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

can’t play golf with their new shiny clubs or go anywhere fabulous in their recently liberated couture. Yet both—the humans and the zombies—are consumed by the act of consumption. And the human consumers may themselves ultimately be consumed—literally eaten—by the hyperzombie consumers.
    Zombies replicate virally. Similar to the metrics of our social media accounts—your number of Twitter followers moves strongly in one direction—their numbers are always gaining in strength. Their power is in numbers: the more of them there are, the more powerful they are. Our power is also in numbers: the more followers we have, the more powerful we are. When we gain a follower, we don’t gain a person; we gain a metric. And yet, many of our followers might in fact truly be zombies or bots—programs on a network that often appear to act and interact like humans—who follow us so we’ll follow them back. A trick to swell our ranks is to buy followers, acquiring legions of zombies who will do our consuming on our behalf. Romero’s zombie shoppers may have filled their shopping carts with stuff but they can’tuse it the same way you can’t use all the data you download. However, someone else can: our computers are invaded by agents that turn them into zombies as part of a botnet—a swarm of bots—performing nefarious deeds without us even knowing it.
    We are the walking dead, passive-aggressive, human-machine hybrids who are under the illusion that we’re in control. But it’s not that simple. We are collaborators with the zombies: sometimes wittingly, other times coercively, but always codependently. We are at once identified and self-identified with them, which might not be such a bad thing because the apparatus through which all of this flows—the network—is the ultimate zombie. The network appears to be more resilient than the waves of global epidemics and terrorism that continually engulf us. In spite of extremism, wars, mass migration, climate change, and market meltdowns in which fragile human bodies are decimated, our robust networks remain unbreakable in ways that bodies aren’t.

    A great inspiration for the dreamy surrealists was the nineteenth-century flaneur, an idle man-about-town who was the opposite of the zombie. Like a dériviste (the situationists also claimed the flaneur as a predecessor), he roamed the city alone, allowing himself to be pulled by the flows of the crowds on the grand boulevards. With no goal inmind, he was a spectator of the urban landscape, viewing the goings-on from the shadowy sidelines. Whereas the zombie was obsessed with consuming, the flaneur assiduously avoided it, feeling that to buy something would be too participatory. Instead, he was a world-class window-shopper, haunting enclosed arcades and narrow winding streets, browsing the displays. His was a stance of studied ambivalence. When asked about a certain topic of the day, he would feign indifference and recuse himself by simply saying, “I don’t know” or “I don’t care.” The flaneur exemplified a position that Roland Barthes called “the neutral,” wherein one intentionally places oneself in a state of uncertainty or indecision—living in a state between states—like sleepwalkers, ghosts, vampires, androids, and androgynous persons. * Neutrality was at the heart of the flaneur’s resistance; fiercely individualistic, he resisted any attempts to be programmed or enlisted to join movements or groups. Uninterested in power, he was bereft of the kind of hungry desire that drives consumers and zombies.
    The flaneur is hardwired into the ethos of the Internet: we “browse” the web with our “browsers,” “surfing” from site to site, voyeuristically “lurking” from the sidelines. The digital flaneur obsessively frequents comment streams but doesn’t dare leave a comment; he