On people-watching

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a promising URL: http://astronaut.io/. The premise of the website (bear with me) is that you’re an astronaut, floating in the screen-blue light above Planet Earth. You’re peering through your window and somehow, despite the distance, you’re able to people-watch. The site plays an infinite reel of YouTube videos with undescriptive, default titles (IMG A15; WMV 64); they’re all unedited, recently uploaded, and largely unviewed. Each video plays for a few seconds before a new one takes over. Each one is unexpected; each one fleeting. There’s pretty much no way you could find one of them again.

On the many occasions I’ve visited the site, I’ve seen videos mysterious and cringey and banal. I watched two children selling lemonade to a girl with red hair; a hand opening to reveal a ladybird; the bucking view from a bicycle tearing through dark woods. A mariachi band performing under a lot of tinsel. A slow advance towards a sign in Cyrillic characters; a fish gulping feed in turquoise water; a room of women dancing; a mother and child rolling out pastry. A man humming to himself as he paired clean socks. A protest filmed from an apartment window, anger framed by lace curtains and a spider plant.

I’ve spent the past week trying to work out why I don’t find it boring. It should be: there’s no narrative shape to the reel, no progression, very little beauty. You don’t walk away having realised anything particularly; it’s not cathartic. Finding a moment to stop is totally arbitrary, and surprisingly difficult. I don’t know why I’ve sunk long minutes of my life into watching grainy depictions of strangers feeding their fish or cutting butter into flour, but I have.

Perhaps it’s because watching these videos — records of quotidian goings-on in various places around the world; momentary insights into hundreds of lives — is a little bit voyeuristic. There’s a bit in a famous David Foster Wallace essay, where he argues that we love television because it allows us to watch others without ourselves being seen. Surely the astronaut.io reel allows us to do exactly that: to observe and compare ourselves with and assess other people without being comparably observed and assessed, or even obliged to put up a front specifically for other people’s observation and assessment.

As Wallace goes on to explain, what’s ironic is that television is performative, deliberately made to be seen. We’re not really voyeurs, because we’re not intruding on anything truly private. And that performativity makes television false and a little bit empty: everything you see, the people (who look like real people with their flaws removed) and the situations they face (which approximate real situations with the dials turned up), is a fiction. Even reality TV, that misnamed genre, is heavily editorialised, in an increasingly ‘meta’ way: as John Jeremiah Sullivan puts it, “you’re not watching a bunch of people who’ve been hurled into some contrived scenario and are getting filmed, you’re watching people caught in the act of being on a reality show. This is now the plot of all reality shows, no matter their cooked-up themes”. Any emotion you feel in response to television is real, but you’re feeling it in response to a simulation and on some level, that’s terribly, terrifyingly lonely. (Interestingly, the main depictors of this particular loneliness I’ve come across to date are Wallace and Sullivan, two extraordinarily white/male/postmodern writers. They’re undeniably limited, not least because the television age has transmogrified into the much messier social media age. But I still think their observations are insightful.)

What I really crave — perhaps creepily, but I think just humanly — is the ideal that shadows television: the ability to genuinely observe other people’s lives. It’s fun to people-watch. Plus, like all people (I think), I do it because I long to know whether I’m doing okay — whether my thoughts and wishes and actions are normal; whether I’m any less lovable than other people.

The astronaut.io reel gets me somehow a little closer to doing this. You know how sometimes, usually without meaning to, you see someone doing something without knowing you are looking? Maybe they’re picking their nose or smiling unconsciously at their phone on the bus or trying to get a cat on the sidewalk to like them. Whatever they’re doing, no matter how banal, they’re always alone in the privacy of their action, and seeing them lets you in on some sort of secret. This morning, I watched a stranger bobbing his head to earphoned music all the way across Victoria Park and knew something about him just from how he absent-mindedly gripped one backpack strap.

I realise I’m always trying to catch people doing such private things: to catch them in the act of non-acting; to catch them red-handed as themselves. The strangers on astronaut.io aren’t always unperformative — it’s hard to be, around a camera — but sometimes they are. The American mother rolling pie dough knows the camera is watching her and shapes her face accordingly, but the child doesn’t understand yet, and her round-eyed contemplation of the puffs of flour is somehow exquisite. The dancing women don’t even know they’re being filmed: one of them closes her eyes for the crescendo in the drums. The fish, with the rich un-self-consciousness of all fish, just does its thing. I think I’m watching for those videos that momentarily, and however accidentally, catch a bit of unperformed life. For the possibility of seeing something real — not just something — without being seen.

I think seeing enough of those snapshots adds up to something else. Especially this year, when so many people’s lives have involved collapsing their work and home spaces and not getting to hug anyone on their birthday, there’s a soothing kind of knowledge to be had from watching life go on in all its various forms, somewhere else. We need reminding of the detail of other places and people, and all the better if it’s not through some air-conditioned, slickly produced Netflix series that looks nothing like grey, ordinary, wonderful life. Give me your tinsel, your pastry, your fish feed, your protests. Your chore-hummers, your ladybird-marvellers. Your children greeting the unknown. All your silences laden with thought. I’ll take it all.