Anonymity in the Age of the Internet

Saw this in a profile of uncreative writer Kenneth Goldsmith:

His position on writing is as follows: Modernism and postmodernism
are over, and the literary arts have entered a new technology-driven
paradigm. Originality is out the window. “Writers don’t need to write
anything more,” he says. “They just need to manage the language that
already exists.”

There is something utterly intoxicating about this idea. At least,
that’s how I felt hearing it from Goldsmith on a recent visit to his
Chelsea loft, where he lives with his wife, the video artist and
painter Cheryl Donegan, and their two sons. Perhaps what sold me was
the realization I had, in the midst of Goldsmith explaining his
monumental tome Day (2003)—for which he retyped an entire edition of the New York Times,
including all the ad copy, cover to cover—that to be Kenneth Goldsmith
is to have vanquished writer’s block, because there are countless texts
just waiting to be retyped. It’s just as reassuring to hear that
Goldsmith doesn’t actually expect anyone to read Day or his recently completed American trilogy, Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports
(2008)—transcriptions of, respectively, a year’s worth of radio weather
reports; a twenty-four-hour traffic cycle, every ten minutes from 1010
wins; and the radio broadcast of a long and dull Yankees game, ads
included.

It coincides interestingly with some of the things Michael Martone said in our interview with him:

Are you kidding? This, this what is happening now, is revolutionary, profoundly revolutionary. The whole electronic apparatus is simply redefining who and what an “author” is. The categories of “book,” “editor,” “publisher,” “audience,” “reader,” are in flux at least if not collapsing, transforming before out eyes. Much was made of high literary theory’s pronouncement of the death of the author, but the paltry deconstruction that went on in a few English Departments was, is nothing to what is going on now with this machine—the one I am tapped into at this moment. Universities are, by nature, so conservative. My colleagues don’t get, don’t want to get post post-modernism. Meanwhile, their students, their children are in the midst of the real deconstruction of the entire culture and it has not, will not take place at the university but here out there. I love the way the Web has worked around anything thrown at it, especially the desire of universities, publishing, etc., to re-impose the gates for gate-keeping of quality and the maintenance of hierarchy. Just work around it. The machine easily ignores it. The author is dead all right but long live writing. This is the end of the Johnsonian Age, the end of the Romantic, Modernist Individual Genius.

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