Is it time to start talking about Web 3.0? This would be the ghost-downtown Web, the gated-community Web, the Web of Facebook, Twitter, and iPhone apps: the Web that’s already familiar and that you no longer want to know too much more about, not in any one sitting, anyway. The Web in which the flâneur might just as well stay at home.

Ah, the flâneur, beloved figment of Web 1.0.

And yet, reading Evgeny Morozov’s contribution to the Times‘s Sunday Review — well, I didn’t even have to start reading. There was Caillebotte’s great picture (still the best reason to visit Chicago), Rue de Paris, temps de pluie, with its burghers walking in the rain. Don’t say that they’re “strolling”; don’t imagine that their amiably aimless air has anything to do with Baudelaire or Benjamin. The setting may be “Paris” to you, but when Caillebotte painted it, this was one of the newest developments in town, too new for much greenery. (According to my map, it is now known as the Place de Dublin.) Neither grand nor funky, it was the last place you’d expect to encounter an errant bohemian in search of serendipity.

Maybe that was the point. Maybe the Times image editor appreciated the irony of illustrating “The Death of the Cyberflâneur” with a picture of post-flâneur Paris. That would be very clever. But I doubt that many readers saw it that way.

Meanwhile…(ahem): chopped liver? What am I doing here, do you suppose?

***

I don’t know much about Baudelaire & Benjamin’s idea of the flâneur; I’d never heard of it before the Web came along. AtWikipedia, I see, alongside the Caillebotte, that “the concept of the flâneur is important in academic discussions of the phenomenon of modernity.” I’ll try not to hold that against it. (Modernity turned out to be such a wicked idea.) The flâneur discovers that he (or she) is the ultimate arbiter of what’s interesting in the busy stream of city life, where the odds of running into something unexpected are at not only generally higher than they are anywhere else but also subject to rapid change, capable of dropping to zero if you walk into a newsstand where they sell lottery tickets. But we’re not here to talk about city life. We’re hear to evaluate Morozov’s claim, “Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore.”

(Can we speak of the “surfeur”? Best not.)

I’m trying to think of the last time I did anything like surfing. Nothing comes to mind. I begin the workday with 1000+ unread feeds and try to whittle the number down. Lately, I’ve been canceling “subscriptions” to sites right and left. Beachcombing is one thing, looking for needles in haystacks is another (I’m thinking of WSJ’s Speakeasy, which sued to turn up the occasional tidbit of interest.) I may follow a link from a site to which one my feeds leads me, but this doesn’t happen often; as a rule, my feeds take me to long reads, after which I have to lie down, far from a computer screen.

If people aren’t surfing as much as they used to do, that’s because a lot of the odd and intriguing stuff has been discontinued. Stocking a site with catchy items is great fun at first, but then you either run out of material or resent the obligation to crank it out. Or both. You either give it up or adopt a professional attitude. This is where the difficulty in Internet flânerie comes in: to have a clear idea of what you’re doing, and a regular schedule for doing it, then close encounters with the surprising are going to become unlikely.

On the other hand, the space that used to be taken up by weird fun is filling up with sites such as The Awl, the comic carapace of which you don’t have to scratch very hard to feel the warm vibration of genuine thinking. Remember Maria Bustillos’s piece on David Foster Wallace’s “self-help” library? Of course you do. It was so intensely surprising that the actual library, the books that Wallace had marked up with comments about his mother, were withdrawn from public access. That sort of corker doesn’t pop every day, but, when it does, you’re very glad that you were there to see it. I’ll plow through any number of Alex Balk’s entries about bears if that’s what it takes to read Bustillos’s amazing journalism.

***

You’ll have heard me rattling on about “livings.” I still have an exclusive on this term, unfortunately, but my keen eye for like-minded analysis has spotted a few published parallels, the latest of which is an essay, or rump of an essay, by Slavoj Žižek, in the latest LRB to reach me, “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie.” From a Marxian point of view, I gather — I have never begun to understand Marx — “salaried bourgeoisie” is something of an oxymoron; either you’re a worker who receives a salary, or  you’re an owner who receives the profits. The growth of large corporations — Žižek leaves this to inference — leads inevitably to the dwindling number of outright owners and its replacement by armies of individually impotent shareholders.

What’s behind the revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie? Income disparity — it isn’t great enough. This is a fantastic insight. While everyone’s attention is riveted on the widening gap between a handful of extremely wealthy people and the rest of us, nobody’s attending to the real irritant, which is the shrinking of the gap between the bourgeoisie and the working class. This isn’t a matter of less money for lawyers and doctors, but rather one of fewer jobs for people who used to be the equals of lawyers and doctors. Whole classes of middle management have evaporated since the 1970s.

Which is probably what gave me the idea of livings in the first place. The poor have always been with us; what strikes me as a newlypressing problem is the matter of finding occupation for the displaced bourgeoisie. This isn’t tenderness of heart so much as common sense: Žižek cautions against treating the lot of 2011s worldwide uprisings as revolts of the salaried bourgeoisie, but they all seem to have some of that in common, particularly if you consider the role played by college students whose job prospects are dismal.

With Žižek’s final paragraph, I could not agree more heartily.

The proletarianisation of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is matched at the opposite extreme by the irrationally high remuneration of top managers and bankers (irrational since, as investigations have demonstrated in the US, it tends to be inversely proportional to a company’s success). Rather than submit these trends to moralising criticism, we should read them as signs that the capitalist system is no longer capable of self-regulated stability – it threatens, in other words, to run out of control.

***

While we’re on the subject of dandies, how’s this for a pose: when somebody asked me if I favored the Giants or the Patriots yesterday, I blinked. “Baseball, already?” 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2012 at 9:20 am.