The Lonely City

by Olivia Laing

  And Twitter was only the gateway, the portal into the endless city of the internet. Whole days went by on clicking, my attention snared over and over by pockets and ladders of information; an absent, ardent witness to the world, the Lady of Shalott with her back to the window, watching the shadows of the real appear in the lent blue glass of her magic mirror. I used to read like that, back in the age of paper, the finished century, to bury myself in a book, and now I gazed at the screen, my cathected silver lover.

  It was like being a spy, carrying out perpetual surveillance. It was like becoming a teenager again, plunging into pools of obsession, moving on, riding the rocking swells, the changing surf. Reading about hoarding or torture or true crime or the iniquities of the state; reading misspelled chatroom conversations about what happened to Samantha Mathis after River Phoenix died, sorry to sound partonizing but are you sure you WATCHED this interview? The plunge through, the drift, the awful k-hole of recessive links, clicking deeper and deeper into the past, stumbling out into the horrors of the present. Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain getting married on a beach, a child’s bloodied body on the sand: images that generated emotion, overlapping the pointless, the appalling and the desirable.

  What did I want? What was I looking for? What was I doing there, hour after hour? Contradictory things. I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to be stimulated. I wanted to be in contact and I wanted to retain my privacy, my private space. I wanted to click and click and click until my synapses exploded, until I was flooded by superfluity. I wanted to hypnotise myself with data, with coloured pixels, to become vacant, to overwhelm any creeping anxious sense of who I actually was, to annihilate my feelings. At the same time I wanted to wake up, to be politically and socially engaged. And then again I wanted to declare my presence, to list my interests and objections, to notify the world that I was still there, thinking with my fingers, even if I’d almost lost the art of speech. I wanted to look and I wanted to be seen, and somehow it was easier to do both via the mediating screen.

  It’s easy to see how the network might appeal to someone in the throes of chronic loneliness, with its pledge of connection, its beautiful, slippery promises of anonymity and control. You can look for company without the danger of being revealed or exposed, discovered wanting, seen in a state of need or lack. You can reach out or you can hide; you can lurk and you can reveal yourself, curated and refined.

  In many ways, the internet made me feel safe. I liked the contact I got from it: the small accumulation of positive regard, the favouriting on Twitter, the Facebook likes, the little devices designed and coded for maintaining attention and boosting client egos. I was willing enough to be the sucker, to disseminate my information, to leave the electronic snail-trail of my interests and allegiances for future corporations to convert into whatever currency it is they use. Sometimes, in fact, it seemed like the exchange was working in my favour, especially on Twitter, with its knack for facilitating conversation between strangers along shared lines of interest and allegiance.

  In the first year or two that I was there it felt like a community, a joyful place; a lifeline, in fact, considering how cut off I otherwise was. At other times, though, the whole thing seemed insane, a trading-off of time against nothing tangible at all: a yellow star, a magic bean, a simulacrum of intimacy, for which I was surrendering all the pieces of my identity, every element except the physical carcass in which I was supposedly contained. And it only took a few missed connections or lack of likes for the loneliness to resurface, to be flooded with the bleak sense of having failed to make contact.

  Loneliness triggered by virtual exclusion is just as painful as that which arises out of real life encounters: a miserable rush of emotion that almost every person on the internet has experienced at one time or another. In fact, one of the tools psychologists use to assess the effects of ostracism and social rejection is a virtual game called Cyberball, in which the participant plays catch with two computer-generated players, who are programmed to pass the ball normally for the first few tosses, before throwing it exclusively between themselves – an experience identical to the minute smart of having a conversation in which your @self, your avatar, is abruptly excised.

  But what did I care, when I could drift away from conversation, and be succoured instead by the addictive act of looking itself? The computer facilitated a pleasurably fluid, risk-free gaze, since nothing I looked at was precisely aware of my observing presence, my fluctuating regard, though I left a trail of cookies to mark my path. Strolling the lit boulevards of the internet, pausing to glance at the exhibitions people have made of their taste, their lives, their bodies, I could feel myself becoming a kind of cousin to Baudelaire, who in the prose-poem ‘Crowds’ sets out a manifesto for the flâneur, the uncommitted apolitical wanderer of the city, writing dreamily:

  The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being able to be himself or someone else, as he chooses. Like those wandering souls who go looking for a body, he enters as he likes into each man’s personality. For him alone everything is vacant.

  I walked all the time, but I’d never walked through a city like that. I found the idea abhorrent, in fact, a dandyish disinclination to engage with the reality of other people. But on the internet, it was hard to remember that there were fleshy, feeling selves behind the avatars. Other people had a tendency to become increasingly abstract, increasingly unreal, their identities blurring and reforming.

  Or perhaps it was Edward Hopper I was morphing into. Like him, I found myself becoming a peeper, a creeper, a connoisseur of open windows, patrolling in search of stimulating sights. Like him, my attention was often caught by the erotic. I wandered around the personal ads on Craigslist in just the same way that I wandered around the delis on Eighth Avenue, gazing blankly into the lit racks of sushi, yoghurt, ice cream, Blue Moon and Brooklyn beer, wondering what it was that I wanted, what it was that would satisfy or settle me, eating with my eyes.

  No one I knew would admit to liking Craigslist, but I always found it weirdly cheering. The unashamed display of need, the sheer range and specificity of things that people wanted was far more reassuring and democratic than the preening, exacting profiles that appeared on the more sanitised dating sites. If the internet was a city, Craigslist was its Times Square, a site of cross-class, cross-racial contact, temporarily levelled by sexual desire. Cross-entity too, considering how hard it sometimes was to distinguish the human from the bot. We can both get what we want out of this. I just want a tan Asian girl! I love eaten. Drinks and conversation with a Harvard grad. LET ME SHOVE MY COC IN U long-term 420 sweet princess Chelsea Midtown Midtown West cuddle kitty licked submissive BUSTY game-players tons of baggage plant flowers in my front yard type REAL in the subject of your response. Sprawled on the futon in my apartment I spent hours scrolling through the ads, encouraged by how many other people were going frantic with longings of every possible dimension and heft.

  But the looking didn’t only go one way. Part of the allure of the computer was that I could be seen through the screen, could put myself out for virtual inspection and validation while remaining in control, remote from the possibility of physical rejection. The latter was an illusion, of course. Twice, I put ads on Craigslist. The first, written while I was still in Brooklyn Heights, was hyper-specific and drew mostly angry men or men who quickly became angry. Ignorant cunt go burn bitch beg to be raped, one responder wrote, an email that felt like a punch to the chest, a minor explosion of hostility in the larger war enacted on the internet against women. I didn’t reply. I logged out of the email account, itself in an assumed name, and never went back, withdrawing this time not because of hypervigilance to social rejection but because of the opposite – because the screen permitted people to make threats and use language that most of them would – I’m guessing here – never countenance in real life.

  This is the thing about screens: you can never be sure how clear they are. The disinhibition throwawayemayl@gmail.com evidently felt wa
s a darker aspect of the same freedom I often experienced in my nocturnal journeys, my frictionless hauntings: a freedom that arose because of the way screens facilitate projection and encourage individual expression while at the same time dehumanising the countless others concealed or embedded behind their own more or less lifelike avatars. What’s hard to know, though, is whether this means that what emerges is magnified or distorted, or if anonymity and consequenceless speech (seemingly consequenceless, anyway) simply permits real feelings to seep into the light.

  In the second ad, I was vague to the point of absurdity. 479 replies. Grew up on a farm, you need a strong black man in your life, 6’3 shaved head, care to chat a little, please please no headgames. These messages were often accompanied or supplanted altogether by pictures of men under trees, men reflected in mirrors, men sometimes whole and sometimes in parts, cropped down to naked chests and engorged penises, one of which was paired with a perplexing picture of its owner standing on a bed, a striped comforter hanging from his shoulders like a superhero’s cape.

  Some of those emails made my skin crawl, but the majority were touching, with their intimations of loneliness as well as horniness, their hopes for contact. I wrote back to a few, and went nervously on a handful of dates, but none of it went anywhere. Though I wasn’t exactly heartbroken any more, something in me – some structure of confidence or esteem – had crumbled. I didn’t see anyone a second time. Instead, I stayed indoors and carried on patrolling, looking for connection of an easier, less exposing kind.

  Sometimes, as I was scrolling pages, I’d catch my face in the mirror, pallid, absent, glowing. Inside, I might be fascinated or agitated or absolutely enraged, but from the outside I looked half-dead, a solitary body enraptured by a machine. A few years later, watching Spike Jonze’s Her, I saw the exact replica of this face on Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore Twombly, a man so bruised and leery of actual intimacy that he falls in love with his operating system, a reboot of Warhol marrying his tape recorder. It wasn’t his incredulous joy I recognised, the scenes of him spinning in circles with his phone. It was a scene right at the beginning, in which he gets home from work, sits down in the dark and begins to play a videogame, manically jiggling his fingers to propel an avatar up a slope, his face pathetically engaged, his slumped body dwarfed by the giant screen. He looked hopeless, ridiculous, absolutely divorced from life, and I recognised him immediately as my twin: an icon of twenty-first-century isolation and data dependency.

  It no longer seemed absurd by then that someone might have a romantic relationship with an operating system. Digital culture was undergoing hyper-acceleration, moving so fast it was hard to keep track. One minute something was sci-fi, palpably ridiculous; the next a casual ritual, part of the everyday texture of life. The first year that I was in New York, I read Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad. Part of it is set a little in the future, and involves a business meeting between a young woman and an older man. After talking a while, the girl becomes agitated by the demands of speech and asks the man if she can ‘T’ him instead, though they are sitting side by side. As information silently flushes between their two handsets, she looks ‘almost sleepy with relief’, describing the exchange as pure. Reading it, I can distinctly remember thinking that it was appalling, shocking, wonderfully far-fetched. Within a matter of months it seemed instead merely plausible, a little gauche, but entirely understandable as an urge. Now it’s just what we do: texting in company, emailing colleagues at the same desk, avoiding encounters, DMing instead.

  The relief of virtual space, of being plugged in, of having control. Everywhere I went in New York, on the subway, in cafés, walking down the street, people were locked into their own network. The miracle of laptops and smartphones is that they divorce contact from the physical, allowing people to remain sealed into a private bubble while they are nominally in public and to interact with others while they are nominally alone. Only the homeless and the dispossessed seemed exempt, though that’s not counting the street kids who spent every day hanging out in the Apple store on Broadway, keeping up on Facebook even – especially, maybe – if they didn’t have anywhere to sleep that night.

  Everyone knows this. Everyone knows what it looks like. I can’t count how many pieces I’ve read about how alienated we’ve become, tethered to our devices, leery of real contact; how we are heading for a crisis of intimacy, as our ability to socialise withers and atrophies. But this is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. We haven’t just become alienated because we’ve subcontracted so many elements of our social and emotional lives to machines. It’s no doubt a self-perpetuating cycle, but part of the impetus for inventing as well as buying these things is that contact is difficult, frightening, sometimes intolerably dangerous. Despite an advert then prevalent on the subway that declared Your favourite part of having a smartphone is never having to call anyone again, the source of the gadget’s pernicious appeal is not that it will absolve its owner of the need for people but that it will provide connection to them – connection, furthermore, of a risk-free kind, in which the communicator need never be rejected, misunderstood or overwhelmed, asked to supply more attention, closeness or time than they are willing to offer up.

  According to the psychologist Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT who has been writing about human-technology interactions for the past three decades and who has become increasingly wary of the ability of computers to nourish us in the ways we seem to want them to, part of the screen’s allure is that it facilitates a dangerously pleasurable self-forgetfulness in something of the same manner as the analyst’s couch. Both spaces offer up a complicated set of possibilities, an alluring oscillation between the dyad of hidden and seen. Lying on their back, witnessed by but unable to glimpse the observer who watches over them, the analysand dreamily narrates their life story. ‘Likewise, at a screen,’ Turkle writes in Alone Together:

  . . . you feel protected and less burdened by expectation. And, although you are alone, the potential for almost instantaneous contact gives an encouraging feeling of already being together. In this curious relational space, even sophisticated users who know that electronic communications can be saved, shared, and show up in court, succumb to its illusion of privacy. Alone with your thoughts, yet in touch with an almost tangible fantasy of the other, you feel free to play. At the screen, you have a chance to write yourself into the person you want to be and to imagine others as you wish them to be, constructing them for your purposes. It’s a seductive but dangerous habit of mind.

  Alone Together was published in 2011. The third in a trilogy about relationships between humans and computers, it’s the result of years of research projects, of observing and discussing how technology is used and feels with many different kinds of people, from school children nervously mothering Tamagotchis and teenagers struggling with the demands of virtual and real social lives to isolated seniors coddling therapeutic robots in nursing homes.

  In Turkle’s first two books, The Second Self (1984) and Life on the Screen (1992), computers are presented as primarily positive objects. The first, written before the advent of the internet, considers the computer itself as other, ally, even friend, while the second explores the way that networked devices facilitate entry into a liberating zone of exploration and identity play, where anonymous individuals can reinvent themselves, forming connections with people all over the world, no matter how niche their interests and proclivities.

  Alone Together is different. Subtitled Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, it’s a frightening book, conveying an oncoming dystopia in which no one talks or touches, in which robots take on the role of caregivers and people’s identities become increasingly imperilled and unstable as they are simultaneously succoured and surveilled by machines. Privacy, concentration, intimacy: all are lost, worn away by our fixation with the world inside the screen.

  How far ahead can you see? For most of us, committed Luddites aside, these more sinister aspects of vi
rtual existence are only just beginning to crest into visibility, two decades after the public launch of the world wide web. But there have been warnings, both by scientists and psychologists and broadcast through the prescient medium of art. One of the strangest in this latter category was made over fifteen years ago – and not even by an artist but by a dotcom millionaire with money to burn. Prophecy is a strong word, but the things Josh Harris created at the turn of the new millennium have something of the quality of predictive text, capturing not just the shape of the future but also the urges that brought it into being.

  *

  Josh Harris was an internet entrepreneur, the cigar-chomping poster-boy for the excesses of Silicon Alley, the nickname for the digital industries that burgeoned in New York towards the end of the twentieth century. In 1986, at the age of twenty-six, he’d set up Jupiter Communications, the first internet market research company. It went public in 1988, making him a millionaire. Six years later, he founded a pioneering internet television network, Pseudo, which produced multiple channels of entertainment, each catering for and made by different subcultures, from hip hop and gaming to erotica – the same panoply of communities, in fact, that still colonise the web today.

  Years before social media, before Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2006), before Grindr (2009), ChatRoulette (2009), Snapchat (2011) and Tinder (2012), before even Friends Reunited (2000), Friendster (2002), MySpace (2003) and Second Life (2003), not to mention the broadband that made them viable, Harris understood that the internet’s most powerful appeal was not going to be as a way of sharing information, but rather as a space in which people could connect with others. He foresaw from the beginning that there would be an appetite for interactive entertainment and he also foresaw that people would be willing to pay a good deal in order to participate, to have a presence in the virtual world.