Wasting Time on the Internet by Kenneth Goldsmith Read Free Book Online

anyone wants to share their password with the group. My request is met with dead silence. I can see I’m not going to get too far with this one. So instead, I demonstrate theway I construct my passwords. I crack open a Word document and make the font really big, which is projected on a screen behind me. I explain to one hundred total strangers the formula I use to create my passwords. I show them how every password I make begins with the names of the site beginning with a capital letter—Yahoo, for instance—which is then followed by a scientist’s first and last name, trailed by the last four digits of one of my old landline numbers, ending with two exclamation points. So, a typical password of mine would be YahooStephenHawking6830!! or AmazonMaxPlanck2448!! The elements I chose are indicative of who I am, including my nerdy fascination for science and nostalgia for the many phone numbers I’ve had throughout my life, each one evoking a flood of memories every time I type them.
    I ask anyone else if they would like to come up in front of the workshop and demonstrate how they make their passwords. A woman volunteers, showing us her technique, which always includes the number 410. When asked why, she said that when she was a child growing up in Denmark, 4:10 was the time her favorite television show aired. Suddenly, the room lights up with conversation. It turns out that this particular show was aired all over Europe at that identical time and many of these international participants have deep connections to this show as well. The animated memories and chatter go on for quite a while before another gentleman steps up and proceeds to walk us through his passwords. It’s very confusing and no one in the room can understand itat all, which is his intention. As he explains it to us, he is a trained cryptographer, a lover of puzzles. His passwords are completely logical, but it’s a different type of logic. What’s beginning to emerge among the participants is that passwords are much more than something we use to get into locked rooms: they are tiny self-portraits constructed with fragments of autobiographical data that unwittingly convey who we are and how we think. Even those generic security questions you get asked are steeped in awkwardly intimate autobiography: “What is the first name of the person you first kissed?” or “What is the last name of the teacher who gave you your first failing grade?”
    Next, taking a page from my Penn class, I ask everyone to cue up one song on YouTube, then full-screen it. At the same moment, everyone hits Play. The room fills up with a cacophony of one hundred different songs played from tinny speakers. Afterward, people get up to speak about what song they chose, why they chose it, and by doing so, what sort of message they were trying to project about themselves to the others. As it turns out, everyone has a reason for choosing the song they did. One man played a rap video from Tyler the Creator that his sixteen-year-old son had showed him that morning over breakfast; another woman played a current earworm, one she claimed to be her soundtrack for the summer, already laden with memories on this early mid-June day; an older gentleman played an alternative British national anthem, one he said expressed his strong political sentiments.
    One song rises above the din. It’s Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off,” the one song everyone in the room seems to know, and because of its iconic pop hooks the one song ringing in everyone’s ears long after all the other videos have been turned off. I have everyone cue up the same YouTube video of “Shake It Off.” Again, at the count of three, everyone hits Play at the identical instant. One hundred laptops are displaying the first moment of the video, a row of ballet dancers at a barre doing stretches to the heavy drumbeat that begins the song. The row of dancers in the video extends