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Not too long ago, you could say: just go online and type the person’s address in a digital phone book and there it is, that is the number you are looking for. But who uses a digital phone book? Who even has a landline phone that is registered in such a database? Who even has a landline, period? And why would you want to look up a phone number anyway? It’s awfully obtrusive to just go and call a girl, why don’t you just add her on Facebook and start a chat?

The other person is so close, a few clicks and there he is, that the game of longing and seduction is lost. That is, at least, what the philosophers say. Byung-Chul Han describes our time as being characterized by a constant availability of everything and everyone: ‘Unmediated enjoyment, which admits no imaginative or narrative detour, is pornographic.’ A boy who traces the Big Dipper in the starry night so as to remember your phone number – that’s the real thing.
Chatting away on Facebook while scrolling through hundreds of pictures – degeneration.

Surely, desire in the age of Facebook can just as soon take on the guise of obsession, which might then from one day to another, through overstimulation and unending nourishment, turn into immediate boredom. There is no quest anymore, no fear of the other not knowing who you
are, no absence. The other is always within arm’s reach, ready to be scrutinized from every possible angle – you can read the articles he reads, listen to the music he listens to, get to know the people he knows. The distance to the object of desire has never been so short and that’s precisely why true love and lust diminish. In her sociology of love, Why Love Hurts, Eva Illouz describes the feelings one might get
from a Facebook-chat as fictional, since there has never
been a ‘real’ interaction. Moreover, the person on the other
side is ‘virtual’ and in the end remains ‘absent’ and ‘nonexistent’,
and therefore somewhat phantasmagorical.

For there to be something like ‘true love’ distance is required, says Han, something you cannot grasp, cannot see, something that makes you sense what the other is, namely: an other. ‘Not enjoyment in real time, but imaginative preludes and postludes, temporal deferrals, deepen pleasure and desire.’ Such imagination however, is fading, and so-called image culture is to blame. All of the pictures, emojis, videos; they’re in your face, digitally produced, and therefore literally without a negative. This genre, Han writes, ‘belongs to the order of liking, not loving’. Drawing the Big Dipper in the night sky, isn’t that the ultimate image –wordless, loaded, a composition of light and
darkness – the last thing to compare to a love poem?

Can we even keep up the difference between the ‘real’ and online?
Medium and reality have become so intertwined on all levels – whether it’s language, perception, our senses – that divorcing the two is a fiction in itself, more fictional, I’d say, than feelings aroused by a virtual person. The world is constantly shifting on all these levels, is what the protagonist from Ben Lerner’s novel 10:04 would say. For him, the city has already been drenched in an extra layer of meaning for years, a layer that originates in his smartphone. He states rather matter-of-factly: ‘As I read I experienced what was becoming a familiar sensation as the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display.’ Messages about love, suffering, life and death reach you through this bluelighted screen, but that doesn’t make them less ‘real’ than a rendezvous arranged without using a device. Those messages are read, first and foremost, because whoever would call anybody anymore? In that sense the world is built up more and more from language, rather than from images.

A couple of years ago, I spent a summer on my iPhone, which through various social media brought to me the object of my desire. My coincidental geographical location didn’t matter. The iPhone was glued to my hand, even if I crossed the border. At an ever-increasing pace I exchanged messages with J., on Twitter, on Last.fm – a website for
keeping track of the music that you listen to – and Facebook, text message, WhatsApp, and, for months on end, via the digital Scrabble app Wordfeud. How does something like that start? Well, you follow each other on Twitter and read along as the other’s life unfolds on your timeline. A funny comment is followed by a direct message, you give a clever riposte, you Google one another, you read up on him so to speak, start to write just in keywords so as to get one more reaction, the messages shorten instead of lengthen, and within a few weeks a construction of idiomatic words, sentences, allusions, written sighs and dots is erected. Would philosophers such as Han and Illouz ever have experienced such a truly mediatized love affair? I’ve never been good on the phone. Calling a boy?! Forget about it. Fortunately the smartphone is a computer that happens to have a call function. Chatting is more important, whether it’s through WhatsApp, Facebook or Twitter.

In that way the phone is still a junction that makes love possible, as it’s always been. It can even become the personification of the loved one, with all the pain that entails. The landline at times could seem like a hostile entity, not ringing as it was, while the boy had done so much as compare your phone number to the Big Dipper.

The plump appliance that was shared with family or housemates was located in a cold hallway and its line was always too short. You’d press the earpiece, which to be honest was of grotesque proportion, to your ear but the harder you pressed, the longer the distance between you
and him seemed to become. In his 1930 play La voix humaine, Jean Cocteau tells the story of a woman receiving a break-up call: on the other side of the line a man puts an end to their relationship. I always associated those kinds of impersonal ways to break up with the cell phone, but apparently that is not correct. The cell phone does seem to make the humiliation worse, because there is the option to use nothing more than a text message. To the woman on stage the distance produced by the phone call is enough of a humiliation. She longs for physical interaction: ‘You used to see each other … One look could make everything alright, but with this device what’s gone is gone.’ Slowly, she wraps the phone line around her neck.

The telephone has always brought pleasure, too. The Hungarian writer from the interbellum period, Dezső Kosztolányi, describes the morning ritual of his marvelous hero Kornél Esti: ‘In the morning when he woke up Esti had the telephone brought to him in bed. He put it by his pillow, under his warm quilt, like other people put the cat. He liked
that electric animal.’ The electric animal in Esti’s bed is a landline, of course.The smartphone has even more going for it to become a lover itself; it’s always there with you, it lies in bed on the pillow besides you, it nestles in your pocket, ready to vibrate, right next to the loins. It’s like a child for whom you develop a sixth sense, you keep track of it from the corner of your eye and when it drifts off out of sight you follow up on. All the regular spots to find it again, quickly.
Yes, it is like an animal that is caressed, that is nourished, an electric animal that you turn about in your hand, just to feel its contours and the possibilities that are contained within it.
Telephonic love rises to a peak in Spike Jonze’s film Her.

Theodore develops a truthful romantic engagement with his operating system Samantha. This is not a dystopian movie (at least not to me) – rather it shows that love for a system that has all the characteristics of a human being, except for physicality, is human love. Who would ever dare to call Theodore’s feelings fictitious? And the relationship with
Samantha as ‘virtual’, ‘absent’ or ‘non-existent’? Her tells us about programmatic love.

The first time that I felt my phone turn into a substitute for the one I loved, or rather turn into the centrifugal point of my desire, was with K. I met him at a party, stayed the night in his apartment in the middle of town, and spent the following days terrified that I would stumble into him unprepared, or, even worse, that I would never see him again. I didn’t have his phone number; something like social media was still budding somewhere on the web that required calling in through a landline. After a couple of days living in the negative, to paraphrase Han, I wrote him a letter. ‘I’m terrified of stumbling into you unprepared, or, even worse, of never seeing you again.’ I signed it with my mobile number, left it in his postbox and began waiting. The mobile phone I owned back then, eight years before my iPhone-driven summer of lust, had a two-color screen and enough memory to store five text messages. I copied some of the messages that K. sent me in a text file that over the course of the years has disappeared in the quicksand of
my hard disk. I can’t remember the words, although language was all we had. The most important were the punctuation marks, the difference between one, two and three dots. K. was the one who taught me how to desire in 160 signs. We only met two or three times after that night, but it didn’t matter. My phone was K. I liked the electric animal.

Complaining about new technologies has always happened. Already in 1900 the Dutch writer Louis Couperus, in his novel The Hidden Force, had Eva complain about how the telephone killed all the fun: ‘people no longer saw each other, they no longer needed to dress up or get out the carriage, since they chatted on the telephone, in sarong and linen jacket, and almost without moving’.

A new technology takes away another scrap of our humanity, until there is nothing left. We don’t even need to dress up – see how civilization erodes! Another more tragic example comes from the story ‘The Sandman’ by E.T.A. Hoffmann, which is from 1816. Nathaniel falls in love with
Olimpia, whom he sees only from far away. When he finds out that his obsessive love is directed at a robot, he throws himself of a tower. Dead. What these stories tell us is that technology which becomes too human makes us less human ourselves. But what if Nathaniel would have tried to talk to Olimpia sooner? Wouldn’t he be able to continue feeling a deep, truthful love for her? Isn’t it the closing of the border
between the technological and the human, between distance and nearness, between death and love, which finally results in the downfall of Nathaniel? Whoever saw Her has to admit that such borders are more porous than we might have previously thought. By the way, their
programmatic love doesn’t end well either. Seduction and desire, only rarely do they get a happy ending. Technology has nothing to do with that.

Am I another pathetic nutcase if I describe my phone as the substitute of my lover? I don’t think so. Technology has always been inextricably connected to humans and human relationships. That is not to say that it always leads to some kind of progression. As Ben Lerner puts it, something happens in the balance of things which makes the world rearrange itself. The device in your hand, against your thigh, on your breast and in your purse is an integrated part of your being. Sure, it’s a machine, a robot, but to quote Nathan Jurgenson, ‘it is still deeply part of a network of blood; an embodied, intimate, fleshy portal that penetrates into one’s mind, into endless information, into other people’. Embodied, intimate, fleshy: might the smartphone channel desire and pleasure after all, let phonophilia bloom? Isn’t it possible that the wordiness of mobile communication, the ongoing practice in the use of the written word, turns out to be precisely the savior of the
game of seduction? My summer of iPhone lust made me realize that real time pleasure can actually transcend the genre of ‘to like’. Whereas K. and I had played checkers, the game that started with J. took on the complexity of chess. The transition from text message to Twitter meant
a transition from 160 to 140 signs, from paid to free, from five messages each time to fifty. We played Wordfeud as if our lives depended on it – word after word after word. LLAMA. LEGS. STIPULATE.
By playing the game – the one of Scrabble and the one of the direct message – we taught each other the art of seduction, I can’t call it anything else. Or, maybe. The art of titillation.

Smartphone sex doesn’t have a lot to do with porn or webcam sex. The latter is a matter of imagery, the former of language. In the imagery of webcam sex there is no negative, as Han would have it, everything is exposure, pornography. In direct message sex everything is language, everything is dots, everything is wordy sighs and groans, everything,
everything. ‘For a year already I hadn’t had any telephone sex,’ writes
Arnon Grunberg in a column. ‘I texted my girlfriend: “Shall we have some telephone sex? Tomorrow or tonight?”’ She’s fine with it, but it won’t take off. ‘After a while she said: “Hold on, I will get a banana.” I heard her go down the stairs, opening and shutting cupboards. “What kind of banana is it?” I asked. “A small, organic banana.”’ This makes me laugh. Whoever would think of calling in the first place? Try to imagine however that your lover sent you a message, a written one, through the private channel of a public microblogging service: ‘A small, organic banana.’ Doesn’t it sound like poetry, the poetry of lust? Love is, as Han says, seeing the other as other. But also:
seeing the otherness in what the rest of the world deems merely normal. The Big Dipper in the five accidental digits of a phone number, two (not three!) dots to end a text message, a Wordfeud word being connected to yours and simply, your own phone, the personification of him.

My phonophilia romances all ended badly. I was left with dozens of messages and broken off Scrabble games. I misunderstood the words, I didn’t know how to play the game at the top level. Language can be dangerous. Like love, like a love poem.

It won’t take long, just some fifteen years – admittedly, that’s eternity in computer history – before the spreadsheet goes digital and transforms into the thing we know now, the thing that all office workers are doomed to learn to use, love and put to work, that which we all need
to excel at, as excelling accountants, the thing we hate and that secretly gives us pleasure, which gives us power and the ones above us extreme power: the spreadsheet, the ‘accounting program for a computer’, better known for its metonymical, eponymous, symbolist name: Excel.

Let’s start at the end. Consider the numbers:
‘95% of U.S. firms use spreadsheets for financial reporting.’
‘9 experienced spreadsheet developers each built 3 SSs.
Each developer made at least one error.’
‘There is even an emerging theory for why we make so many errors.
Reason (Reason, 1990) has presented the most complete framework for understanding why human beings err.’
‘A taxonomy of error types… three types of quantitative errors.’
‘They compared spreadsheets errors to multiple poisons, each of which is 100% lethal.’
‘Mahalo (Thank you).’

Google ‘staying yourself’ and you’re corrected on the
first page of results: according to the search engine what
you really want to know more about is how to stay true to
yourself.

There she goes, a fugitive, my double, a shadow, slipping
in and out of the crowd, on the street, down an alley, in and
out of the shops. In the sunlight I catch a quick glimpse of
her hair, her coat, her face turned towards the side. I mustn’t
lose sight of her, I must catch her true image, keep as close to
her as possible.

But perhaps she is not running away from something
but towards something. Where to? She probably doesn’t
even know this herself. First pulled this way, then that way,
her attention is drawn towards the noises and flashing
lights, special offers and signs on sale. People pulling at her
sleeve and whispering in her ear, her phone buzzing and
singing, the screen lighting up with a merry-go-round of
messages. Follow her now, stay close to her!
‘When I set out to come here, I mean, here generally,
to this town, ten days ago,’ writes Dostoevsky in Demons
through the revolutionary Pyotr Stepanovich, ‘I decided, of
course, to adopt a role. The best would be no role at all, just
one’s own person, isn’t that so? Nothing is more cunning
than one’s own person, because no one will believe you.’
If only things were so simple. Just to be one’s own person
without concern about who that person is, about who is
adopting a role and who is not and without the need to be
known and appreciated by anyone.

Almost two hundred years after Demons, it has become
doctrine to find, be and stay true to yourself. No one really
knows how this is accomplished, however. After all you
are also expected to continually rise above yourself and
reinvent yourself, again and again. We live in a performance
society wherein you design your identity and play different
roles in different contexts. Context collapse looms, as you
act a role that doesn’t match your public at that particular
moment, when for instance a photo of you partying surfaces
on your boss’s timeline. And if you can’t manage to act out
the performance meticulously, like a magic trick, it’s your
own fault, you are obviously incompetent. Being one’s own
person so that no one will believe it? I would rather adopt
the role of someone else, in the hope that someone, anyone,
will believe that it is me.

In Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be? the main
character, Sheila, laments: ‘You can admire anyone for being
themselves. It’s hard not to, when everyone’s so good at it.’
There’s one exception, one person who is not good at being
themselves: Sheila herself. Of course, we all think this: as
I follow a shadow that vaguely resembles myself, people
around me seem to sail through life with envious ease. How
do they manage it? How do they stay themselves without
any problems, while I have no idea who my own person is?
To answer the question set forth in the title of the novel,
Sheila turns to the people around her: friends, boyfriends,
artists, career coaches, therapists. She transcribes emails,
records conversations, flips through the pages of books and
makes an attempt to write. Who she is, how and what she
should be, be it hairdresser, queen of blowjobs, playwright,
wife or recreational drug user, she does not know.

Adopting a role for yourself, like Pyotr put it, may on
reflection be an adequate description of modern life. What
is the self, after all? Nobody really knows. Self-help gurus
claim it is becoming and manifold and at the same time it
exists in its authentic form; it is both dependent and ideally
autonomous. You can never completely coincide with the
self, never grasp it completely, but you can at least try to stay
close to it. The self is a useful illusion – one talks about it as
if it exists, and that’s really all one can say about it.
By extension, this applies to the rest of reality too. Reality
is reclining out of focus, it hides behind stories, images,
interpretations, make-believe and perversion. ‘Reality’ is
only one of the many contexts (and a boring one at that) in a
world which is saturated with photos, videos, sounds, music,
whispered, shouted and written words, language and signs,
links, screens, buttons, interactive installations, acceleration
and amnesia. In the post-digital condition it seems the world
and reality irreversibly drift apart.

‘Post-digital’ doesn’t mean that the digital era is behind us.
The concept heralds a new phase wherein the digital has
become self-evident, hardly distinct from the ‘non-digital’.
The digital turn has been accomplished, there’s no way
back. You’ll just have to put up with it, just like you live with
the neutrinos that rage, billions per second, through the
material body which is yours.

In the post-digital, reality has also become difficult to
recognize, just like the self. At the same time, it can’t be
avoided either. It seems we are obsessed with reality, but
before everything, the (social) media are already there,
making an act of it, a story, an anecdote. In a comment on
the Dutch poetry blog ooteoote, poet Maarten van der Graaff
wrote the following reaction in a discussion that arose
around one of his poems: ‘Even if I resist, the world in which
I exist invades my language, even with only a slight cough,
and that world, next to so many other and far worse things,
can be mundane and exhibitionistic (...) This is no joke to me,
nor some trendy influence, it is a phenomenon that drives
me to despair sometimes.’

The world will always permeate the language of poets,
but since the rise of the web, something has changed. There
used to be a kind of delay in contact, and also it happened
only by invitation – through the newspapers, TV, during
dinners with friends, in the pub, at school or on the streets.
Now that world is constantly available, at your fingertips,
ready to be consumed in real time and acting intrusively
when left unattended for too long. The world reveals itself
through the screen, like a party crasher who immediately
starts overbearing the party. And from all these screens,
from the traditional to the new, language can be heard. In
another comment Van Der Graaff describes a snapshot of
that world and how it entered his poem:
In this case, sentences from a episode of MTV Made
invade the intimate scene between two lovers. The
trivial words speak to me of a world of desire and
tragedy. For example, in the concluding scene of the
episode, a boy says to a girl: “I want you to feel free
again.” Perhaps it is a gesture of kindness but the girl
doubts his intentions. She suspects he has a hidden
agenda and says: “what a good excuse.” These are no
trendy phrases to me. The imperative “play it cool” is
pretty creepy if you think a bit about its implications.
Someone who always wants to play it cool, could look at
everything they see in the world and say “what a good
excuse”.

MTV Made is a reality show – the hybrid genre in which
one never really knows what is ‘real’ or what has been
scripted and in which the distinction between the two has
become irrelevant. What’s more, in the case of MTV Made,
‘reality’ is played out by teenagers (people who by definition
are not what they are to become). They are ‘made’ into
something they are not themselves. The Wikipedia-page
of the program reads like a poem: ‘Selena is made into a
surfer chick. / Richard is made into boyfriend material. /
Abby is made into a hip hop dancer. / Christian is supposed
to be made into a football player, but refuses to listen to his
female coach and quits.’ And so on for another 280 lines, one
for each episode.

The series are filled with American, semi-articulate
people, talking like self-help books, practicing their role in
society and reflecting on their emotions with the platitudes
that go with that. It doesn’t stop there. Their sentences
return, translated into Dutch – ‘speel het cool’ – in the poem
by Van der Graaff, published on a Dutch poetry website and
reviewed and discussed by other poets, readers and critics
in the comment section. I use them in my essay, which is
then translated back again into English, and thus the postdigital
world turns round and round: from a TV program,
via a poem, to a comment on a blog, to a Wikipedia page
and finally on paper and back to the web, then paper again.
Sheila Heti would say, semi-articulately: ‘We don’t know
the effects we have on each other, but we have them.’
What a good excuse.

In the highly mediated, post-digital world of today, there
is a strong desire for a lost and indisputable reality. An
unmovable and formidable reality, which used to be the
solid basis for all experience. Karl Ove Knausgård brings this
longing to the fore: even though he doesn’t seem particularly
fond of the internet, he is somewhat an historian of the postdigital
condition. In Some Rain Must Fall, book 5 of My Struggle,
he tells of his introduction to the world wide web:
Something else at Student Radio which I hadn’t seen
before was the Internet. This was also addictive.
Moving from one page to the next, reading Canadian
newspapers, looking at traffic reports in Los Angeles or
centrefold models in Playboy, which were so endlessly
slow to appear, first the lower part of the picture, which
could be anything at all, then it rose gradually, the
picture filled the frame like water in a glass, there were
the thighs, there, oh, there was … shit, was she wearing
panties? … before the breasts, shoulders, neck and face
appeared on the computer screen in the empty Student
Radio office at midnight. Rachel and me. Toni and me.
Susy and me. Hustler, did they have their own website
as well? Rilke, had anyone written about his Duino
Elegies? Were there any pictures of Tromøya?
Knausgård traces the emergence of his series of six novels,
My Struggle, back to his dislike for fiction, without really
knowing where this dislike came from or what to do about
it. For him it had something to do with the fact that the
unreal world of the media is ever more present, is gradually
becoming the only world we live in. If the whole world is
already saturated by fiction, why add more stories to it?
Knausgård prefers to show real life, the real life of a real
person in an increasingly fake world. So he begins to write
about himself – beyond the limited categories of fiction and
non-fiction or autobiography and history.
Knausgård work, just like Heti’s, has been associated
with ‘autofiction’, the French avant-garde genre from the
70s. In autofiction, a transgression is made between reality
and fiction as the writer constantly moves between the two.
He may use his own name, date of birth and birthplace,
the ‘vital data’ for a real person, but after that he flowingly
crosses autobiographical and fictional boundaries in his
narrative. Moving back and forth between the two does,
however, imply that the two domains remain intact. Heti
and Knausgård take it a step further; in the post-digital the
boundaries between the two have become redundant, and
in that case moving back and forth has become impossible.
In the sixth and last book of My Struggle, Knausgård
writes about ‘virkelighedshunger’: the longing for something
real in a world that is becoming more and more unreal.
It is the same term that David Shields uses as title for his
manifesto in book form: Reality Hunger. Shields argues
for a literature that goes beyond the distinction between
fiction and non-fiction. Made up of all kinds of quotes and
fragments, Shields describes as one of the first the effect of
the internet on contemporary literature: a contemporary
literature that relates to the existential repercussions of
never being offline anymore and which deals with the
blurring distinction between private and public, with a
world in which connectedness is becoming the driving force
of social life. The correspondence between Knausgård’s and
Shield’s reality hunger may be a coincidence or not, I don’t
know (befitting post-digital times); the original, Norwegian
edition of Book 6 was published in 2011, a year after Shield’s
manifesto.

Both writers do follow the same line of thought. David
Shields relates ‘reality hunger’ explicitly to the supremacy
of the unreal, to fiction and stories that submerge or
even wash reality away. ‘Living as we perforce do in a
manufactured and artificial world, we yearn for the “real”,
semblances of the real,’ he writes. In a world in which reality
has dissolved, like a lump of sugar in a cup of coffee, the
very nature of reality has changed. According to Shields we
need something that is true and spontaneous to life, even if
this used to be viewed as subjective and hence unreliable.
‘We want to pose something non-fictional against all the
fabrication – autobiographical frissons or framed or filmed
or caught moments that, in their seeming unrehearsedness,
possess at least the possibility of breaking through the
clutter.’ To be able to handle the default of fiction, Shields
seems to say, one can only abide by one’s own experience.


Even though reality has become swamped or even has been
washed away, we are still yearning for it. In truth, it makes
reality hunger futile, just like the longing to stay true to
yourself when you can never truly be yourself. ‘What it’s all
about,’ the Dutch writer Maartje Wortel writes in her short
story ‘Schrijver II’ (‘Writer II’, from the collection Er moet
iets gebeuren, which translates to Something’s got to change): ‘I
don’t want to lie any more.’ And: ‘I’m not playing a game.
On the contrary. I want to show people what they could
possibly think if they can think whatever they want.’ It’s
about showing what’s underneath all the layers of play and
pretense. What becomes visible is not so much a conclusive
list of hard facts but moreover, a personally experienced
reality or a social reality that can be shared with others.
Facts are no longer that interesting, we seem to have
lost our appetite for them. Facts can even be just as fake
or unreal as the rest. Knausgård writes at the end of the
thousand plus pages of Book 6 of My Struggle: ‘We can try
to peel away reality, layer after layer, without ever actually
reaching the center of it. The last layer just covers the
most unreal of everything, the biggest fiction of them all:
actuality, or ownedness.’ In Knausgård’s quest for ‘real life’,
the focus is not so much on objective facts as on subjective
experience. An experience that doesn’t need to be only
individual but which can actually point towards something
shared or communal, as we’ll see later on.

For Shields reality is played out too, and he also counters
it with something, a precept: realness. Realness in itself
expresses a different kind of reality than the factual, namely
the reality of subjective experience. He proclaims: ‘Reality
is something you could question; realness is beyond all
doubt.’ Whereas reality is only one of many contexts in an
assemblage of fictions, realness by definition goes beyond
any distinction between the real and unreal. As a kind
of urban form of authenticity (or ownedness, if you will),
realness offers truth in a world in which factual reality
seems to have become irrelevant. It is an unsystematic and
uncontrollable truth, at most (or perhaps in its highest form)
an expression of intersubjectivity.

Realness is about something which is more real than
the facts, namely ourselves. There seems to be no other
alternative but to resort to ourselves as the ‘real’ world
seems increasingly arbitrary and irrational, ruled by crises,
unreliable politicians and plastic TV stars who need to be
‘made’; a world that cannot be satisfactorily explained by
facts and causality, nor by a religious master plan, a world
that is pulling at you from all sides and racing through
you, like the billions of neutrinos through the body. Our
personal experience, our self, if only a shadow, is the only
thing keeping the world together. It is the most important,
the most reliable, the most real of all.
Realness has become the antidote for the post-digital
condition.


The ‘post-digital’ was coined as a term in the year 2000 by
Kim Cascone in an article on electronic music. Now it is used
in the visual arts especially; the possible literary meaning of
the term is undefined as of yet. Post-digital refers to a phase
that begins when new media are no longer new, maintains
theorist Florian Cramer: ‘the term “post-digital” in its
simplest sense describes the messy state of media, arts and
design after their digitisation’. Post-digital art works ignore
the boundaries between digital and analogue, between
online and offline, as best as they can. The revolution is over;
all we have is the debris it has left behind.
One of the strategies artists use to express the
implications of this revolution, is to give the digital an
analogue appearance. For instance, by putting a life-size
Google maps-pin on a roundabout, like the artist Aram
Bartholl did, or by printing out thousands of pages from
Wikipedia, which happened in an art project by Michael
Mandiberg. In the book Post-digital Print: The Mutation of
Publishing Since 1894, Alessandro Ludovico brought together
all kinds of examples in publishing. The artists and writers
resort to analogue production methods and materials, such
as stencil machines and vinyl, but use them to research the
digital. One can see this as a yearning towards the analogue
but one which is completely situated in the digital.

What could the post-digital mean in a literary context?
Could it be interpreted even as something existential, just as
‘the post-digital condition’ suggests? I think so. Digitization
not only has an impact on media, art and design but also on
people. After ‘digitization’, a person finds herself in a ‘messy
state’ in which she needs to find new bearings.
How can people themselves be digitized? Digitization
is usually explained as zeros and ones, computers and
information technology but the etymological meaning
of ‘digital’ means something else, says Cramer. ‘“Digital”
simply means that something is divided into discrete,
countable units – countable using whatever system one
chooses, whether zeroes and ones, decimal numbers, tally
marks on a scrap of paper, or the fingers (digits) of one’s
hand – which is where the word “digital” comes from in the
first place.’ All things that can be split up into countable
parts are thus by definition digital. The alphabet is digital
because all the letters are a distinct unit, so are the keys of a
piano. A fretless violin is not, it is analogue.
A man or a woman is also, presumably, analogue –
doesn’t the same etymology say that individual derives
from ‘undivided’? Today this is becoming less and less
evident, however. The whole world has been put in a digital
framework, in other words, everything has become split up
and ‘atomized’ into pieces, is regarded as countable. This
also applies to people themselves, however analogue they
might feel with their fleeting thoughts, mysterious dreams
and transient scale of emotions. The desire to measure
and quantify, in short to digitize, extends itself to all kinds
of humanistic, analogue terrain – all internal activities,
mind, body and spirit. Google claims to already know what
you are looking for before you have even formulated your
question, advertisers comprehend your body and mind
better than you understand them yourself, the meaning of
happiness can be read from brain activity; and all are based
on quantifiable data.

The individual can quite easily be split into ever smaller
parts, so as to count, analyze and trade her data. Just like
the post-digital artist longs for the analogue, so too does the
‘atomized individual’ crave for it, not so much as a factual
reality but rather as a non-quantifiable state-of-being.
I think the non-quantifiable may relate to what David
Shield calls realness. Hunger for a factual reality is perhaps
only a symptom of a transition, an illustration of an almost
old-fashioned ambition from the time that media could still
be ‘new’. In the post-digital world, the hunger for factual
reality has changed into a new hunger or even nostalgia, for
something that is lost to data, a realness that goes beyond all
categorization and counting digits.
What could it be then, this realness? Knausgård believes
it can be found in art, language, history, domains he calls
‘communal’. These domains are not quantifiable, they are
heterogeneous. They can only be experienced individually
and shared subjectively. In My Struggle Knausgård makes
an attempt to understand how these kinds of ‘fictional’
domains can affect reality. Their impact goes beyond the
power of a single person and their strong influence thus
questions an individual’s autonomy. This is precisely why
this impact is more real than the facts of natural science
or the chronology of history. As the Thomas-theorem in
sociology states: ‘If men define situations as real, they are
real in their consequences.’ Or to quote Sheila Heti again:
‘We don’t know the effects we have on each other, but we
have them.’

The question of how fictions influence our life is
obviously not new – let’s say it’s at least as old as the Don
Quixote. The capacity to trigger ‘real consequences’ is of
course enormously elaborate and occupies not only fiction
as a defined category, but the media in general and even,
social contexts and culture. As a so-called autonomous
human being, you owe everything to yourself – you can be
congratulated (and blamed) for everything that happens
in your life – at the same time, all these fictions are
continually affecting you without you having the power to
do anything about it.

That tension is central to post-digital literature. Another
example is the short story ‘My Life is a Joke’ by Sheila Heti.
A woman returns from the after-world to tell the story of
her life and death to a public so she can finally rest in peace
for eternity. What is her problem? The title already gives it
away, her life was a joke:
Here is the thing: I was a joke, and my life was a joke.
The last man I loved – not my high-school boyfriend –
told me this during our final fight. I was thirty-four at
the time. During the fight, as I was trying to explain my
version of things, he shouted, “You are a joke, and your
life is a joke!”
It’s an intriguing and irritating lecture. What the heck is
going on? People say all kinds of stupid things during a
fight. For this woman however this exclamation – ‘You’re a
joke’ – is a matter of life and death, literally. She elaborates
on the serious consequences the joke has had on her, as it
became an epithet of her life:
When a person slips on a banana peel and dies, then
her life is a joke. Slipping on a banana peel is not how
I died. When a person walks into a bar with a rabbi,
a priest, and a nun, and that is how she dies, then her
life is a joke. That is not how I died. When a person is
a chicken who crosses the road to get to the other side,
and that is how she dies, then her life is a joke. Well,
that is how I died – as a chicken crossing the road to get
to the other side.

The exclamation that she was a joke and her life was too,
may only have been a thoughtless reprimand by an ex-lover,
but it has become the mythical essence of her existence.
What she is, how she died, the beginning and end of
everything. An absurd interpretation that has grown out of
proportion. If death is the consequence, if you’re not even
allowed to die but need to deliver a theatrical apology in
order to truly die, what is real or not becomes completely
trivial. What could she have done about it? Absolutely
nothing, except to give account of her crushing defeat in
front of a gathered crowd.

In post-digital art, the artist recaptures new media and
brings them back into the offline world. This also applies in
literature, with the material of the writer, namely language.
The language of MTV that surfaces in the poem of Maarten
van der Graaff is but one example. Sheila Heti too echoes
the language of popular media. Not only emails have
been included in How Should a Person Be? (which is not so
shocking for a novel these days), her style, which sounds a
bit awkward at first, seems to have gone through the social
web. In so doing, the book gives a voice to how, specifically
now in this day and age, one ‘must be’.
She is, for example, exceptionally good at what sounds
like inspirational quotes: ‘Catalog
what you value, then put a fence around these things. Once you have put a fence around something, you know it is something you value.’ Her heart spawns all her feelings and she scatters exclamation marks as if she were an eighteenth century sentimentalist or a keen Facebook user. ‘My heart caught on my rib. If only I could figure out what that was –the
decision that would benefit everyone – I would do it!

Knausgård, who fiercely dislikes the social web,
expresses his deepest feelings in Some Rain Must Fall like
so: ‘Ooooh. Ooooh. Ooooh.’ Knausgård’s style has often
been described as nonchalant, his imagery as imprecise,
his words too grand and indefinite. Just like Heti, he can be
extremely sentimental. Seen within a post-digital context
however, his style gains maximal expression: it focuses
on making connections with people, sharing the things
you feel and opening up who you really are, whatever that
might mean. ‘Everyone was interesting, everyone had
something to say that I could listen to and be moved by
until I left and they were reclaimed by the darkness.’ He
continually tries to connect with other people but without
much success. ‘My plan had been to write. But I couldn’t,
I was all on my own and lonely to the depths of my soul.’
These are pretty monumental words, yes, which he uses
without an inkling of irony.

Heti too leaves irony behind:
For so long I had been looking hard into every person I
met, hoping I might discover in them all the thoughts
and feelings I hoped life would give me, but hadn’t.
There are some people who say you have to find such
things in yourself, that you cannot count on anyone
to supply even the smallest crumb that your life lacks.
Although I knew this might be true, it didn’t prevent
me from looking anyway. Who cares what people say?
What people say has no effect on your heart.
In a roundabout way, Heti is looking for the wisdom of
others; how she may learn from it, even though she doesn’t
really want to listen to them when it comes down to it.
The expansive, chatty but always hyperbolically serious
and tongue-in-cheek way she writes, reminds one of the
language of blogs, the online genre which literature has
always adamantly tried to avoid. In an article by Kavita
Hayton about literary weblogs from 2009, for example,
blogs are viewed as an inferior form of writing, only
meant as intermezzo and unfit for paper, hence their
online existence. The writers give these blogs titles such as
‘throwaway language’, they are thoughts that ask the reader
to be ‘uncritical’. In 2009 these words were not positive, let
alone possible unique selling points. ‘It is apparent,’ Hayton
states, ‘that the informal, “throwaway” language in the
titles of these blogs would not translate well onto a book
cover’. Heti’s title How Should a Person Be? shows how much
this has changed.

This ‘post-blog’ quality, that shows a post-digital venture
with the writer’s material, also relates to what Knausgård
calls the communal. Both Heti and Knausgård maintain
the myth that after a long struggle with themselves and
the outside world, they quite naturally, even automatically
wrote the book we are reading now (in reality, so to speak).
Both wanted to write something completely different,
a conventional novel or commissioned play, but failed.
They struggled with this up to the point of self-hatred
and eventually gave up. As happened before on blogs, the
writers share with the reader their experience of how much
effort is needed to produce something. In the end, they
only succeed in writing when they just sit down and let it
happen, once they put their ‘adopted role’ on hold, decide
to let go and let themselves be carried along with the flow
of the world. It is only by surrendering to a kind of écriture
automatique that they are able to come closer to themselves
and they are longing to show the reader how this process works.

Maartje Wortel writes in the aforementioned story
‘Writer II’: ‘Marie. She says she would rather I didn’t write
about her. I exist for real, you can’t make that any more
beautiful. I don’t want to make it more beautiful, I say.’ She
pleads her lover; can she include her in her work? – ‘I would
rather you didn’t,’ she says, but the writer goes ahead and
does it anyway. Just like Sheila records and transcribes the
talks she has with her friend Margaux in How Should a Person
be?, even though Margaux doesn’t want her to. The voice of
somebody else helps them to find out how to write about
themselves, about who they are, even though this eludes
them, time and time again.
Van der Graaff seems to have let go of principles like
these a long time ago. He makes the automatic activity of
writing explicit in his poetry volume Dood werk by using
stylistic techniques like lists and ‘clocked poetry’. ‘I time
the poem to be free,’ he notes, even if it is only a question of
sitting down, beginning and producing words. The others
will enter by themselves. In what seems almost a striking
portrait of Knausgård, he writes: ‘11:30: Somewhere in a
poem, / an article, or in a conversation, / I met an exchange
student / who during his stay abroad in a country of his own
choice / had spoken to no one. / His dry, mineral loneliness
touched me / and I thought of all the ambitious, friendly
people / who are lonely in a paradise of knowledge, / growth
and technology.’
Perhaps everyone is lonely in a paradise of knowledge,
growth and technology. In another clocked poem Van der
Graaff writes: ‘1:37: I live in Holland. / I am a secret / that
is kept by certain / communities, who are not inclined to
share.’
A community who keeps secrets, not inclined to share,
must be blasphemy to digitization, to a world in which
everything is becoming quantifiable and split into data,
regardless of the generation of data we are supposed to
make happen ourselves through sharing. The analogue, that
which cannot be digitized, is kept secret in the heart of the
community, and this secret is the ultimate object of desire
for the post-digital condition.

Sheila Heti writes about how the communal can form a
positive experience: ‘Luck unfurled at the slightest touch. I
had a sense of the inevitability of things as they occurred.
Every move felt part of a pattern, more intelligent than I
was, and I merely had to step into the designated place. I
knew this was my greatest duty – this was me fulfilling
my role.’ It sounds almost like a religious experience. The
flipside of this communal pattern is a kind of limitation to
one’s freedom. It is the paradox of the post-digital condition:
you are supposed to be free and autonomous but you cannot
escape all the external and uncontrollable influences that
come from the world we live in. The community is both
desired and feared, we suffer because of it but at the same
time, we seek it.

If the communal is the analogue experience we are all
looking for, it inherently triggers a contradiction. Language
and images surround you in the ugly, trivial, exhibitionistic
and messy world that hustles itself into your perception
through all kinds of sounds, images, opinions and
statements – something you need to resist. At the same time
these shared cultural expressions are the interface between
the individual and the collective, generating the communal:
jokes, the language of self-help books, popular programs,
social media, and also history and poetry. They present an
opening towards the communal, are an expression of the
desire to find a connection with others, to be absorbed in a
shared world. At the same time the communal can also feel
constraining, a cultural straightjacket even. Knausgård’s
hundreds of pages of analysis of a poem by Paul Celan
and the autobiography of Hitler in My Struggle: Book 6 are
poignantly illustrative of this ongoing duality.
For Knausgård the heart forms the symbolic interface
between the individual and the communal. Just like Heti,
the heart beats through his novel, starting with the very
first sentence: ‘For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as
long as it can. Then it stops.’ A heart is somebody’s heart
and, at the same time, it is something we all possess. The
heart is yours but at the same time, you have no power
over it – if it stops, it stops and then everything stops. The
heart, Knausgård says, is ultimately both individual and
communal at the same time. ‘The heart never errs.
The heart never ever errs.’

The heart and its countable heartbeats are perhaps our
most precious possession, now under siege by digitization.
The internet gave unlimited freedom to be who you wanted
to be – an illusion we have been bereaved of long ago. We are
being digitized to our hearts and who we are is being reduced
to ‘vital data’: name, birthplace, date of birth, and even
more datafiable units. To deal with this, I read in the work
of these writers, we have to loosen our contrived grip on
our own private core, stop resisting so as to be able to move
with the flow of the world and swim with the current of the
communal. We need to let the world in instead of keeping it
out, compensate the digital with the analogue, understood as
that which cannot be divided. The individual? Maybe – but
it would have to be an individual who does not believe in
staying herself, staying true to herself.

Maarten van der Graaff writes in the article ‘Druk op
huid’ (‘Pressure on the Skin’, published online just like the
other comments quoted): ‘The problem is I don’t know how
to write about the community. (...) I don’t want to be creative.
I want to disengage from my inner world of struggle by
just writing “me, me, me” incessantly. Sometimes I think
the epic can be achieved through dissolution and entropy.
The Epos as an exercise, a series of movements that doesn’t
tell the “story of the tribe” but at least, makes it audible as a
social sound.’
How might that social sound transmit as? ‘Ooooh.
Ooooh. Ooooh.’
2016

Since the internet time and
space have changed. Everything
is close, so nothing is close.
Everything moves fast, so
nothing lasts. More and more
of life takes place in non-lieux
– places that aren’t real places,
places without history, places
that can’t be pointed out on a
map, which lack in identity
and for ever hold you in transit,
a commuter or transferring
passenger.

Social media are non-lieux like
that and that’s the reason why
the cement holding connections
between people together,
holding friends together, would
be crumbling. ‘Social media’
can’t be pointed out, can’t be
traversed, there’s no landscape
to longingly watch rushing by as
you’re on your way there.
It takes no time to get there and
that shouldn’t be understood
in a positive way, no, it rather
signifies how time collapses,
which makes all meaning
disappear with a hush.
Proximity means nothing
anymore. And when proximity
means nothing anymore,
because everyone is always close,
then time itself will become
weightless, meaningless, because
we never spend any time with
anyone anymore. Who knows
you your whole life? We rush
from one friendship to the next
with the same ease as we switch
from one job to the next.
That’s what I read, sort of.
*

My smartphone is in my hand.
It is a space shared with dozens
of friends, or whatever you want
to call them. It is a school yard,
panopticon, fence, hangout,
campus, city center, house.
A kitchen table.

The professors pronounce
their doom for us, sitting at the
kitchen table. Camera on.
We’ve lost our ability to talk, we
don’t know each other anymore,
man has turned into an animal,
while he was so productively
working on his own civilization
(ha ha). No one is able to keep his
attention on a conversation for
more than a minute anymore, is
what they say. The smartphone is
guilty, they say. The smartphone
drives a wedge in the friendly
treatment, in the truly friendly
treatment, the treatment of
true friends, not the phony
connections that dress up in
fancy (or ugly) words as old as
the middle ages. The smartphone
is smart to yield so much money,
otherwise it would have been
banned already a long time ago.
I try to remember conversations
I supposedly had before and now
miss out on. I had the school
yard, the city center, for a short
while I even had a local hangout,
and the friend-of-the-househouse.
There was talking and
eating, drinking, dancing and
kissing. There were jokes being
made: word jokes, bad jokes,
inside jokes. What conversations
were left behind there, which got
lost?
I can’t remember and I don’t have
to. It is a well-known fact that the
conversation we are mourning
over is the conversation at the
kitchen table, where everyone
tells how their day went, one by
one. A stringent, although not
necessarily wide-spread norm,
the holy norm of the higher
middle class, a WASP-like utopia
born in the nuclear family, one
that I know of only through
American TV-shows.
*

There’s no way that Facebook
or Twitter or Snapchat are
non-identifiable spaces, nonlieux,
I will have nothing of
it. Don’t they have an address
that everyone knows by heart,
a location on your home screen
where you find your way without
having to look? Just like we do
with physical places that we
frequent more often, we start
to recognize the surroundings,
even if it takes some time to find
our way. Sometimes the trusted
surroundings are broken up to
renovate parts of them and then
people are enraged.
Etcetera.

Moreover, they are places where
we spend a lot of time. Hours and
hours each day, week, month,
year. Not only do we share
the space, those recognizable,
designated, shared places – all
the people hanging out there are
in our proximity and the residue
this shared time leaves is just as
real as the residue beneath our
feet, coming down on the school
yard.
*

Now it goes like this: even if you
move out or take off, everything
will stay together right there on
your phone. No one ever needs
to know that you’re gone, ’cause
you’re never really gone. If you
break yourself lose from the
enclosed extension of the school
yard that doesn’t necessarily
mean that you write yourself out
of the minds. The minds of your
friends are all there, always, just
like it was with the porouslywalled
panopticon that was the
school yard. Even if you want to,
you cannot write yourself out of
minds.

How can I forget them when they
turn up again every day, here
or there, wherever, online, on
my phone, on my laptop, during
work, on the train, at home,
in bed. My phone has become
nothing less than the ground
that I walk on.
*

Idea: a plug-in or app called
‘Ranking Your Friends’, which
based on your social networks
puts all your friends in order,
the order of importance, status,
seniority, whatever you wish.
Undoubtedly such a thing
exists already. I once saw a
Facebook app that visualized the
mutual relationships of all your
connections and, oh, how great
it felt when it turned out that for
one of my friends (10) I was in the
center of everything.
It exists, no matter what. The
algorithmic ordering of the feed
as you see it when you’re logged
in puts your friends in order all
the time. That’s nothing more
than the result of the game
‘Ranking Your Friends’, a game
that has everyone hooked and
which we keep playing over and
over. Who do you see, who don’t
you see? Every action is a move
in the game, whether you want to
play or not. The algorithm don’t lie.
In this way, the most successful
friends turn into the least
forgettable ones. Although,
when you’re a nobody in real
life – someone whom no one will
think of by themselves – then at
least you can keep the memory of
yourself alive online. They won’t
be able to ignore you, because
you keep turning up at the top of
their feed all the time.
*

I’ve heard say that ‘there is
status updates, but no friendship
updates’. I didn’t immediately
understand whether it referred
to status updates put on
Facebook or updates in your
actual status – your salary and
prestige and everything that
tags along: the social circles you
move in, jokes you make, what
you eat, where you go out – that
leave your friends hanging.
The friends don’t update along
but are left behind. Update into
obsolescence. ‘Sorry, drinks are
calling.’
Maybe there’s no difference. If a
status is updated ‘in real life’, you
can see it doing the same on the
social networks: the meter starts
running, first a few are added,
then handfuls, dozens, hundreds
at once. In this violence of the
masses the old friendships are
rendered invisible, they will
always succumb to those with
greater status.
This other sort of status update
can just as well be regarded as
a friend update. People need
to be tagged in pictures, a
little box circumscribing their
faces. On Twitter: the reply, the
favorite, the retweet. Everyone’s
promoted. You, you, and you!
The less often you are invited to
join, the faster you run behind
in the game of rankings, without
mercy you float downwards, to
that unholy place that no-one
ever reaches in their scrollings,
or even further, into the
bottomless pit from where no
update is ever called up to parade
on the feeds of the network.
You’re parading alright, but only
in front of the mirror and behind
the mirror there is no-one left.
Worst of all is demotion. You’ve
been hidden, muted, ignored,
given the silent treatment, like
could happen in the school
yard. Unlike was the case there,
online there’s no one to notice.
Demotion is invisible. It makes
the humiliation a lonely thing
(yes, that is possible), solely those
who are not-updated-anymore
feel that they’re left behind by
the happy crew. Only the bots
call for them still.
*

I recount my friends: on
Facebook 489, on Twitter 1465,
on Instagram 74. The magical
line of 2000 (well over 10x150)
has been crossed. Although
those last two categories
technically aren’t friends, but
followers. In real life it’s still 40.
5+10+25.
I try to unthink the numbers
and only to picture the faces,
the color of the hair and eyes,
the names of the children and
of the pets that I looked after,
but before I know it I’ve counted
to 25, because that’s how many
children they have made, and
10, the pets, and 5, the ones who
share their name with one of the
other children or pets.
I’m just not able to demetricate
myself.
*

I’m digressing. The kitchen
table, back to the kitchen table.
Camera’s on.
The kitchen table of the
nuclear family is the unity of
friendliness, that’s how it goes
nowadays. Everyone is supposed
to be friendish, your mother and
father to begin with. If you’re
not my friend, you’re my enemy,
in between there’s nothing.
Not at home, not anywhere.
It’s not necessary to have a
laughing fit, surely, but if you
can’t handle a joke, if you don’t
have a system of idiomatic jokes
at your disposal, if goddamnit
you don’t understand my jokes,
then remove yourself from my
kitchen table.
*

Those people who call you by
your first name all the time.
Those people, Anna. Don’t miss
out, Josh. Last chance, John. It’s
the first name treatment, the
great equalizer. Everywhere
everyone addresses you in the
same way – as long-awaited, as
old acquaintance, as way back
when, as friend. Hi friend, hi
Tom and Dick and Anna too.
They want to sell you stuff, like I
don’t get that! Hi marketer! Hi ad
man, hi communications worker,
get lost, you commicaterslaver!
When I’ve been trolling around,
lazily filling out forms, the
algorithm speaks back to me:
hi M, hi X, hi what de fuck.
Like being John Malkovich in
the movie Being John Malkovich
there’s no escaping your own
name. Malkovich, Malkovich,
Malkovich. (But I already knew
that: even if you disappear
towards the east, you’ll still be
chained to yourself.)
No one believes companies
to really be your friend. The
reverse might be true: we
count companies to our friends
because they’re always there
for us, always have something
waiting for us, never disappoint
us and are always ready to please
us. You’re always allowed to visit
their website in the middle of the
night. Friends could take that as
an example. Can’t they treat me a
bit more like a product? Haven’t I
deserved that?
*

By the way, don’t expect this
familiarity to be heartfelt,
the first name treatment is
automated, as we all know. So
please, just automate your own
smile as well if it doesn’t come
naturally, and your goodspirited
greeting too. And in
case you don’t feel like it, don’t
be surprised if you die alone,
zero (0) friends, found rotting
and foul-smelling in your dirty
apartment after a week or two.
Isn’t that how friendship is
threatened, rather than by an
inflation in words? It turns into
a product that is subject to the
laws of demand and supply, a
product that companies can
provide better, faster, more
accurately and cheaper than
people themselves.
*

Someone is being loud in the
street. ‘I gave my students an
assignment. They have to write
about a dilemma that’s bothering
them, now, in this very moment.
You know, confrontation,
collision, it’s either/or is what I
say to them; you have to make a
choice, it is your responsibility,
DOING NOTHING IS A CHOICE
IN ITSELF, and the result will be
tragic, I don’t forget to mention
that, it’ll always be an unhappy
end in some way or another,
a dilemma means needing to
sacrifice something or someone,
perhaps yourself, and that’s why
it makes you feel bad and won’t
leave you alone, you’re being
tossed back and forth between
conflicting interests, desires,
fears, but you must, you MUST,
you MUST DO something. And
always there are a few who write
about their hesitations in ending
a friendship.’
‘Remarkable,’ the other says.
*

I have moved again, way more
than half a kilometer east, but
not way more. I have pulled
myself out of the enclosed
extension of the city center
and landed in a desert made of
concrete and steel, like a giant
has picked me up from the
rumble below with its thumb
and finger and has dropped the
figurine a bit further ahead. I
myself was the giant, of course,
I was giant and figurine all at
once. From high on up in the sky,
bungling by the back of my coat,
in between a thumb and finger
as big as myself, I saw them, my
friends, distancing themselves
from me, or I from them. The
house I was a friend of, the local
hangout and far out back, the
school yard.
And suddenly I saw it! They
where standing at the school
yard, not still, but again, not
the same one, but another. The
school belonged to their kids!
I had nothing to find there,
moreover, if I would be hanging
out there each day surely I
would get arrested on account of
suspicious behavior.
*

I don’t think about my friends
from primary school a lot, the
girlfriends whom I haven’t seen
for about twenty years. I can wax
very sentimental over them. I
still feel as if I’m connected to
them through a steel cable. We
never talk, at most we like each
other’s new profile pic.
I see that one of them has seven
children by now, not including
two foster kids. Not because she’s
religious, but rather, I presume,
a hippie. The children have
strange names, the household
seems medieval.
I see that an other is still together
with her high school sweetheart,
the boy who was there already
twenty years ago, he is a man
now. I see that she is pregnant
again, sixteen or seventeen years
after the first one, but fathered
again by that same boy, man.
I see that the third still is a
horse-loving girl, a horse-loving
woman I should say, but no
matter how much I try to close
read her updates and pictures, I
can’t find out whether she’s in a
relationship, likes men or women,
if besides a dog she has children,
or maybe, maybe, maybe.
Should one of these beautiful
women show up on my doorstep,
broke, doing heroin, chased,
wounded, or whatever might be
the case, I would pull them in by
their arm, stick my head out of
the door, look left and right, then
rapidly close the door, turn the
key and say: ‘Tell me.’
*

The first time I heard gossiping
I must have been around seven
years old. I was sitting in the
municipal pool with two of my
class mates. One said: ‘Kelly’s
nails are so ugly, did you see?’ I
was stupefied, I never could have
thought you could do something
like that with language. (Of
course I didn’t think that,
but I can’t describe it another
way.) Saying something about
someone who wasn’t there, and
not just something like ‘I played
with Kelly’ or ‘Kelly’s coming
over’ or ‘Tomorrow’s Kelly’s
birthday’ or – and this would’ve
been close, but still factual –
‘Kelly still believes in Santa
Claus’, no, not a statement that
informs you of something, but a
remark like a poke in your ribs, a
remark that sets things moving.
Moving within me, because now
I had to answer and not just like
that, not just like ‘yeah I know’
or ‘you got a present?’ or even
‘ha ha, I don’t!’, no, something
flushed through those words,
something that I might as well
call morality. Whatever I’d say, it
would establish an alliance: for
or against Kelly. And with that:
for or against the gossiper.

So I said nothing, but listened
to my other class mate who
answered: ‘Yeah, gross, her nails
are so ugly.’
*

Josh was my best friend.
Evidently I was secretly in love
with him. I didn’t dare tell him
because my greatest fear was
to get turned down. Would it
have been different if there was
texting, Facebook, WhatsApp? I
think so. It’s so much easier to say
what you think in 160 characters
that might have been sent to the
wrong person ‘by accident’.
At times my crush on Josh
passed – quite often it did
actually, because as a teenager I
was in love with many people. I
kept dreaming about him until
years later, long after we didn’t
meet up anymore. I dreamt
everything turned out right.
Then I ran into him. I was well on
my way to forget him, so when
I saw him I said, as if it hadn’t
taken me half a dozen years to
get there: ‘I used to be so much in
love with you, I was convinced
you were the love of my life.’ He
said: ‘Same here. Me too.’
Here’s a slogan for friendship
for you: ‘A woman and a men being
lovers is a friendship-bomb.’
I let the bomb explode in his face.
*

In the end friendship isn’t a
product, it’s destruction. A selfigniting
friendship bomb. The
crack in the seamless, happy,
content, familiar, is where true
friendship reveals itself, but then
boom! it goes up in the air.
I read about the terror of
presence and think of the corny
social network Hyves, where
everything was covered in the
vaseline filter of innocence: Ich
bin dabei!
I’m absent. My chat function
is turned off by default. My
response time lies well over five
seconds. I read everything, but
the degree of my interactivity is
unpredictable. I won’t let myself
be pushed about.
Now I hardly get any messages
at all. Sometimes I take a tour
of the networks, leaving a trace
of hearts and smileys, so as to
return to myself the glow of
presence. It’s like I’m trying to
make an energy saving bulb
light up using a bike, I can see a
shimmer of light in the distance,
but my legs always get tired first.
*

My phone sends me a
notification: ‘Wer am meisten liebt,
ist der Unterlegene und muss leiden.’
Translate.
*

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HOW DO WE WRITE WHEN WE WRITE ONLINE?

ALWAYS CLOSE

DIGTIAL SYSTEMS(PART 2)

POST-DIGITAL

NEW TYPES OF FRIENDSHIPS(PART 2)

First digital text

October 29, 1969

Founding of Facebook

February 4, 2004

Founding of Whatsapp

2009

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