She sat on stage next to men who were better known by their usernames and women who drew their eyebrows on so hard they looked insane, and tried to explain why it was objectively funnier to spell words wrong. All around the world, she was invited to speak about the new communication, the new slipstream of information. This had raised her to a certain airy prominence. They were going to remember, Can a dog be twins? instead of the date of the Treaty of Versailles, which, let’s face it, she didn’t know either. Can a dog be twins? It had recently reached the stage of penetration where teenagers posted the cry-face emoji at her. She had become famous for a tweet that said simply: Can a dog be twins? That was it. ‘Are we all just going to keep doing this till we die?’ everyone was asking. Besides, you were not even living that deeply. It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. She lay every morning under an avalanche of details, blissed: pictures of breakfasts in Patagonia, a girl applying foundation with a hardboiled egg, a shiba inu in Japan leaping from paw to paw to greet its owner, white women’s pictures of their bruises – the world pressing closer and closer, the spider web of human connection so thick it was almost a shimmering and solid silk. Should she be listening to the conversations of teenagers? Should she follow with such avidity the compliments rural sheriffs paid to porn stars, not realising that other people could see them? Other people’s diaries streamed around her. The amount of eavesdropping was enormous. Why did the portal feel so private, when you only entered it when you needed to be everywhere? Inside, it was tropical and snowing, and the first flake of the blizzard of everything landed on her tongue and melted.Ĭlose-ups of nail art, a pebble from outer space, a tarantula’s compound eyes, a storm like canned peaches on the surface of Jupiter, Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters, a chihuahua perched on a man’s erection, a garage door spray-painted with the words ‘STOP NOW! DON’T EMAIL MY WIFE!’ S he opened the portal, and the mind met her more than halfway. It seemed fitting to write it in the third person because I no longer felt like myself. The portal that told us, each time we opened it, exactly what was happening now. But if we managed to escape, to break out of the great skull and into the fresh air, if Twitter was shut down for crimes against humanity, what would we be losing? The bloodstream of the news, the thrilled consensus, the dance to the tune of the time. I cared about the collective head, which seemed to be running a fever. I cared about the feeling that my thoughts were being dictated. I did not care about the Singularity, or the rise of the machines, or the afterlife of being uploaded into the cloud. A few years ago, when it suddenly occurred to us that the internet was a place we could never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind.
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