Free Wasting Time on the Internet by Kenneth Goldsmith Page A

highlight words on my iPad, I do so with the tip of my index finger. Same when I sign a tablet for a credit card charge with my finger. Relieving the need for an intermediary utensil, my flesh directly creates or alters words. In what way is this not physical? Even the resizing of images, which I do with my forefinger and thumb, physicalizes the way I interact with visual media, bringing to mind a popular YouTube video of a young child crying with frustration as she tries to enlarge a photograph in a print magazine by frantically moving her fingers back and forth.
    We create the digital world in our own image. In this way, we can think of the web as a body double. With every click, we penetrate its flesh; with every bit of text we “cut,” we incise its corpus. Page views are, after all, sometimes referred to as “impressions” or “hits” marking this body. The data trails we leave on it are inscribed, marked, and tracked, engraved in browser histories, clouds, and databases, like tattoos on that body. Attempts to cleanse that body rangefrom plastic surgery for surface blemishes to invasive surgery to root out virally spreading cancers by companies such as reputation.com, whose slogan is: “We believe individuals and businesses have the right to control how they look online.” In the European Union, one may exercise one’s right to be forgotten, which allows you to have documents, recordings, or images of yourself scrubbed from the web so search engines don’t index you, making you physically present and virtually absent, in essence, rendering you infrathin .
    This sense of being in-between—being at once digital and physical—has spawned a reassessment of the relationship of our bodies to meatspace, the earthbound equivalent of cyberspace. There was a time when the divide between being online and off was clear. It used to be that when I was online, I was sitting at my desk, tied to a computer. During that time, I was clearly online. When I was done, I’d shut down my computer and take a walk around the block, being clearly offline. Today, I don’t leave my house without a device; I’m still online when I take my walk around the block, smartphone in hand, at once straddling the physical and the virtual. In those days, the future appeared to be either/or. Either you were going to be spending time in sealed-off worlds like Second Life or Virtual Reality * or you’d be offline. Nowwearable computing, mobile media, and augmented reality have reinscribed our bodies back into our physical settings, while we remain, at the same time, online. This intersection of the digital world and the physical has been driving the new aesthetic, a catchphrase cum art movement that was coined by the British designer James Bridle in 2011. No longer content to live exclusively on the screen, memes, images, and ideas born of digital culture are infiltrating and expressing themselves in meatspace. Think of digital pixelated camouflage as an example or a T-shirt with the dancing baby meme printed on it. This slight warping of reality, at once familiar and disconcerting, represents a shift in the ways we might process aesthetics much the same way Warhol’s soup cans did, prompting author Bruce Sterling to comment: “Look at those images objectively. Scarcely one of the real things in there would have made any sense to anyone in 1982, or even in 1992. People of those times would not have known what they were seeing with those New Aesthetic images.”
    With technologies like augmented reality, geography itself has become unhinged from any singular verifiable, stable state, instead subjected to remixes and whimsical interpretations, overwashed with data-hazed layers of subjectivity, proposing the landscape itself as a series of collage elements to be repurposed and reconfigured. Standing in front of my apartment building on West Twenty-Sixth Street in New York City and looking at it