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

computing. As a completely quantified being, each motion he makes—every step and every shake of the head—generates more visible dust. He doesn’t traffic in clods of turf or thick mud. Instead, his dust is atmospheric and crystalline, melding with the air. Like snow, it gently falls on whatever it touches, only to be whisked away just as quickly. He’s a machine; his cloud functions 24/7, continuously spewing billows of dust. Regardless of the weather, his condition remains unaffected; even rainstorms can’t rinse him clean. His is a networked cloud, affecting those who come into contact with him; he himself is a living social network, always eliciting a strong interactive response from those in close proximity to him. Like a Wi-Fi signal in search of a smartphone, dirt finds Pig-Pen. Stepping outside after a bath, in clean clothes, he is immediately coated in dirt, declaring to Charlie Brown: “You know what I am? I’m a dust magnet!”
    Wherever Pig-Pen walks, he is met with repulsion. Hiscritics—the entire cast of Peanuts —often accuse him of wallowing in his dirt, of taking a hedonistic pleasure in his condition. They say he’s as self-absorbed and insensitive to others as he is a bastion of filth. But he sees it differently, claiming that he has affixed to him the “dust of countless ages.” Deftly assuaging his critics, he turns the tables on them, forcing them to see value where before they saw none: “Don’t think of it as dust,” he says. “Just think of it as the dirt and dust of far-off lands blowing over here and settling on Pig-Pen! It staggers the imagination! I may be carrying the soil that was trod upon by Solomon or Nebuchadnezzar or Genghis Khan!”
    As he moves through the world, he inscribes the contemporary into his cloud, adding the dirt of the day to his already thickly layered historical record. In this, he at once performs the roles of geologist, archeologist, and archivist. Like Homer, who transmitted his sagas orally, Pig-Pen is the bearer of a certain historical record, told in his own specific tongue. As an outcast, he assumes the role of the trickster, a figure who, defying normative community-based behavioral standards, is the keeper of a database of deep and secret knowledge. He is at once physical and ephemeral, omnipresent and local, site specific and distributed, time based and atemporal. His cloud is a haze, an ambience, a network that can’t be defined by specific boundaries. It is without beginning and without end: a pulse, a stasis, a skein, a caliphate.
    Going against the grain, his self-image is strong. Violet shows him a mirror and tries to humiliate him by asking,“Aren’t you ashamed?” Pig-Pen replies, “On the contrary. I didn’t think I looked this good.”

    A few months later, on a cool autumn evening after work, I’m sauntering down Madison Avenue. I walk lockstep a few paces behind a woman who is thumbing her Facebook page as she languidly ambles. She is oblivious to anything else going on around her, including my shadowing her and looking over her shoulder. Like many of us, she has honed and fine-tuned her peripheral vision to animal strength, stopping with the crowds at corners, waiting for red lights, never looking up. When the lights change, she crosses the street, neither crashing into anyone nor stumbling on a curb. We walk together for about five or six blocks, at which point my attention is drawn to a man stopped dead still in the middle of the sidewalk texting. As a sea of pedestrians flow around him, he doesn’t budge. He just stands there still as a stone. He’s a human piece of street furniture, a public impediment to others—many of whom are also glued to their devices.
    Everyone is in their own world, but it would be unfair to say that just because they aren’t interacting with people on the street they’re antisocial. In fact, they’re