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 … - Kenneth Goldsmith

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.

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.