Kenneth Goldsmith Quotes

The beauty of the Internet is that people can take things, and do what they want with them, to project what they want or feel.

For the past decade, art historians Hito Steyerl and Boris Groys have written in favor of “weak images,” claiming that in the digital age, a weak or cool artifact is more democratic than a strong or hot one.

Many decry the loss of “real time” to capturing moments on-screen, claiming that the recording of memories as they happen threatens to replace the actual memories you have of that moment. I’ve read many articles in which parents bemoan the fact their kids were seeing family vacations through GoPro cameras, rather than actually living them. After a day on the ski slopes, they edit their raw footage into action-packed greatest moments and post it to social media, where it’s shared and commented on by their friends, hyperextending their time on the mountain. For a generation raised on reality TV to be able to replay those moments over and over through a mediated interface is a way of reliving an eternal present, loved for a moment then replaced by the next day’s upload. In this way, we’re simultaneously archiving and forgetting: archiving because we continuously upload media, and forgetting because we rarely go back to visit what we have uploaded. Today’s upload is the best upload and keeps us very much present and mindful in the here and now.

This is the subject of an art work by the Brooklyn-based artist Andrew Norman Wilson called ScanOps. The project began in 2007, when Wilson was contracted by a video-production company to work on the Google campus. He noted sharp divisions between the workers; one group, known as ScanOps, were sequestered in their own building. These were data-entry workers, the people to whom those mysterious hands belonged. Wilson became intrigued by them, and began filming them walking to and from their ten-hour shifts in silence. He was able to capture a few minutes of footage before Google security busted him. In a letter to his boss explaining his motives, Wilson remarked that most of the ScanOps workers were people of color. He wrote, “I’m interested in issues of class, race and labor, and so out of general curiosity, I wanted to ask these workers about their jobs.” In short order, he was fired.

The Internet has been accused of making us shallow. We’re skimming, not reading. We lack the ability to engage deeply with a subject anymore. That’s both true and not true: we skim and browse certain types of content, and read others carefully. Oftentimes, we’ll save a long form journalism article and read it later offline, perhaps on the train home from work.

The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.

In Flusserian terms, it doesn’t really matter what we tweet (content); it just matters that we keep tweeting (apparatus). For Flusser, the content of any medium is always the series of apparatuses that produced it.

Take the tech blog Boing Boing, for instance. They’re one of the most visible blogs on the web, but they create very little original content. Rather they act as a filter for the morass of information, pulling up the best stuff. The fact of Boing Boing linking to something far outweighs the thing they’re linking to. The culture of citation and name-checking on the web has resulted in a cascade of “re-” gestures: retweeting, reblogging, regramming, and reposting

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 encrypted communication 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.

You may not want to hear that or think of it as writing, but I’m telling you that the moving of information is a literary act in and of itself. Even when people aren’t reading it.

Your photo of the Eiffel Tower on Flickr is identically redundant to the millions already stored on Flickr, yet you keep on snapping them (just as I keep downloading MP3s).

The best thing about conceptual poetry is that it doesn’t need to be read. You don’t have to read it. As a matter of fact, you can write books, and you don’t even have to read them. My books, for example, are unreadable. All you need to know is the concept behind them. Here’s every word I spoke for a week. Here’s a year’s worth of weather reports... and without ever having to read these things, you understand them.

The role of the professor now is part party host, part traffic cop, full-time enabler.

Instagram something with the intention of it being taken down by Instagram. Take a screenshot of it; keep a record of it. Instagram the screenshot. Screenshot that Instagram. If it is taken down again, repeat the process until all you’re posting is a screenshot of a screenshot of a screenshot . . . of the original photo.

No fue sino hasta que sucumbimos ante la tentación que pudimos tomar conciencia de la insensatez de nuestros deseos