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

aggressively social, but their interrelations are geographically distributed. Like sleepwalkers, they’re both present and absent. I’m reminded of how the surrealists’ ideal state for making artwas the twilight between wakefulness and sleep, when they would dredge up images from the murky subconscious and poetically juxtapose them on the page or canvas. A few days later, I’m walking up Sixth Avenue with a buddy who almost collides with a digital sleepwalker. “Fucking zombies,” he says, something I often hear used to describe them. He’s right: “zombie” is an accurate way to depict our digital somnambulists. Zombies seem self-motivated, even purposeful, but it’s an illusion. Completely lacking in awareness, zombies don’t make choices. They’re preprogrammed by drive, similar to the way consumers are. In fact, by nature, zombies are insatiable consumers. As reactivated corpses, zombies are living bodies rendered soulless, lobotomized by sorcery (which is itself a kind of programming), automated to consume living flesh.
    It’s been said that social media has turned us into ravenous consumerist zombies. Nothing has voracious brand loyalty the way social media does, which keeps us refreshing our feeds the way zombies crave flesh. On August 27, 2015, Facebook reported for the first time that one billion users logged on in a single day—and many of us compulsively log on several times a day. Each time we click Like on a status update we add to an already shockingly accurate profile of our consumerist selves—highly valuable information that’s eagerly harvested by the network. Edward Snowden said that if we want to protect ourselves against government agencies scraping our data, we should get off Dropbox, Facebook, and Google and that we should “search for encryptedcommunication services” because they “enforce your rights.” Few have taken his advice. Zombies can’t be deprogrammed. The social media apparatus beckons us and we become addicted, joining the billion-plus strong for whom a life without social media is an impossibility. Social contacts, dating prospects, job opportunities, communications with loved ones—just about every interaction we have—flows through social media. For most of us it isn’t a choice; it’s a necessity. Even Snowden couldn’t resist: on October 6, 2015, he joined Twitter.
    Much of the web itself has been colonized by zombies that automatically churn pages, entice us to click on them, sometimes phishing for passwords, other times accumulating page views to generate ad revenue. At the same time, spiders—another type of zombie—crawl the web and consume all they can, indiscriminately sucking up files. Casting the widest net possible, they trawl data, passwords, and media that are warehoused in distant servers with the hopes of salvaging something of value, ultimately to be resold by yet more zombies. Every move we make on the web is tracked, transforming our digital peregrinations into data sets. Truly, our online lives—intersections of flesh and machine—are daily feasts of extreme digital consumption.
    The zombies in George Romero’s 1978 film Dawn of the Dead , were also hyperconsumers. Descending on a suburban shopping mall, they’re doing all the things shoppers normally do—wandering aimlessly through the aisles, pushing their brimming carts to the piped-in strains of Muzak. Aswarm of individuals who are unaware of each other, they act entirely out of self-interest. They are driven by the fierce desire to consume, in this case, the flesh of the living humans who have barricaded themselves inside the mall and who have also fallen prey to the dazzling array of products in this depopulated mall, all free for the taking. As much as the zombies have no real use for the consumer goods overflowing their shopping carts, neither do the humans. Trapped indoors, they