There’s something wonderful about this dogged insistence on having nothing whatsoever to show for your time in class, especially given the cultural rage for productivity. And the seminar courts a drifting boredom that is seductive in its challenge to the cult of mindfulness. But: With the approval of the UPenn English Department, Goldsmith’s crafted a creative writing course that fails to generate any writing, one that to some extent paints basic college benefits like insight, growth, and learning as passé fantasies of the old guard. “We don’t do much,” Goldsmith shrugged at one point, all dunce-cap apologies and haplessness. “Most of our experiments go nowhere.”

I scroll down. Unlike Kant’s sublime, which provokes grand torrential passions like awe and terror, the stuplime deals in less “socially productive” or esteemed emotions—irritation, ennui, restlessness. The pettiness of these feelings shawls the viewer in a meta-layer of shame. From that sense of emotional estrangement, that watchful distance from one’s own responses, comes irony, the Internet’s prevailing sensibility.