Friends without Benefits

Robert Fitterman describes Now We Are Friends as “an experimental poetry book where I randomly follow people online and appropriate the text along the way.” Only classicists and prudes will take exception to the word “poetry” in that account, but one might pick a bone with the word “follow”: unlike, say, the surveillance tactics of the conceptual artist Vito Acconci, from whose Following Piece (1969) this book takes its epigraph, Fitterman’s online scrutiny requires no legwork, and any real menace about it was abstracted away at least a decade ago. The risk in this project is neither criminal offense, as when Acconci stalked strangers in New York City, nor personal tedium, as when Kenneth Goldsmith copied out an issue of The New York Times. The risk here is equivalent to that of selecting the “random page” feature on Wikipedia a dozen times and reproducing the text of each resulting entry: that the endeavor will have been a waste of time. If Now We Are Friends is indeed poetry, it is found poetry—assuming, as Fitterman long has, that the very act of appropriation suffices to make text poetical. The content of the book is a stream of Internet text-droppings, each belonging to a randomly chosen man named Benjamin Kessler or to a randomly chosen man or woman within one or two degrees of separation in his Facebook friend network. (There are in fact a small handful of different Benjamin Kesslers in play, but Fitterman makes no particular effort to keep track of which one is the original [section 1] and which ones are the “Other Ben Kesslers” [section 2]; an abortive attempt at a correspondence between Fitterman and the former was published online in the magazine GlitterPony, but is not included here.) Most of the material gathered in Fitterman’s impassive Web-combing is mundane and useless, albeit impressively diverse: genealogical data, voting records, local sports league tournament brackets, the sidebar of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette website, the filmography of Canadian actress Rae Dawn Chong. The uselessness of said material is, of course, meant to be evocative in itself: this is how easy it is to sketch a picture of a Benjamin Kessler through the traces of his online comings and goings; this is how much information is available, on almost anyone who uses the Internet, for no cost and virtually no effort. (This is what we learn about Robert Fitterman from how little he learns about Benjamin Kessler.) The subtext here is important, if not novel: that the Internet’s greatest strength—connectivity—might be dangerous. The more we interact online, the more mingled our information becomes with that of a logarithmically increasing number of people. The more time we spend on the Web, the faster we become unwittingly, sometimes unwillingly, intertwined with the others in it.