Free Wasting Time on the Internet by Kenneth Goldsmith

browses the great online shops and bazaars but doesn’t buy anything; he googlesstrangers 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 waysdidn’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.

    Many lament the passing of the book’s physicality. They are nostalgic for its smell, the sound of flipping pages, or the habit of dog-earing a page. But reading the web has a different type of physicality than reading on the printed page. When I click on a link, I literally press down on language, something that never happens when I’m reading a book. I find that when I read a web page, I tend to nervously mouse over the words I’m reading, highlighting them, pawing and dragging them around as I read. Sometimes when I read a book, if I’m reading really carefully, I’ll run a finger over the words I’m reading; it’s a surface engagement, which never actually transforms the words I’m reading, unlike when I highlight those same words with a yellow highlighter pen, physically altering them. Yet now when I