In October 2016, the American digital artist Jenny Odell took the participants in a lecture series in San Francisco on a virtual tour through a long bygone era: the mid-1990s - a time when people were still confused about the Internet. Nobody knew how to understand this Internet, so you watched VHS tapes and TV spots where friendly men in ironed shirts compared it to the highway system while some youngster in the background, balancing on an office chair, made surfing movements. If you decided not just to look at the new world, but to register yourself in it, you discussed science fiction and paleontology on non-commercial platforms like Usenet and built bulky geocities websites,on which you displayed your pets and built flashing shrines for the actors of "The X-Files".
The users with the purest hearts called themselves “netizens”, a derivation of “citizens”, ie residents of a defined area with rights and obligations. Even more skeptical people had reason to believe that the internet would make things easier for you - reading the newspaper, keeping an address book, communicating with colleagues and eating a sandwich at home at the same time - but not creating a whole new reality, in that our curiosity and sociability are increasingly being misused to increase the financial and political power of giant technology corporations.
The talk, which Odell called "How to Internet," originally ended with an anecdote about a train ride where she had a tense, enriching conversation with what she suspected was a Trump-loving army veteran and his grandson, at whose table she had had been seated in the dining car.
She advocated “more dining cars on the Internet”, more coincidences, more spontaneous exchanges with strangers, as there had been before.
The fragmentation of time into hours that can be monetized
But when she started to write down the lecture two months later, the outcome of the presidential election had already made this conviction appear as naive as the old highway metaphor: If the Internet is still a highway, she now writes, then one, " On the basis of previous behavior (and purchase history) one is forced to return to the same places over and over again. In fact, the highway itself always seems to return to its own neighborhood, while other people have their own set routes that have nothing in common with their own. "
Around the same time, Odell begins to visit the Morcom Amphitheater of Roses, a ninety-year-old rose garden in their Oakland neighborhood, almost daily. Surrounded by birds, whose purpose she is gradually learning from David Sibley's bird watcher bible, she just sits there for hours. In the morning she lounges around in front of her kitchen window to watch a crow and its cub as they dive daringly from the telephone wire across the street towards the peanuts that they have thrown onto the balcony, and to be watched by them again. In the evening after work - Odell teaches at the Stanford Art Faculty - she catches herself taking a detour from the bus stop to pass a pair of night herons,whose laser-red eyes and white bellies remind them in a strangely comforting way of ghosts, ghosts from Oakland's pre-civilized past as a swampy region.