I went on a long forest walk with my family the other day and my dad, towards the end, sagely said, "You know what, a long walk is a great first date. You get to see how soon they literally get tired of you."¹ Time is a great measure of value. But, I also think one of the beautiful things about getting to know someone through a moving process is to find out if they're the kind of person who's curious enough to take the time and go down a corner street and explore to discover what might be there - do they wonder what's down there, and wander in? Wandering is how you really get to know a place. What's your favorite place?² How did you find it? I'd love to know the story if you say Google.

We don't often wander in or to places that we don't feel safe in, or at least not alone. Waiting for a friend in an unfamiliar neighborhood can be anxiety inducing.³ You scroll on your phone, headphones on, intensely preoccupied with looking busy. Not to be disturbed. It depends on the neighborhood you're in, but more importantly, it depends on who you are - and if you feel like you fit in. On the other hand, if there are signs that this is a Welcome Place For You, it's downtime to explore, look for something to do in the meantime, stop into a niche cafe and have a cuppa while you wait. We wander when there are appropriate guardrails in place to feel safe and free to roam. My preference for wandering is the not-suburbs - suburbs are very well designed to get you from one place to another, but the in betweens are less interesting than a city. Wandering's utility isn't so much about the destination, but the journey along the way, and there's only so much that's intriguing about manicured lawns and nice houses. Something is always going on in a city, it is never the same, even if nothing changes.

The internet can be a neighborly Welcoming Place For You, if you find the right space. But if you don't know where to go, many spaces are either highly structured objectives Craigslist) or wildly unstructured explorations (YouTube, Tumblr).⁴ The in-between is where it gets interesting...and by the in-between I mean a space that is usually undesigned. Learning how to navigate cyberspace requires learning a new set of physics - one where timespace works differently, and identities are more than fluid, they are infinite. Wandering on the internet opens up worlds of wonder, but what are our street signs and navigational cues? Wandering, like many things that are both a noun and a verb, is hard to have metrics to optimize.

Wandering, like many things that are ambiguous, is both incredibly freeing, and incredibly terrifying.⁵ For a lot of the internet that we see, every page has a call to action. Ads are waiting for you every couple of seconds, pointing you to one Exciting! for a limited time only! sale! or another. It is like being trapped in a shopping mall and you can't get out. Warning signs and gates and login screens and privacy protections mean to do good - they're meant to ensure our rights and our ability to stay safe. But they're more often than not framed as dense terms and conditions - lengthy documents that are hard to read and designed intentionally to be not-skippable, but easy to forward through.⁶ They're speed bumps for your fingers as you scroll to the good part.⁷ That's not wandering in a cool neighborhood - it's more like closing your eyes and speeding through the warnings and stuff we don't want to think about. It's very destination, rather than journey driven. Reading books became condensed to reading articles, which condensed even more to reading the headlines of the articles, all in order to get to the point - to save time. This erosion of situational learning perhaps contributed to why we see so much binary divisiveness in digital spaces, an uprooting from context and with it, nuance.⁸ For the sake of Getting to the Point, the monetized internet has reduced the infinite possibilities of playing with spacetime, of wandering through the new physics possible in digital spaces, to optimizing for tesseracts - shortcuts from one internet place to another. Why? To save time.⁹ To Get to the Point (or as the design industry calls it "completing user objectives").

To reduce a complex beings decisions - to the simple objectives of a user.

Users don't wander. Users have pre-planned journeys.

How did this happen? How did we end up in the Pinterest Singularity of templatized internet experiences that optimize for task completion, rather than exploration? In a world of slickly designed templates and UI libraries, I miss touring custom made websights - the experiments in wielding css and html on Tumblr and Myspace. The absolute sheer glee of being able to change something to the specific color that you wanted it to be, curated with love and care, every little detail painstakingly created. These were no McMansion websites with fancy swirling parallax animations, these were hand coded sparkles that followed your mouse cursor, because...well, why not?¹⁰ Contrast that expression of personality from a hard coded website with the bounded constraints of a feed - while the tools of these platforms make the sharing of expression more accessible, you're getting to know each other as users, wearing the same uniform of blue, on a path already traced out for you, tested vigorously to predict your every possible move.¹¹ Each of your experiences are unique, as defined by the algorithm. Your feed is a lonely single serving meal, no communal family dinners to be found here. Try as you might to wander away from the designed path, you're working against the designers who make this experience nice for you - and the entire historical canon of interaction design and behavioral science.

Tell me you didn't just fall for it.¹² The interaction designer in me just thought "Ah, yes, it still works" and the human in me just facepalmed because I just fell for it, again. Try as you might, that was wandering-proof, by design. This isn't all together a bad thing. When you're trying to get something done, like your taxes, you want this kind of intuitive design, looking out for you, to make your user objectives easier, as Credit Karma has done such a nice job of doing.¹³ But it's in the un-doing, and un-objectives that people come together over more than what they want to get done as users. In The Architecture of Loitering, designer Wenting Guo explores Rome for three months, wandering the city to understand what architectural designs "invite moments of respite, pause, and serenity - moving beyond the singular pursuit of function and efficiency in our cities."¹⁴ Cities are places of utility, but they are also incredible hubs of community, explosions of creativity. They are spaces where people gather in high concentration, they are places of high foot traffic. What digital architecture might we design in cyberspaces with high eyeball traffic to encourage these same paradoxical moments of never a dull moment found, while doing "nothing?" What if we were to consider "usability heuristics" through a lens of pleasure, rather than productivity?¹⁵

To prioritize pleasure over productivity is a radical thing in our cyberspaces where our eyeballs and emotions are the valuable spacetime that a programmatic marketplace is endlessly bidding on.¹⁶ It is designed, perhaps, to be the antithesis of wandering - every microsecond matters, monetarily speaking. "Our internet, on the other hand, tends to be in quite the hurry." ¹⁷ Our internet that we have today is largely shaped by and optimized for the advertising money machine that keeps the lights on. Things are quick, attention is considered scarce, you gotta get them at that very first impression and within 0.2 seconds. Entire industries are built to optimize this, and there are game changes occasionally. But this is a mindset left over from the physical world of advertising - one where brands will pay the big bucks to have their products placed right at eye level on precious scarce physical shelf space for consumers.¹⁸ Why do we not consider the internet to have all of the infinite abundance that digital spaces can hold? What if we hadn't set time, a scarce resource limited by our construct of it, as the unit of measure, but rather something abundant, regenerative, and viral like the internet itself - curiosity?

What does it look like to incentivize the curiosity that wandering requires? What if instead of an ad being a pop up that took you directly to a flash sale, they were set up as a series of portals to secret sites, folded space that you could find only after following a breadcrumb of clues?¹⁹ What if brands spent the dollars and resources invested in demanding our attention, instead on understanding where we would like to be paying attention?²⁰ What if our online paths weren't so designed and constructed in service of completing user objectives, but rather tools to see what objectives we might like to construct? What if the value of eyeball time on the internet could be understood not as the transactional destination of clicks and page views, but the relational process of discovery and associations made? What if we understood the internet to be set up for wandering?

If the internet was set up for wandering, the way you find yourself at a destination becomes your own proof of work, of the context that you are arriving with, of the associations and connections you've made along the way.²¹ Your contribution made after extensive research and association building, no matter how unfocused, would be weighted more than someone who found the answer the quickest. No longer would it be boastful for Google to declare 600,000 results in 0.26 seconds, because it would be more impressive to point you to a few useful starting points that get you the understanding that you're looking for, not in one succinct answer, but set in the history and context for you to understand why that answer matters. Other internet users become fellow explorers, falling down the same rabbit holes, finding the same deadends, opening up the different new leads, and end up trying to find a particular reference that gives context that you haven't yet found. Like geocaching, but in the infinite container of cyberspace. You end up building a community of shared interests, and a common language on your quest to find more answers. Not a definitive answer that completes your user objective, but an answer that is uniquely pieced together from a collection of other lived experiences. It's kind of what happens in subreddits - there's a reason why Reddit communities are strong. People have wandered their way in, led by and motivated by their curiosities, from the front door of the internet.

Wandering implies a passage through spacetime, a transformation that happens as much because of you (through the decisions you make) as well as to you (with the passage of time). Some spaces, you can only find yourself in, because of the time and space you traveled through to get there. You are transformed by your journey.²²

For this transformation, we need structured unstructure²³ - enough structure to make the collective purpose of gathering clear, but enough unstructure where in a multiplicity of experiences is available, with the power to make your own decisions. Sidewalks to explore, enough twists and turns to interesting.²⁴

The internet should be like a library, where so many different worlds are all sitting there next to each other on a shelf. You can wander those shelves, brush your fingers up against their spines. Smell that old book smell. Thumb through a few pages, and put it back. Structured, lovingly, by a librarian who actually knows so much about information architecture and how to connect knowledge.²⁵

Unstructured in that you can explore whatever and however you want, and know how to find it. We figured out how to make our bookshelves wanderable. Let's figure it out with our web sites. Let me find the true gems online, no billboards necessary. Let me wander onto a website, delighted by what's there, but even more delighted at having stumbled upon a rare find - and the even rarer wandering journey it took me to get there. Let's have that be the true value of the internet. The journey, to get to the destination.²⁶

Thank you for wandering through this study with me both in text, and in footnotes. There were many side tangents left out of this discussion, including a tour around Tumblr²⁷ as a neighborhood that illustrates what "local" means for cyber real estate, and a few rabbit holes into Web3 and tokenized experiences. Ultimately, they wandered too far from this already meandering text to add much value, but this does make me want to set up a place to submit "wander logs" in order to understand if there's a less threatening side to digital footprints and the mental associations not captured between hyperlinks.

What is the invisible dewey decimal system for knowledge sharing that we don't yet have the data to understand? Google's search history is enlightening, but we still don't know why people click on things with a definitive answer. Some of us, sometimes, don't know why we don't click on those things. It's hard to know why we like things, when what we like is reflected back to us.

But there's something quite beautiful about the process of finding out why we do the things that we do, without influence. We could spend an infinity exploring why, because ultimately, it's the infinity of our own minds. Go on a wander sometime, either in cyberspace or your innerspace, and tell me how it goes.

¹ DMs are open.

² Did you just feel a feeling flood through your chest? That's love for a place. Where do you feel that way on the internet?

³ Ah, yes, remember the feeling of meeting up with somebody? I miss it, actually, even though, inevitably, one of us would be either just a little bit too early or too late.

⁴ Yes, Craigslist. Craigslist will probably outlast capitalism. No stack of marketplace solutions have completely replaced it. It's also a complete coincidence that this oft viral post is from a Tumblr entitled "The Gong Show."

⁵ Wandering is very quantum. It is a bit like a relationship, before you have Defined the Relationship. This is a personal preference. Some people like the tension in the unknown, some people like to know what the boundaries are. Having clearly defined boundaries keeps you from heartbreak, but perhaps that's the kind of thrill you're looking for in a relationship. Ask yourself if you like the ambiguity, and why! Do you embrace it, or do you fear it?

⁶ There's this sort of trolly and also very striking art piece by Dima Yarovinsky that illustrates just how long and unwieldy the Terms and Conditions of our social media platforms are. It's a wonder anyone has read through them.

⁷ In reference to Jon Gacnik in conversation with the Creative Independent: "Conversely, when we 'walk' the net, we're moving through a boundless space devoid of touch points. Understanding scale in relation to a space like that becomes a lot trickier. I often think about a line from Peter Lunenfeld, a mentor of mine, which goes, 'The infoverse may be infinite, but our allotment of days is not.' We ought to be conscious of how far and how quickly we move through the internet. But without a physical way to observe our time spent online, we risk scrolling, skimming, and hyperlinking ourselves to oblivion."

⁸ Context is important!

⁹ "Time - the version that kept the trains running in the 19th century, that keeps us at our work desks until late at night, that reminds us rent and mortgages are due, that services appointments and Google calendars and governments and authorities - was invented. It was created by white people and institutionalized in service of capitalism and colonialism. In other words, in service of oppression." From Taja Cheek.

¹⁰ Well, because you end up with things that aren't that easy to use. And autoplay audio, which thankfully we've all collectively agreed and scolded each other away from doing. And sometimes fairly broken code. But dang it, it's my goblin pile of broken code.

¹¹ Usually to optimize for ad monetization. Sometimes intentionally slowed down in order to make sure you can register what's happening.

¹² @badgalriri. "then this." Instagram, 2019.

¹³ It's April! Have you done taxes yet?

¹⁴ Guo, Wenting. "Design of Wandering." Semester Studio, 2020.

¹⁵ Heuristics, a fancy word I need to look up every time I use it, to remember that it just means "things we think we know how to do."

¹⁶ "The Plumbing." Subprime Attention Crisis: Advertising and the Time Bomb at the Heart of the Internet, by Tim Hwang, FSG Originals x Logic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020.

¹⁷ "Our internet, on the other hand, tends to be in quite the hurry. The pace and fervor found online like to keep anxiety company. The internet we are marketed to use is a perfect storm of interface design in the service of an attention economy. It's dialed-in. Basically, the 'feed' as an interface works. 'Pull-to-refresh' as a serotonin booster works." From Peter Lunenfeld, "On Observing Time," with The Creative Independent.

¹⁸ The next time you go to a grocery store, notice where brand name goods are placed (ahem, eye level, for a 6 ft tall person, usually) and where generic brands are. What's the price differential? Why are they priced differently? You're looking at a small factor.

¹⁹ Where does this start? Where does this end?

²⁰ Sometimes I think Zoom would be interesting if it had built in breaks (as ads) every 30 minutes or so to give everyone a bathroom break. And then I realize there's no reason to stay inside of such a rigid platform that doesn't reward exploration. This is exciting. You can whisper to each other, and place people on furniture. The best of skeuomorphism, with none of the limits of real space physics.

²¹ But maybe not in a tokenized way. Maybe nobody else needs to know the amount of time you put into it, and maybe this kind of work is priceless.

²² Hello, Mr. Charles.

²³ Structured unstructure, something that came out of a working group on...the future of work. Trying to structure exploration around work ended up in getting stuck in policies, rules, software packages. How should we work? Humans, trying to have organization scale conversations. But the unstructured bits of the conversation allowed us to zoom out meant we were talking about why we work. And that's when you realize that when you have people who work together be able to talk about work, what they are really talking about, is how they would like to live.

²⁴ This structured unstructure is a loose interpretation of Vygotsky's theory of the zone of proximal development (ZPD), which theory of learning and development fans will recognize, especially those of dual language learners! ZPD is defined as the zone between what a learner can do unguided, and what a learner can do with mature guidance or while in collaboration with experienced or same level peers. In cyberspace, this requires both community roles to know who might be a guide, an experienced peer, or a peer, and also the conditions where it is safe to ask questions, and have the ability to both connect to and ask for collaboration or guidance. Reddit has most of these features built in for each subreddit to conduct community governance - although how communities implement them is not a global platform decision.

²⁵ Wikipedia, in many ways, is like this, although there's no "librarian" to help you, and the articles written could use a wider variety of points of view. But the structure is there, in the format of articles, hyperlinks, and references - the unstructure is there because you have to decide what your objective is and why you click on the things that you do. The donation based structure of Wikipedia is great, because there aren't any monetary incentives augmenting your choices, but it also means that contributors and curators are less able to be compensated for their time and expertise, skewing the content.

²⁶ Speaking of which, it looks like Stumbleupon is now in beta as Mix.

²⁷ Tumblr is still around for many reasons, but it is one of the only social media sites that isn't really optimized for ad monetization, which means that you get ads like this one, and some very good meta analysis like this one.

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