The Last Word On Nothing

I recently wrote a story for The Atlantic about a question that I have been obsessed with for a long time: How many photographs am I in, in the world? It’s something that has bugged me for years, and before you chalk this up to pure narcissism, here’s a fact: Facebook can now identify you in photos in which your face doesn’t appear with 83 percent accuracy. Your clothes, your slouch, your tilted head, they all give you away. Let loose on the entire Internet, Facebook’s algorithm could find me, and perhaps provide me with some beginnings of an answer to this question.

But without access to that powerful, if creepy, system, I couldn’t come to any real estimate in the piece. And that’s partially because there are so many more forms of image capturing going on than the form I had originally thought of. Sure, there are people with their cameras snapping pictures all the time. But there are also other lenses looking at you too, from the corners of buildings, from mall hallways, from drones or hidden in teddy bears. And you never quite know who is watching you on those things. It might be me. And for some people in New York, it is actually me.

There’s a channel on my television called NYC Drive that simply broadcasts live footage from cameras around the city. The idea, I guess, is that you’ll check this channel to see how the traffic is before you leave. It’s a nice holdover from a pre-smartphone era. A time when you had to actually know how to get where you were going before you left the house. A time when you might have even had several different routes in your head, and checking these traffic feed might have helped you pick which one to use.

I don’t know if anybody uses NYC Drive that way anymore. Certainly someone must. But to me it feels like this strange portal to the outside world. I know this is weird, but I watch the channel a lot. Sometimes my boyfriend will come home and I’ll have it on in the background while I’m working or reading. He’ll shrug in the way that he has learned to when I’m doing something weird like obsessively visiting Eveleth, Minnesota on Google Maps, or dragging him to a graveyard to try and help some home detective find a gravestone.

I find this channel strangely relaxing. There’s no sound, just a constant series of moving images that always keeps the same pace. Eight seconds of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Nine seconds of Staten Island Expressway at Fingerboard Road. Eight seconds of the 59th Street Bridge. Eight seconds of the Van Wyck at 72nd street. And so on. And repeat.

Sometimes new cameras will pop up. Recently, a new Times Square camera has entered into the rotation. The Bowery and Canal street cam isn’t alway there, but when it shows up it delivers a nice forking traffic pattern.

Sometimes the cars are whipping along the road so fast it feels like a time-lapse film. Other times there is traffic, and when the cars are crawling I try to make out the drivers. I never can. The footage is grainy and low quality. The point isn’t to make a beautiful documentary here, it’s just to show whether there are a lot of cars or only a few.

As I was looking into these cameras and this channel, I found out that there are tons of closed circuit cameras all over New York City. That is, of course, not surprising. The surprising thing to me is that you can see a lot of them. Here’s a map of all the NYC Department of Transportation cams you can watch right now — there are 471 active cameras, and 82 inactive ones. There are also special cameras devoted to bridges and tunnels. Sometimes I open up a bunch of the live cameras on the DOT website. Just to look around and see what there is to see.

Most of the cameras only get about eight seconds of air time at each pass, except for one. The Times Square camera on 43rd street. We linger here for ninety seconds. This is my favorite camera on NYC Drive because it features the most people. Lots of people, at literally every time of day and night.

I live in Brooklyn, and every time I even think about walking through Times Square it makes me anxious. (This is what New Yorkers are supposed to say. We are supposed to perform anger at Times Square as often and as loudly as possible. But it really it is a horrible place.) But on NYC Drive, I can watch people navigate a corner of Times Square from afar. And I often wonder: If someone I knew walked across 43rd street, and right in front of that camera, would I recognize them? Or, on darker days: If something horrible happened in Times Square, would they turn this channel off? Or would I be able to watch it all unfold here, in silence, with a little clock running along the bottom of the screen?

I can’t say that I have deep thoughts about this channel. I don’t ponder what it means to watch, or to be watched. It doesn’t make me think about what it means to live in a city with millions of functionally anonymous people. I don’t ponder proximity or space or crowds or what being in New York does to a person. Maybe I should. But really I just find it relaxing to watch all these people go about their lives, silently moving across the screen.

I do sometimes wonder whether anyone else is watching this channel while I am, and why. I also sometimes wonder if it’s creepy of me to watch. But if you’re ever on 43rd street, by the police station and the Paramount Hotel, let me know. I’ll see if I can spot you.