THE WEB IS A SORT OF CATHEDRAL of cultural collapse, a virtual mirror of the human experience: driven and financed by pornography and filled with sites dedicated to paranoia, mindless entertainment, and endless consumption. It's a Babel project, like the European Economic Community and the International Space Station, a bureaucratic masterpiece, useless and useful in equal measure. It's the last great collective work of the twentieth century. The best projects are those that parallel the Web's very premises—self-referential halls of mirrors, aimless research sites devoted to unverifiable phenomena, and esoteric memory palaces still under construction, whose purposeless magnificence will welcome in the new millennium. They give me what I want, what I really, really want.
Matthew Ritchie is an artist who shows at Basilico Fine Arts in New York.