Wasting Time on the Internet (20 page)

In 2010, the Pulitzer Prize–winning fiction writer Jennifer Egan published an 8,500-word story consisting of tweets—one tweet a minute, in one-hour-daily bursts—over nine days on the
New Yorker
website. Although the text was written beforehand, Egan's story was as much about critiquing distribution—isn't Twitter supposed to be spontaneous?—as it was about what she was writing. But what she was writing was good: each tweet stands alone as a self-contained tweet, yet builds, tweet by tweet, into a narrative. Her Twitter novel begins:

            
People rarely look the way you expect them to, even when you've seen pictures.

            
The first thirty seconds in a person's presence are the most important.

            
If you're having trouble perceiving and projecting, focus on projecting.

            
Necessary ingredients for a successful projection: giggles; bare legs; shyness.

            
The goal is to be both irresistible and invisible.

It ends 607 tweets later with:

            
You won't know for sure until you see them crouching above you, their faces taut with hope, ready to jump.

Egan's twitter novel is a lovely rebuttal to Arcangel's book. She had actually been working on her novel for over a year, but then distributed it quickly and “spontaneously,” blasted out in crystalline perfection over social media.

Since 2010, Steve Roggenbuck has been producing poetry that is made, distributed, and viewed almost exclusively on the web, taking the form of Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and image macros. He became best known for a series of videos that show Roggenbuck either in bare apartments or out in the forest, manically improvising poems that celebrate the cosmos and our place in it. In one video, he screams at a
gray sky: “Make something beautiful before you are dead . . . Maybe you should stand in the rain! You're alive right now!” But this ain't no tree hugger or Iron John. There's an intensity and an edge to his work verging on violence, which is at once terrifying, hypnotic, and completely moving. Roggenbuck uses shaky handheld cameras, hazy inspirational background music, and rough jump cuts. Purposely aping the look of amateur videos strewn across YouTube, they are meticulously crafted infomercials for poetry. In another video, Roggenbuck, with his boyish acned face, thick eyebrows, and scruffy hair, stares intensely into the camera and asks: “I'm interested in marketing, but I'm mainly interested in marketing the moon. Do you love the light of the moon, sir? And if you don't, can I convince you?”

Along with Tao Lin, Roggenbuck is one of the bright stars of Alt Lit, an online writing community that emerged in 2011 and harnesses the casual affect and jagged stylistics of social media as the basis of their works—poems, stories, novels, tweets, and status updates. Its members have produced a body of distinctive literature marked by direct speech, expressions of aching desire, and wide-eyed sincerity. (“language is so cool. i can type out these shapes and you can understand me,” or “Yay! Dolphins are beautiful creatures and will always have a wild spirit. I have been very lucky because I have had the awesome experience of swimming with dolphins twice.”) The poems and stories, published on blogs and Twitter feeds, are usually written in the Internet vernacular of lowercase letters, inverted punctuation, abundant
typos, and bad grammar. While other web-based poetry movements exploit appropriated text—cutting and pasting or scooping vast amounts of preexisting data—Alt Lit tends to use emo-heavy, homespun language that bears the urgency and candor of a status update; no sentiment is too trite to be repurposed as poetry.

This type of writing has deep roots, extending back to the cosmological visions of William Blake, through the direct observation poems of the imagists, the anti-art absurdities of Dada, and the nutty playfulness of surrealism. In the second half of the twentieth century, a major touchstone is the beats, particularly Allen Ginsberg's spontaneous mind poems, Jack Kerouac's unfiltered spew, and Gary Snyder's environmental consciousness. The concrete poet Aram Saroyan's purposely misspelled single-word poem “lighght” is a model for much of the wordplay that occurs here (gorgeous moments like the reimagining of the words “can,t” and “youuuuu”). But there's a punk-inspired outlaw energy rippling through much of the work here.

Alt Lit and its siblings Weird Twitter (a group of writers who abuse the platform's 140-character conventions) and Flarf (an early Internet poetry movement), cull poems that feel like the Internet itself, jammed with screen caps of Twitter updates, image macros, and photoshopped collages that appear between lineated verse, short stories, and blog entries.

One prominent Weird Twitter poet is Jacob Bakkila, then a BuzzFeed employee who between 2011 and 2013 wrote under the pseudonym of @Horse_ebooks, a feed that
was widely presumed to have been written by a spambot. The feed was widely followed; people were charmed that a bot could've come up with lines like: “Their negativity only served to push me deeper into the realms of soap making” or “
HOLY COW!! . . . DOG TOYS ARE GETTING EXPENSIVE WHY NOT
.” In 2013, Bakkila announced that the feed was indeed authored by him and that the project was finished. When @Horse_ebooks was thought to be a machine, the misspellings, non sequiturs, and fractured sentences were charming, the by-products of an inferior literary “mind” whose struggle to get it right humanized it.

In his video “‘
AN INTERNET BARD AT LAST
!!!' (
ARS POETICA
),” Roggenbuck talks about his debt to the past. “Five and a half years ago, I read Walt Whitman and it changed my life,” he says. “Walt Whitman had made me appreciate my life more actively than I had ever appreciated it before. Walt makes you step back and say, the world is wonderful, this whole thing that is going on is wonderful. Pay attention to what is going on.” Technology is the key. “The purpose of the Bard is my purpose,” he says. “This is the dream for poets, to be a poet when the Internet exists. Man! We got an opportunity!” The video concludes with Roggenbuck connecting the past and present: “You know that Walt Whitman would die for this, that Walt Whitman would be on a TweetDeck, kicking his legs up, and going ha-a-a-ard.”

AT&T recently ran a series of ads promoting its merger with DirecTV that had the tagline: “The revolution will not only be televised, the revolution will be mobilized.” One ad opens by showing various nighttime locations in New York City with lots of screens—places like Times Square and sports bars. At the same time the denizens of those locations are all glued to their mobile devices. It's a hyperconnected, super-distracted world; everyone is furiously multitasking, keeping one eye on their device and the other on the huge public screens. Suddenly, without warning, the screens glitch and go black. In the silent darkness, the camera pans across legions of bewildered and frightened faces that look up from their devices hoping for some explanation. Then, in another instant, the screens blink and flash back to life. The camera pans across the crowd, visibly relieved. Their smiling faces are now glued to the reactivated screens, which display clips
from films like
The Matrix
, with Morpheus saying, “After this, there is no turning back.” A user picks up his smartphone to find Mr. Spock proclaiming, “History is replete with turning points.” A woman swipes a giant touch screen that displays a jubilant fist-pumping A-Rod, as a voice-over screams, “When fantasy becomes reality!” The ad ends with the final scene of
Casablanca
, projected on the skyscrapers of Wall Street: “Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” ballyhooing the convergence of TV and mobile media. The future has arrived and it's better than we expected. In that one glitch, it's as if the entire world got a huge reboot into the future.

The ad, with its mix of hope, fear, and redemption, brought to mind the Y2K hysteria. Just past midnight in 2000 on that New Year's Eve when the world didn't end, my sister-in-law, a historian at Berkeley, explained to us that traditionally a moment of doubt occurs right before cultures fully embrace new circumstances. She compared the Y2K crisis to previous millennial frenzies, suggesting that our thousand-years' fears this time around were being displaced not on God, but on technology. She added that cycles of guilt, repentance, and grace often accompany such trials, which always turn out to be nothing more than fear-fueled mirages. The Y2K introspection was the final barrier to our full embrace of technology, which was collectively vanquished that evening. With the dawn of the new millennium, we were poised to move into—in the words spouted by a cartoon character on the AT&T ad—“The future, to the glorious future!”

The theorist Paul Virilio has a concept he calls the “integral accident,” which says that every time a technology is invented, an accident is invented with it. So, when the ship is invented, you get a shipwreck; the train, a train wreck; the airplane, the plane crash. These early technological accidents impacted a geographically specific area: the woods where the plane went down was affected in isolation. But when it comes to electromagnetic waves, such as radiation from a nuclear accident, the results of that accident are no longer felt locally but have networked implications. When the Fukushima reactor melted down, the radiation traveling through the Pacific Ocean food chain endangered fish on the West Coast of America. Similarly, market meltdowns in China crash Western economies. A virus in an electronic network can act with devastating results, infecting many, not just one. The integral or whole accident moves from local to general.

Little did we know that a mere year and a half later, an older technology—airplanes—would engender an integral accident in ways that Y2K could not. On 9/11 in New York City, overloaded cell phone networks went dead and overtaxed sites like CNN.com and NYTimes.com refused to load. Subways, buses, and commuter trains—many of them controlled by computers—stopped running. The island was sealed off from the rest of the world, thrown back to the darkness of earlier times. Broadcast television for much of Manhattan was unavailable as the giant TV antennas atop the Twin Towers were no more. Like those screen-addled citizens in the AT&T ad, we sat there in the dark bereft
of our devices, huddled close to our transistor radios trying to get the latest news as if it were the great New York City blackout of 1965. For the next week or two, our technology barely worked; even our data-driven stock markets went dark. Lower Manhattan, closed to vehicular traffic, resembled a cross between a nineteenth-century village and post-WWII Berlin. We languidly ambled down the great avenues as if they were country lanes, while in the background great plumes of acrid smoke spewed from the Lower West Side.

Without distraction from our technology, we rediscovered each other, looking into faces rather than screens, slowing down for person-to-person chats while we sat in silent parks, soaking in the glorious mid-September sunshine. There was an eerie silence in the city, one that was punctuated only by the frequent wailing of sirens. It was an escape from the stress of recent events, an enforced return to a lost time, but one that could not last. As the networks sprang back to life and the transportation began running again, we picked up right where we had left off, roaming the streets with Blackberrys glued to our palms, each in our own bubble. Over the next few years, crises like blackouts and hurricanes would plunge us back into darkness for short periods. These enforced digital detoxes became more harrowing than refreshing. During Hurricane Sandy, impromptu charging stations powered by generators sprung up on the streets, as groups of New Yorkers huddled together in the cold, waiting an eternity for their devices to charge before they headed back to their primitive dark caves.

AT&T's ads of course were riffs on Gil Scott-Heron's
1970 song “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” which proclaimed that media would play absolutely no role in the forthcoming social and political revolutions that had begun in the 1960s. Forty-five years ago, Scott-Heron had seen how all experience had been influenced, framed, and saturated by media, robbing us, he felt, of our human experience. We had been turned into zombies, bent on consumerism and stripped of our political import. He was pleading for deprogramming, hoping we might reject media spectacles and instead take to the streets, where the revolution would happen away from the cameras, in “real time,” where there would be no “instant replay.” After all, if the urban riots of the 1960s showed anything, they demonstrated that highly technological civilizations could be plunged into darkness and chaos with basic means: the striking of a single match or the throwing of a Molotov cocktail. AT&T's snarky usurping of Scott-Heron's political message proclaimed total victory; corporate-sponsored technology was now a foregone conclusion and there would be no turning back. Ever. The future had arrived, and it looked an awful lot like Big Brother.

But the truth is more complex than that. AT&T's ads showed us a one-sided, oversimplistic, skewed vision of the “revolution.” At a Black Lives Matter panel I attended recently called “The Fire This Time,” an audience member asked why and how the movement emerged when it did. One of the panelists responded by simply reaching into his pocket and holding up his smartphone. In an unanticipated twist to both AT&T and Scott-Heron, the revolution is, in
fact, both televised—uploaded to social media and replayed endlessly—and mobilized (people mobilized by mobile media) in the service of justice. The corporate technological apparatuses that Scott-Heron had so rightly feared had now been distributed among the citizenry to record trespasses that not long ago went unnoticed, able to bring light to the darkest and most unjust corners of the world. The fire this time is a digital flame, capable of illuminating darkness and torching unjust systems.

Many articles I read yearn for a return to solitude and introspection, quiet places far removed from the noises of our devices. But those places, away from the rabble of the street, are starting to remind me of gated communities: highly patrolled spaces where discourse is circumscribed and vetted. What they are ignoring is that for many communities, the presence of devices to record and distribute events that entrenched powers that be would rather not have anyone see, are tools of social justice, crucial to pointing out abuses of power. I read that our devices are removing us from life, but when a device records an injustice, it's an indicator of presence, not absence.

In another one of those AT&T ads, the line between presence and absence is obliterated as image after image is shown of people watching their devices while they are doing something else. A guy in a stuffy concert hall sneaks a peek at his smartphone while a voice-over decries: “Flip between the fight, the game, and the ballet you didn't want to go to!”; or someone sweating it out on a treadmill, phone in his
hand: “Binge while you lose weight!”; a surfer in the curl of a wave: “Channel-surf while you surf!”; or a mountain climber dangling in midair: “Enjoy a good cliffhanger while you hang from a cliff!”

Like many, AT&T would like you to think we use our devices in one way only: to indulge in frivolous media while we are doing things we don't want to be doing. However, the truth is more complicated. Our use of media mimics our circadian rhythms, as we cycle through periods of being awake and being asleep. We are neither complete zombies, nor completely present: usually it's a mix of the two. The smartphone that captured the police shooting death of Walter Scott might have been, just a moment before, playing Candy Crush Saga, and right afterward, wasting time on the Internet.