Walking in New York City can feel a lot like searching the Internet. Surfing web pages that drag me into a rabbit hole of information reminds me of the snippets of content I collect and edit in my mind just by walking east through Midtown Manhattan. The walk is a bit less curated, free from algorithms or search engine optimization, sparked by ephemeral encounters.
For example last Friday, I noticed a woman wearing a dark blue office dress on 53rd Street, sporting matching Hermes sandals, flipping off a black escalade running a red light while barking obscenities (“you missed the light, asshole!); two blocks down a man in an eye-catching brown plaid suit escorted his family into Tina’s Cuban, directly passed a homeless person trying to negotiate a cigarette in his mouth while eating a crumpled hamburger bun; further down along, a lady wheeled her bulldog puppy onto an empty sidewalk in a pink baby carriage while talking on her iPhone, right below a scaffold that was holding three construction workers monitoring a support beam that swung above other beams, Jenga-like, from a massive crane maned by yet another worker above them; a collection of rats rushed into garbage bags when I turned the corner on 59th street, opposite the Balenciaga store which showcased distressed sneakers through it’s show window, marked up to 1,190$ dollars online. A dog on 60th Street stopped to sniff the corner of my Nike sneaker, only to be tugged violently away by his owner. The doorman who caught the whole act, laughed and shrugged in my direction.
All this didn’t spark my next book idea, but it naturally became the most exhilarating 18 minutes of my week.
A daily walk reveals that I am one of many in the city; that spaces aren’t always aligned with how we describe them in the news or our conversations, and that interesting content is available for me without my past engagements coming back to nudge my behavior, like when I jump on most search engines.
Some people find Manhattan’s noise and activity overwhelming. I get it—being caught in a whirlwind of stimuli isn’t relaxing. But I’ve come to see it as a lesson in learning how to stay calm amid the chaos. At home, if I tried to match this level of sensory input, I’d lose my mind, and so I’m forced to become very intentional in how I relax. In how I become bored.
But If I go from a walk to scrolling the internet on my phone, my level of stimulation doesn’t really change. That jarring feeling of constant activity is still there, whether it’s circling me in the street or as I sit down and search for content in a digital, grocery aisle of pixelating commodities. Both experiences can be exhausting.
There is a difference in clarity, though. My walks provide unfiltered, ephemeral content that I interpret in my own way. On my phone, most content is framed, and curated to reflect what I’ve already shown interest in. Psychologist, Robert Epstein, has argued this much, noting how the algorithms behind search engines shape readers’ views. Epstein has since developed the American Digital Shield to track intentional, ephemeral engagements within Google’s ecosystem such as video suggestions on YouTube or the hierarchy of Google search results. These subtle imprints manage bias and are exceptionally hard to see.
In the Google ecosystem, the ephemeral becomes the frame, and what is fleeting becomes strategic.
AI could soon take this to another level, learning from our searches and scrolling habits to feed us information tailored to our subconscious desires. A similar warning was described by Jack Dorsey at this year’s Oslo’s Freedom Forum:
We are being programmed. We are being programmed based on what we say we’re interested in, and we’re told through these discovery mechanisms what is interesting—and as we engage and interact with this content, the algorithm continues to build more and more of this bias.
We “are being programmed” feels a bit much, but there might be a kernel of truth here that we glaze over. Like my walks through the city, the constant stream of information online hits us on both a conscious and unconscious level, though it feels less impactful given its expediency. In Rob Kitchin’s new book, Digital Timescapes, he makes the claim that we are living in in a time where “the production of time is qualitatively different from the pre-digital era,” and new “temporal relations” have been legitimatized and normalized between individuals and organizations. That feels right. Temporalities are experienced differently today, flickering through life like strobe lights. The ephemeral engagements that nudge us become harder and harder to notice by the day.
I still like when fleeting moments feel constantly unpredictable; when they sort of roll off the day like notes emerging from an acid jazz song. It’s a strange reminder that life isn’t so uniform and that existence rests within a strange ecological landscape of intensities, not so much the stories we want to tell ourselves.
This Friday’s walk had some highlights. A tall man dressed in all black and splashy sunglasses strolled across Madison Avenue like a praying mantis; a pigeon flew directly above my line of sight, nearly clipping its wing on my forehead as I passed by Cassidy’s bar where a couple sang along to Billy Joel’s “Captain Jack,” clasping their rainbow-colored vapes. On my way home on the subway, the bass line of a Mexican Mariachi band quickly woke up the guy sleeping on the 1 train while another guy wearing a man bun and a catcher-in-the-rye teeshirt sitting across from me vigorously sketched out the scene in his black canvas book.
There’s something poetic in the chaos of it all, and I’m not sure how the various cut-outs of the day shape my thinking, if at all. But at least I’m there to meet these moments, unfiltered.