely noticeable—which he intended to act as little more than an atmospheric perfume or tint to a room. The whooshing sound my e-mail program makes when I hit Send or the click of the shutter my smartphone makes when I take a picture are similarly displaced
infrathin
moments. These noises are signifiers of an event that in some ways happened and in other ways
didn't happen. My mail was sent, silently and invisibly, and my photo was taken, but not in the way that I heard it. These series of contradictory events happening simultaneously—compatible and disjunctive, logical and absurd, present and absent, real and artificial—are evidence of ways in which the
infrathin
permeates our online lives.

The flaneur died with the birth of the department store. A creature of the boutiques, arcades, and streets, he felt unwelcome in the controlled confines of the big-box shops. His stage taken from him, the flaneur ceased to be. As the web becomes more commercial, I find I do less wandering than I used to. The web is now so riddled with zombies and their foul culture—clickbait, spam, ads—that I tend to return again and again to the few sites I know and trust. And even when I do, say, click to a site from a Facebook link, I find myself closing that window and returning to Facebook to seek another for fear that I, too, might become contaminated. Years ago, I might've hung around, exploring that site, drilling down to see what else was there, but today, the lure of social media draws me in over and over again, filling me with nostalgic sadness to witness my digital flaneur hovering on the verge of extinction.