There was one purpose for my journey to the Brooklyn Flea Market: to escape my computer screen.
But breaking the grip of a MacBook Pro’s 2-D, 17″ window onto the world takes a lot more than hauling a Web worker’s chair-sculpted ass up and out the door.
That glowing rectangle is not just a thing that can be walked away from. Not when you spend roughly 80 percent of your day in front of it.
At some point — about 3,000 hours in — the window hops off the table and nails itself to the wall of your perception.
What you once saw, you now watch. What you once felt, you now record.
Where there was the flow and music of nature’s complex, sensual software of human interaction, there is now a control panel stopping and going your heart with a click.
Come as you like. Leave when you want. Reboot, replace, copy, paste.
Repeat and you’ll see: Through this window, relationships are Web sites.
Drop by any hour. Refresh and scour for what you want. No costly, messy exchanges of fragile curiosity and glass hopes.
It is seek, find, click, scrape, escape. Risk-free. Cost-free. Scar-free.
Lifeless.
It is superbly ironic that I attempt to alleviate the isolating voyeurism intrinsic to a wired world by using the very device I rail against for conditioning us more and more every day to watch life rather than live it.
But that’s what I did on a sunny Sunday in New York.