The road nobody is racing on

On the edge of Lake Manzala, outside Damietta, a retired man posts a few pictures most mornings. Herons, a fishing boat, the light on the water before the sun gets high. A dozen people respond. Some of them are his cousins.

Show his page to someone who sells online and you can watch them wince. He posts at the wrong hour. He has no plan. He never asks anyone to follow, share or buy. By every measure of the busy part of the internet, he is doing it badly.

But he is not on that part of the internet. He never was.

The web started as a place to wander. People built pages about the things they loved because they loved them, and nobody was trying to get anywhere in particular. Commerce arrived later and laid fast lanes through it, and now the fast lanes are what most of us mean when we say online. The wanderers begin to look as if they are in the way.

They are not, because this road has no shortage of room. A man posting herons takes nothing from a seller trying to reach buyers. There is space for both, and the mistake is to judge one by the rules of the other: to look at someone enjoying the trip and ask why he is not making better time.

If anything, the people in a hurry could stand to watch him for a while. He has a reason to turn up every morning that has nothing to do with the result, and the trip is plainly worth it to him. Most of what is built for the fast lane cannot say the same.