When Herzog calls Chatwin “the internet,” the explicit surface-level context is that his writing served to link certain otherwise disparate and unconnected things, that it in some sense served to unify the world. This might be true, especially given the globalist expanse of Chatwin’s fiction. But it’s also a bit trite image; after all, the internet hardly serves only to unite but also to divide. As Dril knows, the internet is an often needlessly confrontational place, where telling someone to “log off” often only serves to make their opinions worse. Chatwin’s nomadism preaches wandering as a way not only of seeing the world, but of outpacing ourselves. By contrast the internet is something that exists in the phones we take with us everywhere; social media is a bubble we can never escape, a space we are always forced somehow to be attached to.

—Tom Whyman, in “Bruce Chatwin was the internet before the internet existed”