The Internet Blog

There’s this paradox in which the internet is a major source of stress and anxiety for many people, but it is simultaneously used as an escape from that, an access point to various remedies.

"We don’t think this is because they’re trying to hide what they do or anything, we just think they’re bad at internet."

Validation is nice, but as a goal for creative effort, it is somewhat limited. The quest for validation must inevitably restrict itself to the tools of attracting attention: the blunt instruments of novelty and prurience (“Kanye West in a balloon chair”). The self one tries to express tends to be new, exciting, confessional, sexy, etc., because it plays as an advertisement. Identity is a series of ads for a product that doesn’t exist.

Which is all to say: Inputting 176 urban landmarks into my phone quickly made me aware of all the hiccups and gaps in the phone’s sense of place. My phone knows where it is in the world through different means than I do: Wifi networks tell it directly, or it triangulates between cell towers and GPS satellites. I meant for the experiment to tell me about the network of embassies, but it instead told me where my phone’s wayfinding infrastructure breaks down. Try to insert oneself directly into the grid, to find a place into it, and you quickly become aware of the seams.