There are currently 605 items saved in my Amazon shopping cart. Books, supplements, appliances, shirts, boots, tools, etc. Some items appear several times, at once both singular and plural. Others I already own “in real life”, yet they continue to appear in the cart, to persist there as though I can’t quite possess them completely, as if some essential quality or Platonic ideal remains permanently withdrawn and best expressed by thumbnail. I take a sample from an evening scroll: Pale Fire, A Moon Shaped Pool, Methyl B-12, The Death Ray, Pet Naturals Lysine Cat treats, The Emotional Incest Syndrome, The Old Weird America. Time is embedded in this lyrical selection—like a core sample. I read a certain history of a certain self—a brief constellation, a legible compression—and a fragmentary image of personhood tips into the foreground then recedes again, leaving a charged residue.

The other night I added up the total cost of the items in my shopping cart. I really had no idea what to expect, so felt ambivalent about the sum: $11,510.45. I’d be hard pressed to fill a shopping cart up with that much value in the physical world, although that probably wouldn’t be too difficult to figure out how to do, especially in New York City. It took a while to add up, maybe an hour of scrolling and tallying, getting a little bit lost in a kind of shopping cart nostalgia along the way: I remember when I added that to the cart. That’s when I was interested in Alchemy, and there’s when I felt like I had to catch up on all of that Hellboy that I missed. There’s a stretch of ambitious adding-to-cart including books by Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou. These are manifestations of an anxiety about my own incompleteness: intellectual, cultural, spiritual etc. The digital shopping cart is a palliative—an avatar of my improved future self, the data-spirit of that future self made tantalizingly present in that clicking—add add add: continuity of self-resemblance and its commensurate dollar value.

The digital shopping cart is a charged space (pun intended), a crucible for the alchemical transformations of consumer selfhood, and a gateway into an infinite commons. Amazon.com may be the marketplace of choice for many consumers these days, but it’s more than a utilitarian site for transaction: it’s also a place of leisure, a theater, a labyrinthine public garden, a compulsive amusement park, a hazily-bordered city to detourn within, and a ceaselessly reordering wasteland; it’s a site where the salvage of self-image is organized via impulse and choice. We roam in regions of e-commerce as digital...