It Doesn’t Matter If Anyone Exists or Not

Over time, the alienation associated with modern, city life only deepened in its appeal. In 1996, the writer Vivian Gornick characterized the “endlessly advancing crowd” that jostled against her in New York City as both relaxing and energizing. An overheard conversation among young professionals; a fragment of an older couple’s argument; the honks and screeches of cars and trucks; the wafting scent of food from sidewalk vendors; the barker cries of a street hawker. “The misery in my chest begins to dissolve out,” Gornick wrote. “The city is opening itself up to me.” More than 130 years after Baudelaire jostled among the top hats of Paris, the flâneur (or flâneuse) persists, extracting energy from the crowded bustle.

Back when Gornick was writing about the urbane urban life, the commercial internet was still new. In 1995, 36 percent of Americans owned computers, and only 10 percent of them used email. As human culture tried to make sense of life in the middle of a global, decentralized network, topological metaphors ruled. The internet was said to realize a “global village,” after an idea of the media theorist Marshall McLuhan from three decades prior. It was called an “information superhighway” in an effort to make its many physical couplings comprehensible.

Today, these nicknames seem retrograde, if not just plain wrong. Thinking of the online world as a place, especially a separate place, has become outmoded. The belief that online and offline spaces are separate realms has even earned its own derogatory name, digital dualism. It’s a false dichotomy, the critics hold, to construe the “virtual” and “physical” words as distinct, or of offline and online personalities as divergent. To some extent, that speaks to the power the internet has accrued in the two decades since it became commercialized. People do so much online, from work to shopping to socializing, that virtual life has colonized and become “real” life.

Yet the internet is a place where people go, and it has never ceased to be useful to think of it as one. As a place, it feels a lot like a crowded, modernist city. As it happens, that’s how some films, such as The Emoji Movie and Ralph Breaks the Internet choose to depict it: big, dense, urban expanses, which subdivide into towers and hovels representing apps, websites, and services. The global village has become a global metropolis.

There, in its crowded streets, the modernist experience recorded by Baudelaire, Gornick, and so many others breaks down. Web browsing once felt like “surfing,” to invoke another outmoded metaphor, along with the “cyberflâneur,” a very 1990s online reimagining of the 19th-century dandy. For a time, gliding across the internet in those costumes felt pleasurable. But no longer. The grimy streets of Facebook, the angry mobs of Twitter, the irritable swarm of neighbors on Nextdoor—the experience of the online crowd has long ceased to imbue energy. Mostly, it just drains it.