Free Wasting Time on the Internet by Kenneth Goldsmith Page B

through an AR app, I view not only the history of the building, a biography of the architect who built it, and the city records attached to it, but also awealth of unofficial crowdsourced data lobbed on top of it: personal stories of births, deaths, breakups, love affairs, and memories. I can view photographs of these ghostly protagonists as readily as I can call up old pictures of the building. On top of this—if I’m using the unpaid version of the app—I’m seeing a stream of geogenerated advertising associated with my neighborhood: “Hill Country at 30 West Twenty-Sixth Street serves the best Texas-style ribs in the city” and “Duane Reade at Sixth Avenue and Twenty-Seventh Street is having a sale on shaving supplies today.”
    In this way, the twenty-first century itself feels both visible and invisible; the surface of things alone might be the wrong place to look. Instead, the physical mixed with the unseen—the infrathin —as expressed by those tiny devices in our hands or the thick data haze that permeates the air we breathe, is what locates us in the present. And in this way, the collapse of online and physical space functions as a marker, a moment that informs us that culture—along with its means of production and reception—has radically shifted beneath our feet while we were looking elsewhere.

    The city streets, with their complex interplay of wakefulness and sleep, are rife with surrealism. Sometimes we barrel down the sidewalks apace, clinging to our devices; other times we meander slowly weaving in and out of the traffic flow as we stare down at our screens in a waking dream state. And yet, in the midst of the hustle and bustle, there are people actually sleeping in the teeming urban landscape around us. It’s late at night, I’m walking down Broadway, and there, in a huge plateglass window facing the street, is a night watchman sound asleep. I stand directly in front of him—there’s literally only a few millimeters of glass separating us—which is making my wife very uncomfortable. I ask her why and she responds, “You might wake him.” I reply, “But he’s sleeping, on display in public.” Encased in glass, and looking very peaceful, he feels unwakable. It strikes me that the proportions of the glass, similar to a computer screen, have rendered him two-dimensional. Backlit, he looks like he’s been flattened into a JPEG. The reflective surface of the glass and the flatness of the guard is creating a buzzy cognitive dissonance, making me feel as if I’m in the stylized world of Grand Theft Auto rather than on the gritty streets of New York. I snap a photo of him on my device. Gazing at the JPEG I just took, I see that he is now literally flattened into an image. I walk away from the scene with him in my pocket.
    My wife’s anxiety arises from the delicate play of public and private that happens on the streets of a crowded city. Walking down Fifth Avenue with a friend, we speak openly and loudly as if we were ambling down an isolated country lane. Yet many of us love to eavesdrop on these conversations, walking two steps in front or behind listening to these strangers’ narratives unwind block after block. We do thesame with people shouting into hands-free headsets. Once, the only people who spoke to themselves were drunks; today, armies of people spout great soliloquies whilst traversing the sidewalks.
    Sleeping in public is an odd gesture. “Odd gestures of any kind are automatically taken as a threat,” writes Paul Auster of urban life. “Talking out loud to yourself, scratching your body, looking someone directly in the eye: these deviations can trigger off hostile and sometimes violent reactions from those around you. You must not swagger or swoon, you must not clutch the walls, you must not sing, for all forms of spontaneous or involuntary behavior are sure to elicit stares, caustic