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

to infinity across this large room like an endless Rockettes kick line. On a hundred screens, a hundred Taylor Swifts emerge from the clusters of dancers, turn toward the camera, and sing, “I stay up too late, got nothing in my brain, that’s what people say.” But then a lovely computer glitch happens. Due to the various laptop processing speeds and the way they connect differently to the Internet, the videos begin to play off-kilter, with some laptops ten seconds ahead and others ten seconds behind. The room becomes a large echo chamber and as the four-minute video unfurls, the asynchronization becomes more and more pronounced. The pop song is starting to sound like one of Steve Reich’s early tape-loop pieces, in which two reel-to-reel recorders play an identical tape loop simultaneously. As they play, they gradually fall out of sync with one another due to microscopic differences in the machines’ playback speeds, resulting in psychedelic echoes and overlays, which is what’s happened to poor Taylor Swift. Gradually, the room grows quieter as each video winds downat a different speed, then ends. Finally, the slowest laptop in the room finishes—a solo performance that mimics the final shot of the video, with Taylor Swift dropping to the ground among a troupe of perfectly poised ballerinas. It’s simply poetic.
    Next, I have everyone open their laptops and log on to Facebook, then walk away from their computers. For the next fifteen minutes, anyone can approach any laptop and enter whatever they like in the status update windows. There’s great trepidation as the participants gingerly eyeball the laptops. I see them think for a moment, then timidly type something in the window and move on to another computer. But within a few minutes, they’re fully engaged, banging words into other people’s lives. Some enter benign comments: “Have a nice day!” Others are more self-reflective: “You know this is not me.” “I am wasting time on the Internet.” “Kenneth Goldsmith made me do this.” Others yet are laden with moral sentiment: “This feels so wrong to be typing into someone else’s Facebook page.” Several people type surrealistic sentences, nonsensical words, and spontaneous poems in the boxes. Like graffiti taggers, a few participants enter the identical cryptic phrase into each and every computer, marking their territory. When it’s over, I ask several people to read what other people wrote. The room is tense. Some people smile knowingly when they hear their words read aloud; others are horrified as they read what’s been scrawled on their walls. The room becomes an emotive echo chamber, with feelings zooming around the room,bouncing off Facebook pages, and back into the room again. The affect also extends outside of the room: sure enough, phones start buzzing with friends and family contacting the participants to ask if everything is alright, and if they know their Facebook accounts have been hacked. Everyone has a lot of explaining to do.
    Next I ask for volunteers to come to the front of the room and waste time on the Internet publicly for all to see on the computer, which is projected on a large screen behind them. A young man approaches, his hands trembling as he logs on to Facebook. His cursor jitters, a digital manifestation of his physical condition. He hesitates, then checks his e-mail, looks at his work schedule, and deletes a wad of spam. He scrolls through Facebook, zooming past many items, slowing down to play each and every video for a split second. His web activity is an extension of his mind: we can almost see what he is thinking when he zooms past certain items on his feed or when he lingers on others.
    He’s been silent the entire time, but increasingly looks out at us to gauge our reaction. The more he looks at us, the more self-conscious of his actions we feel him become. He goes to YouTube and