Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Virginia Heffernan writes regularly about digital culture for The New York Times Magazine. In 2005, Heffernan (with cowriter Mike Albo) published the cult comic novel The Underminer (Bloomsbury). In 2002, she received her PhD in English Literature from Harvard.

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Magic and Loss

1

DESIGN

Instead of introducing a narrative or a lyric structure, an app game called Hundreds begins with a hazy dynamic: expanding. A player meets no characters; rather she’s put in mind of broadening her horizons, dilating on a subject, swelling with pride. Cued by dreamlike graphics, she feels her neurons inflate.

Next she’s abstractly navigating a crowd in that expansive state. She’s flinching to keep from touching anyone else. Then, on top of all that, she is shot through with the urgent need to get someone alone, to guide him away from the crowd. Finally she’s doing this while trying to avoid the blades of a low ceiling fan.

These obscure neurological half-narrative states and others, far stranger, are cunningly evinced by Hundreds, which is a masterpiece mobile puzzle game by Greg Wohlwend and Semi Secret Software. As in Hundreds (and 1010!, Monument Valley, and the marvelous blockbuster Minecraft), much of the best digital design bypasses language and can only be evoked by it, not denoted precisely.

Superb and sleek digital design like Semi Secret Software’s now live on apps. These apps are not so much intuitive as indulgent, and they put users far from the madding crowd of the World Wide Web. The extreme elegance of app design has surfaced, in fact, in reaction to the extreme inelegance of the Web.

Appreciating the Web’s entrenched inelegance is the key to understanding digital design both on- and offline. Cruise through the gargantuan sites—YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo!—and it’s as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web’s aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America. Eighties network television. Cacophonous palette, ad hoc everything, unbidden ads forever rampaging through one’s field of vision, to be batted or tweezed away like ticks bearing Lyme disease.

THE ADMIRING BOG

Take Twitter, with its fragmentary communications and design scheme of sky-blue birdies, checkmarks, and homebrew icons for retweets, at-replies, hashtags, and hearts. It’s exemplary of the graphic Web, almost made to be fled. Twitter’s graphics can be crisp and flowy at once, if you’re in the mood to appreciate them, but the whole world of Twitter can rapidly turn malarial and boggy. The me-me-me clamor of tweeters brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s lines about the disgrace of fame: “How public—like a Frog—/To tell one’s name—the livelong June—/To an admiring Bog!”

That boggy quality of the Web—or, in city terms, its ghetto quality—was brought forcefully to light in 2009, in a sly, fuck-you talk by Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. The Nietzschean devilishness of this remarkable speech seems to have gone unnoticed, but to a few in attendance it marked a turning point in the Internet’s unqualified celebration of “connectivity” as cultural magic. In fact, Sterling made clear, connectivity might represent a grievous cultural loss.

Connectivity is nothing to be proud of, Sterling ventured. The clearest symbol of poverty—not canniness, not the avant-garde—is dependence on connections like social media, Skype, and WhatsApp. “Poor folk love their cell phones!” he practically sneered. Affecting princely contempt for regular people, he unsettled the room. To a crowd that typically prefers onward-and-upward news about technology, Sterling’s was a sadistically successful rhetorical strategy. “Poor folk love their cell phones!” had the ring of one of those haughty but unforgettable expressions of condescension, like the Middle Eastern treasure “The dog barks; the caravan passes.”

Connectivity is poverty, eh? Only the poor, defined broadly as those without better options, are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens (or mod loft spaces, like Hundreds) that keep the din of the Web far away. The real man of leisure savors solitude or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl—original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

Sterling’s idea stings. The connections that feel like wealth to many of us—call us the impoverished, we who brave Facebook ads and privacy concerns—are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because—it suddenly seems so obvious—we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!

Twitter is ten years old. Early enthusiasts who used it for barhopping bulletins have cooled on it. Corporations, institutions, and public-relations firms now tweet like terrified maniacs. The “ambient awareness” that Clive Thompson recognized in his early writings on social media is still intact. But the emotional force of all this contact may have changed in the context of the economic collapse of 2008.

Where once it was engaging to read about a friend’s fever or a cousin’s job complaints, today the same kind of posts, and from broader and broader audiences, can seem threatening. Encroaching. Suffocating. Our communications, telegraphically phrased so as to take up only our allotted space, are all too close to one another. There’s no place to get a breath in the Twitter interface; all our thoughts live in stacked capsules, crunched up to stay small, as in some dystopic hive of the future. Or maybe not the future. Maybe now. Twitter could already be a jam-packed, polluted city where the ambient awareness we all have of one another’s bodies might seem picturesque to sociologists but has become stifling to those in the middle of it.

In my bolshevik-for-the-Internet days I used to think that writers on the Web who feared Twitter were just being old-fashioned and precious. Now while I brood on the maxim “Connectivity is poverty,” I can’t help wondering if I’ve turned into a banged-up street kid, stuck in a cruel and crowded neighborhood, trying to convince myself that regular beatings give me character. Maybe the truth is that I wish I could get out of this place and live as I imagine some nondigital or predigital writers do: among family and friends, in big, beautiful houses, with precious, irreplaceable objects.

The something lost in the design of the Web may be dignity—maybe my dignity. Michael Pollan wrote that we should refuse to eat anything our grandmothers wouldn’t recognize as food. In the years I spent at Yahoo! News—not content-farming, exactly, but designing something on a continuum with click bait, allowing ads into my bio, and being trained (as a talking head) to deliver corporate propaganda rather than report the news—I realized I was doing something my grandmothers wouldn’t have recognized as journalism. Privately I was glad neither of them had lived long enough to witness my tour of duty in that corner of the Web, doing Go-Gurt journalism.

RESPITE

Which brings me back to Hundreds and the other achingly beautiful apps, many of which could pass for objects of...