strollling through the shadows

The distance of half a kilometer between the two secondary schools was enough to prevent childish stuff like that from happening. We dug each other to the point of love. This is not the story of that friendship. It's the story of all the others.

As for us, we've been friends for far longer than those folk, that's for sure. At night I waited for the weekend, but even then not a lot happened. Besides, our interest was not coffee, but booze. It's the story of all the others.

‘Ah, yes,’ is what we said when one of them turned up in the school yard; you shook hands, exchanged a kiss on the cheek and a cigarette. They still live just around the corner, basically.

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.

In my own personal panopticon, my dome made of stardust, I reside alone and I know exactly who it is that is watching me. The panopticon is an uneven institution. For the rest they remain abstract onlookers.

The freedom gained turned out to be unmanageable, just as it's supposed to be, it was freedom in the same way that a sea in a storm is freedom, or a desert without water, or a galaxy without stars, where humans – the secretary, the calculator, the bookkeeper and the accountant, joined later on by project managers, controllers, treasurers of boards, of committees, of societies, unions and associations, yes, you might say everyone – so, where everyone whirls and swirls, worn-out, run-down and hyped-up, weightless and spinning away from the mother station.

In the post-digital condition it seems the world and reality irreversibly drift apart.

He won't see me singing without any voice will he? Someone looks at me, his wrinkles shift around the eyes, minimally shift the life into the face, and I try to catch the change, again and again and then the shifting of these small movements turns into a leap when the compliment drops out onto the floor, causing the ground to fly up, like the impact of a meteorite, and I knew he was right, that I shouldn't belittle myself.

No. Is he? Perhaps not either. When I sing them he hears them, he will have heard them. Dear Sir, I seek a companion.

“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.’

... the post digital world turns round and round ...

It's that easy: by repeating something, you affirm it, the existence of it, the importance of it. Plain and simple, it just matters that someone is watching while I go about my morning routine. We all know that repetition is so very important when one wants to excel, but we tend to forget that repetition also signals affirmation.

Not every change happens with a leap, sometimes it's rather a matter of repeating the same movements over and over again, without seeing how they change, minimally. Nothing's to be found beneath the surface.

Slogans for friendship. No one has to know who they are. When you reach eighty, you die. I want to know how I can prevent loneliness from entering right now, entering me through the open window, through my phone, from the depths of my memory, prying from the piles of books and magazines around me.

Your hand hurts. At least, it hurts again. I can't remember whether he ever called me but since that moment I do recognize the Big Dipper without hesitation. It can be seen in TV-shows, where there's always a fixed location which functions as a school yard.

A shared space and a shared time: both are essential, but sometimes you can hardly tell them apart.

The very first spreadsheets were made using paper. The boss sits at his desk and calls out the numbers, all the while rattling 39 away on his electronic calculating machine. We can assemble a morphology of the bureaucratic epic; it would be more simple than the morphology of the fairytale. They mark the numbers in the cells extremely lightly; ready to be erased again at once.

Being seen will change the way you behave, and maybe that's all that can be said about it.

Often the first chroniclers of a certain period are also the best. The first epic of the spreadsheet was written by its bard Steven Levy. The distance to the object of desire has never been so short and that's precisely why true love and lust diminish.

Like wrinkles that shift into your face and in the end shift you out of life. As long as the dome is still there you know for certain that the message has arrived even before you sent it, it got read the moment you wrote it. That repetition, the repeating movements, the movements in their repetition that all the while shift again and again ever so minimally, at one point will make you shift ever so lightly out of life just like that.

Sure, this would count as an adaptation of behavior, but in a highly individual way. I want to be a fish. You won't do a lot to keep death at bay. I like that this sharing has nothing to do with the accumulation of meaningful data about me. The subtweet arrives before you even hit the button.

Give me lust, love and companionship, in reverse order. It was not a shortage in affirmation, a hole in the form of a trauma, never to be filled, it was the repeated tracking of movements, again and again, shifting in their minimal ways, shifting life into, me. And the dome, the dome is broken down. Is she dead yet?

In that way the phone is still a junction that makes love possible, as it's always been. They are, so far. It can even become the personification of the loved one, with all the pain that entails.

To the woman on stage the distance produced by the phone call is enough of a humiliation. Now I'm project manager, meaning I don't manage people, but Excel sheets. The cell phone does seem to make the humiliation worse, because there is the option to use nothing more than a text message. He liked that electric animal.

Practicing their role in society and reflecting on their emotions with the platitudes that go with that. 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.

You know, daydreams too are a repetition – of something that has happened in the past or something wished for in the future. It's like turning the tables after rolling around in the life-affirming gaze for a while, you try to see the camera so you can eventually take over the camera's position and see what it sees.

He didn't know my address, so he traced line after line, page after tissue paper page, until he found it. The school yard, one might say, was duration turned tangible, right beneath our feet. My god, there they are, again. A shared space and a shared time: both are essential, but sometimes you can hardly tell them apart.

Our scribbling attempts were consistently pale, indefinite, tentative, dreary across the jotter page. Whatever. Next to rivalry, the distance also halted any further deepening of the friendliness.

The spreadsheet tells a story, a saga, a bureaucratic epic. Secretaries and office apprentices called ‘calculators’ drew meticulous graphite lines across the sheets, crawling on the floor with a pencil and ruler, careful not to crease the paper. Already back then the spreadsheet was a powerful tool, although the impact of its strike remained limited.

My hand hurts. I thought this was because what adults wrote was so much more important than what we did that it had to be preserved in pen, fixed in ink, permanent on the page, like an oath. That was probably because you didn't have to put a lot of work in it.

In no sense can the spreadsheet be identified with itself, everything refers to something else, every number is based on other numbers, which are multiplied, added up, subtracted or divided. The early adopters used Apple.

And while work that used to take days to complete could now be done in three winks, the VisiCalc-ees had to preach, pray, beg to be heard. Characteristic of the spreadsheet – its power, possibly – is that it doesn't tolerate persons in its vicinity, just types; flat, formulaic, formulistic figures. That day meant Liberation Day for all secretaries, calculators, bookkeepers and accountants, and was the moment when numbers got imprisoned.

There is no quest anymore, no fear of the other not knowing who you are, no absence. You said: ‘Don't belittle yourself.’ So that's what I tried to do: not to belittle myself. Not every change happens with a leap, sometimes it's rather a matter of repeating the same movements over and over again, without seeing how they change, minimally.

Spirit animal. Freedom unto death. It came out in 1984 and in October 2014 it was rereleased in honor of Spreadsheet Day.

Or whatever you don't have. He wants to be right – no, he is right, he has identified the truth. People who boast about their poorness, poor people who. It would in effect lose its quality of the possible, we would have traded in excitement for the boringness of reality.

Repetition, repeat me, reap me. At that time I didn't understand that order effectuates freedom. Thinking of work I cannot sleep. For example, the importance of a gesture.

I repeat you, you repeat me, in the end every human repeats every human.

18 min. Then you are free and able to do as you please, but that which made you free – meaninglessness – deprives freedom of its meaning. Being dead and living on. Ancestors have been named.

It's like this: You are supposed to conform to society's expectations out of free will. By now we've lived a lifetime along the line, it's not even the beginning of the 21st century anymore, this year of 2016. History has been told.

I want people to say: now that's someone, yes, A someone. In your head. 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?

We were registered under my mother's name, which he didn't know.

There was always a tomorrow when we met in the school yard.

Preamble: the word, the numbers. Endless paper sheets, white as a ghost and just as thin. The very first spreadsheets were made using paper. Layer after layer a ground grew beneath our feet, a shared ground.

We met in the school yard, even the people who went to the Christian school visited our school yard from time to time. Layer after layer a ground grew beneath our feet, a shared ground. 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.

I hadn't the faintest idea what the Big Dipper looked like, but hey, I was sixteen, it was 4am on a Saturday night and the boy I was riding home with compared my phone number to a constellation of stars.

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. He is blind to everything that doesn't fit the spectacle he wishes to see, which means that he is blind to anything that contradicts the methods used, the objectivity presumed and the colleagues contended, in short, to all the interesting stuff.

They (I) feed off of a sublimated emotional reliving of a past or hoped-for future that can have a physical manifestation, but mainly exists in the head as a mental phantasy, also known as the daydream. Constant repetition might look like a drag, but it is what characterizes our concrete lives.

...but through repetition minimal shifts can occur and precisely those shifts make change possible.

Maybe the question is especially pertinent in the story where you play yourself, the story that is followed by someone every day, someone else from yourself, someone who looks through the eye of the camera. Doesn't the question push itself forward, just like in any other story: does she die?

The individual can quite easily be split into ever smaller parts, so as to count, analyze and trade her data. A fretless violin is not, it is analogue. 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.

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. The artists and writers resort to analogue production methods and materials, such as stencil machines and vinyl, but use them to research the digital.

An exploding sun. Money laundering, buying real estate. But realities are slow and indescribably detailed. If only things were so simple. 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. 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.

Nothing is more cunning than one's own person, because no one will believe you.

He went through dozens of pages of the Culemborg phone book, trying to find my number. A local hangout would be like a school yard for grown-ups. I wanted to have a local hangout. At least not coffee, but booze. The primary school I went to lay next to the one of the ‘caddolics’ and during break we stood calling each other names through the holes in the fence.

The rows are numbered and designate things. spreadsheet (n.) 1965, from spread (n.) + sheet (n.). Let's start at the beginning. spreadsheet spread·sheet \ ˈspred-ˌshēt \

The school yard has a bad reputation: as soon as there's a case of gossiping, bullying or group forming, like in a work situation or a neighborhood, you can be dead certain that someone will start to mumble that ‘it's just like in the school yard’. At night I did little to nothing.

But emergencies are too rare an occurrence to actually remember the sequence.

Loneliness from entering right now, entering me through the open window, through my phone, from the depths of my memory, prying from the piles of books and magazines around me. 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.

There is no quest anymore, no fear of the other not knowing who you are, no absence.

It scrolls through your own Facebook photos as if you were this other person. Yes that's it: it doesn't offer something new but something more. And since the camera really is him, it is him you are looking at now, and you're not just you looking at him anymore (I mean, me looking at you), but through him you're looking at yourself, and the feedback loop starts all over again.

To consider beautiful, to love. That, for the one who's watching me do my daily routine, I'm quite someone, a person to cherish, maybe even to admire. What a good excuse.

The you I'm talking to is the one who lives inside my head and occasionally stretches out into my whole body, making my fingers tingle, weakening my knees and filling up my lungs with heavy, delicious floods of air. It's always also just a song, poem, witticism or phrase. All in the hope that the other is able to decipher the message. It's encryption in public. Hey you, it's me.

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.

The telephone has always brought pleasure, too. For him, the city has already been drenched in an extra layer of meaning for years, a layer that originates in his smartphone.

Identify with a someone who you are yourself, being a someone yourself.

By paying for it, but that was not what the guru had promised. Say I find an envelope with a 100 notes of a 100 euros. You can never completely coincide with the self, never grasp it completely, but you can at least try to stay close to it.

In Sheila Heti's novel How Should a Person Be? the main character, Sheila, laments: ‘You can admire anyone for being themselves. Lights off, spot on. Anyone can see that, even those who live in the age of the spreadsheet without knowing.

The problem is, there are so little women around to notice. Almost. What do rewards do these days? 100×100 euros changes everything.

The middle finger of my right hand has developed a hard ink-stained bump near the nail.

Nowadays it is said that online everyone watches along, but the panopticon implies that the majority adapts to a minority. Which implies that how you behave under the eye diverges from the way you would want to behave if you had a choice. You're someone who shows up suddenly and offers yourself to me as an eye, without necessarily being aware of it.

I mean, when does one gain an interest in someone, or in whom? It's like this: You are supposed to conform to society's expectations out of free will. Always happy to please. When is one ever checked? I hid behind my dark glasses.

But emergencies are too rare an occurrence to actually remember the sequence. We start to notice possibilities unfolding themselves in the repeated gestures but we do not take action, since keeping possibilities open is sometimes more beautiful than having to deal with a possibility-come-real. That is, at least, what the philosophers say.

The reflection that occurs through the eye, through the camera, that creates the distance to yourself which allows you to watch yourself as if you were an object – in the end, an impossibility – may seem to be the first step towards something like self-realization, but the step immediately comes to a halt.

The student got up and spoke. Fuck you, but I have to. I was in my summer coat, it wasn't cold. Please just listen to me, like you did.

I use them in my essay, which is then translated back again into English, and thus the post-digital 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.’

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. They are ‘made’ into something they are not themselves. It doesn't stop there. As a child I wanted to become an actress, since I felt I already was one.

They focus on small gestures – small, fulfilling gestures of bodies, which have you lingering, that endure being watched steadily, patiently. There you have me: someone who rationalizes their emotions away into a daydream, always away, always repeating. All in the hope that the other is able to decipher the message.

In TV-shows it goes like this: out of sight, out of mind. My mind. In case you don't, no one will notice. 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.

Digitization not only has an impact on media, art and design but also on people. The alphabet is digital because all the letters are a distinct unit, so are the keys of a piano. They creep under the radar by being boring. Our personal experience, our self, if only a shadow, is the only thing keeping the world together.

My personal, sublimated panopticon doesn't cause fear or vertigo but rather excitement, maybe breathlessness, but only as long as it's held out in the realm of the possible. Being right, that's true identification, being the same, copy after copy. You should never show off with whatever you're no good at.

In general the question isn't taken seriously, or, at most, up to the level of a school essay: ‘Define friendship.’ A balancing act that might be disturbed just like that, by a light breeze. ‘Virtuous is what a virtuous person would do, given your situation.’ Two powerful men being friends is an inevitability.

And it's not because of a faulty connection or an unexpected downtime – no, nothing arrives anymore because the other has closed his eyes and keeps the eyes closed. Or rather, looking back and trying to find that glow again, reading my own profile, I see that it is not the subtweet that is ambiguous, but my very own private eye that is, or rather, was. All my scopaesthesiac daydreams could have happened.

I would say there is no record keeping in the live-streamed panopticon. So you give him something more to watch. In the daydream the past evolves in a certain way – a repetitive and beautiful way.

Teenagers who share YouTube videos with covert messages that others, parents or teachers, don't understand. It won't put anything on the line, it won't set the machinery to work. Instead of keeping a secret, the secret is hidden in plain sight, packed up in an update and posted for everyone to see.

catch some sun

The performance for the camera is like a daydream acted out in reality, in real time. Both of the extra-presential modes tend to ignore that it's the present that needs a change. But does that really tell the whole story?

I once thought: to be famous at 27, or goddamn it, have a child at 27, welcome a civil life at 27. Trapped, though, is the one who believes in the poorness of freedom – no, the freedom of poorness.

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. Wish I had drunk too much. I don't know if I believe those words.

Fuck you sun. Not every change happens with a leap, sometimes it's rather a matter of repeating the same movements over and over again, without seeing how they change, minimally. There is no quest anymore, no fear of the other not knowing who you are, no absence.

We start to notice possibilities unfolding themselves in the repeated gestures but we do not take action, since keeping possibilities open is sometimes more beautiful than having to deal with a possibility-come-real. The leap is yet to come (never to come); for now I move ever so little, quietly, and repetitively.

Isn't it so that daydreaming and fantasizing can also be about something else, something that might have happened in the past or is hoped for in the future, but which is something beautiful, something important? It creates a parallel world in which you simultaneously live another life. Sure, this won't make a revolution.

It's supposedly the same as being too focused on the past; it's the reason why a traumatic experience keeps recurring, working its trauma on you again and again, barring the present from being really present and keeping the door shut on time to flow forward, towards different times.

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’. How can people themselves be digitized?

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. You are a front runner. 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.

I believe one has to embrace repetition, he says, but I can't. Doesn't repetition consist in hardly noticeable shifts, I say, like a kaleidoscope, a myriad? Poorness doesn't make you rich, but unhappy. A simple show of both repetition and affirmation (which are one and the same, of course), a mode of practice through repetition, a practice that gets affirmation over and done with all at once.

Like the daydream: when dreaming a daydream you're awake, you are here and now, lying on the couch or sitting in the train or walking on the street, all the while being elsewhere, too.

What goes on inside your head? No one knows. That is exceptional: no one knows.

I think so, the earworms were there, the songs I sung, the ever repeated verses that accompanied me day in day out and that drew out the dome in the spacetime of three minutes. It was not a shortage in affirmation, a hole in the form of a trauma, never to be filled. I feel easy, easy peasy pleased. They are only allowed to leave when there's a dome to keep them safe. Do not disappoint me (yet).

Of the other thirty-five there must be ten who would at least consider me. Maybe we (I) don't want it to. Glad to get on the train – This genre, Han writes, ‘belongs to the order of liking, not loving’. It would in effect lose its quality of the possible, we would have traded in excitement for the boringness of reality.

It's awfully obtrusive to just go and call a girl, why don't you just add her on Facebook and start a chat? Of this forty there are five who I am sure would count me, if they counted. Sweaty weather. Sunglasses, the light out of my eyes (entering in the convent).

On the other hand, it is rather my own imaginary insurance; the conviction that there's someone watching is nothing more than an insurance contracted with myself (another feedback loop) to ensure that all will be saved, that I'll stay safe and not just disappear into a non-existing past through a continuous stream of now-moments.

Then you are free and able to do as you please, but that which made you free – meaninglessness – deprives freedom of its meaning. You don't want to get out of bed, and then when you do it's too early.

The movements of the people on their way – to each other, from each other, on their bikes, walking, calling, ‘running a little late’.

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). It's all there at the same time: the bodily feel and the detached look. A repetitive rehearsal, a repetition repeating itself day in, day out.

The series are filled with American, semi-articulate people, talking like self-help books. It has been long since the gurus led us into the brave new world, but they make us believe that it is a world that becomes brave and new again and again and that we need them for that to keep on happening.

Not sleeping I think of work. Thinking of work I cannot sleep.

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. They struggled with this up to the point of self-hatred and eventually gave up.

The gif, moving as it is, all the while catching and fulfilling needy attention spans, has that exact complicity built in. The eye, the camera, makes you move in repetitive ways. I don't know if I believe those words. Repetition is the mark of both the lover-at-a-distance and of those who live in exile (both are me, not you).

Please do not think lowly of me, do not belittle me, please send me a subtweet that is ambiguous, intellectually stimulating, because my rationally contained emotions will find that pleasing. I seek not sexual arousal (although yes, sure) and I am annoyed that there exists nothing else, apparently.

Social steganography, the digital variation on Poe's purloined letter. It never leaves the feedback loop of me talking to the ghost of you and onwards, backwards to me again. That is exceptional: no one knows. Also, it is sublimation.

My very own private eye that is, or rather, was. So why am I still talking? I feel cynical, I feel easy. I know some things, yes, I know where his house lives, approximately. He's not there. Then at a certain moment it becomes clear: no, nothing arrives, nothing is received. But I was awake all the time, I mean, isn't that what a daydream is all about? And if you won't affirm me, why would I affirm you?

Children were never ever allowed to write with a pen; that was only for grown-ups. At least, my friendships have functioned the best there, on those couple of hundred square meters that I shared with a couple of hundred other young ones. Sometimes I start to practice, just in case of emergencies, trying to make it into a little song like I used to.

Each day I was relieved, again. I can engage in profound longing for the extended enclosure that the school yard gave us.

A life lived in the certainty and in the feeling, in the felt certainty, that you're seen and in that sense, that life is lived doubly? Nothing's to be found beneath the surface.

There you are, and you realize that daydreaming isn't really allowed nowadays, at your (my) age, that it is something that keeps you from what's important, from efficiency, from work, from a sense of reality.

One might say that that's what I'm doing (loving): daydreaming. I've heard it say that a gif is of an open and patient nature, since it has no end point but just keeps moving on. It's a very nuanced movement you make, filled with meaning and significance that gets hinted at but isn't very clearly articulated in itself, even if it just resides at the surface.

By willfully fantasizing and daydreaming about all these beautiful instances they are activated in the present, the act of daydreaming wakes them up in the present and you along with them. Not even he knows.

I think about them, day in day out, but the thoughts fall dead in the emptiness. The ones who are left behind will forget him soon after his final episode of goodbyes. What stops me is myself: I'd still be left with me. I've often dreamed of disappearing, of dropping myself hundreds of kilometers to the east without telling anyone.

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 Wikipedia-page of the program reads like a poem: ‘Selena is made into a surfer chick. ‘Post-digital’ doesn't mean that the digital era is behind us. 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.

Like when you stroll through a museum and instead of granting each work just a couple seconds’ glance you sit down and give yourself and the work the chance for more by looking at it over and over again, seeing more of the same and new instances of the same. It's a very nuanced movement you make, filled with meaning and significance that gets hinted at but isn't very clearly articulated in itself, even if it just resides at the surface.

‘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. Being an accountant in the age of the spreadsheet program is almost sexy.

... that which I secretly know will break through in reality.

Me sharing book covers and photos of pages, quotes and blurbs (I share them for you, not with you, as much as I would wish to do so). It won't put the repetitive reactivation of the past to a halt, but that's not always necessary anyway. Isn't that a pretty way to ensure immortality?

So, does he hear me now? Does he listen to what I'm saying now? No, I think he doesn't, rather he will see me, maybe, somewhere somehow he still sees me. Now that I'm saying this to you – even though I never had the conviction that you would hear me and it doesn't matter, really – I wonder if there was sound too.

What it can do is deliver well-being – an ugly word, well-being, but anyway, well-being – a well-being like that of a cat that lies on the window sill, dreaming up the here and now.

Sometimes I start to practice, just in case of emergencies, trying to make it into a little song like I used to. When you reach eighty, you die. On good days they are a bonus, on most days they provide me with the sadness of non-mutual indifference.

am I stowed away in the past or propelled into the future?

When the loop turns outwards, from the center of the dome to its edges, beyond the position of the camera, other mechanisms appear; tweaks, sweet little playful ways to go about things. The gif, moving as it is, all the while catching and fulfilling needy attention spans, has that exact complicity built in.

Out of sight, into the mind. The lesson of the TV-shows, which seemed so harsh to me but which actually is full of grace – ‘out of sight, out of mind’ – has for a long time kept me captive of the enclosed extension where I lived.

I am a producer of normal behavior.

The revolution is over; all we have is the debris it has left behind. Realness is about something which is more real than the facts, namely ourselves. One can see this as a yearning towards the analogue but one which is completely situated in the digital.

It's a step, so to speak, that never turns into a leap. The daydream or the phantasy that shows itself through actions performed for an imaginary camera is a way to hold on to the movement made in the direction of a leap, precisely because the one who's watching is no god, and also not necessarily someone who befits you, but rather someone, just anyone who gives you a feeling of affirmation, who gives a fuck.

He repeats his fear of repetition in the same wording every time I see him. His fear repeats itself.

Say I find an envelope with a 100 notes of a 100 euros. You are also expected to continually rise above yourself and reinvent yourself, again and again. By the side of the road, in the grass? A body in the ditch.

Reality is reclining out of focus, it hides behind stories, images, interpretations, make-believe and perversion. Adopting a role for yourself, like Pyotr put it, may on reflection be an adequate description of modern life. 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.

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. 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.

The self is a useful illusion – one talks about it as if it exists, and that's really all one can say about it.

Yeah, sure, everyone dies eventually, but not every protagonist dies in every story. So, this is what you might ask, being the protagonist in your own story: does she die? In this story, does she die? Being watched over, by you? Or by someone else altogether? Is this story supposed to end first so another story can begin, before she will eventually die?

When I was growing up, school was all about the neatness of your handwriting, the regularity of the looped characters within faintly traced pink feint. Feeling didn't really have a part in it. At least not for me. We did that because you were supposed to, it's what we learned from our brothers and sisters.

Each day you arrived at the school yard, parked your bike, and there they were. Proximity won't let friendships bloom automatically, just like proximity isn't a guarantee for or against rivalry.

The good feeling probably stops the moment you step out of the daydream and find yourself again there on the couch or the train, in the realization that it was nothing more than a daydream. You fill yourself up, inhabit yourself to the edges of your body and your mind is focused on the best of all possible worlds.

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. I hope you take pleasure in my share of shadows.

Liberation Day for the office employee without hesitation turned into a new confinement. For Shields reality is played out too, and he also counters it with something, a precept: realness. 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.

What I don't believe in is this: the number 150 that is supposed to be the natural maximum number of friends. I've counted them. Would philosophers such as Han and Illouz ever have experienced such a truly mediatized love affair?

I tried to catch it in a paper tissue; the tissue immediately dissolved in my hands, my catching hands, throwing it into the waste bin next to the seat. Not enjoyment in real time. You saw that (since you were interested, I suppose).

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. These are pretty monumental words, yes, which he uses without an inkling of irony. Just like Heti, he can be extremely sentimental.

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. I am a producer of normal behavior. Type F for French.

Just quietly sitting there, you stare in the distance and see the person who sees you, watches you. The daydream is repetitive like a gif. Sublimation is my middle name.

Sublimation means that the daydream strikes a balance between rationality and emotionality. You dream up actions for yourself, while sitting there absolutely motionless. What goes on inside your head? No one knows.

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. Knowledge is power.

What a good excuse. Just quietly sitting there, you stare in the distance and see the person who sees you, watches you. Not everyone understands the post, thank heavens, they're not supposed to! Whether it's a song, a poem, a witticism or a phrase, they don't know that they don't understand, that they miss out on something. I want… to let… you know…

The other option is that it doesn't happen and that option of course is much more likely. But the now, what happens now, where he is and what he does, I do not see. His affirmation, his want for affirmation looks completely different from yours. My earworm turns hysterical. I want to be angry but I'm not. Still I see nothing.

He might see, but no, I don't think he hears me. The files are locked in and will not leave the device. Neither should I do so with him. Still I keep talking. Why? Is he still watching nonetheless? Or is he listening now?

I didn't. Sitting at the kitchen table, my telephone in front of me, the half empty glass of wine right there at my fingertips, there's the laptop, I'm thinking, it's the pose of the thinker. I speak to you of my act of love, my excessive subtweet voice message, to be repeated again and again, somewhere in a past that's become present and contains a possible future, a possible universe, moving slightly forward, shifting time, shifting place, trading places, with you, until you have become me again.

All in the hope that the other is able to decipher the message.

‘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. Also, the further the events recede into the past, the more the historian is blinded by methodology, objectivity, colleagues.

The more blinded he is, the less objectively and thus the more truly will the chronicler write history. The genius of the spreadsheet lies in its mask of transparency, which hides the more (otherwise it wouldn't be a mask, would it). Fate comes, everyone knows that, but what it looks like when it comes, is unknown to all.

I didn't dare disappear from there for a longer time, afraid that people might forget about me.

The dome around me crumbles, sure, a couple of bricks had fallen out already, in the past days I saw here and there that the disintegration had started, but, oh well, you know, well, you (I) just don't believe it. And meanwhile you hope that all those small movements will activate something.

When is one ever checked?

All of the pictures, emojis, videos; they're in your face, digitally produced, and therefore literally without a negative. 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. Rock star at 4 pm.

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 beside you, it nestles in your pocket, ready to vibrate, right next to the loins. What's it about? It's my responsibility, that's all there is to it.

The words that fall out of your mouths and disappear again immediately, nothing will ever solidify.

What she is, how she died, the beginning and end of everything. That tension is central to post-digital literature. Well, that is how I died – as a chicken crossing the road to get to the other side. For this woman however this exclamation – ‘You're a joke’ – is a matter of life and death, literally. Slipping on a banana peel is not how I died. Another example is the short story ‘My Life is a Joke’ by Sheila Heti.

... a fugitive, my double, a shadow, slipping in and out of the crowd ...

The self is a useful illusion – one talks about it as if it exists, and that's really all one can say about it. 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.

The best would be no role at all, just one's own person, isn't that so?

Whispering the numbers to yourself seemed to bring the boy closer, as if he came to life by your breath. Then the night dissolves into factors. It's hard not to, when everyone's so good at it.

It has become doctrine to find, be and stay true to yourself.

No doubt there are friends who like to work out together, who talk about the past, go shopping, drink coffee, make things. (It would take years and years before everyone had a cell phone; stuff like Twitter or WhatsApp or Tinder were still a long way in the future.) How the school yards function now, I don't know.

She rolled her cigarettes (like me) and hated gym class – I had managed to get a leave of absence (something concerning a weak spine), she just wouldn't do what she didn't like. We did that because you were supposed to, it's what we learned from our brothers and sisters. ‘Ah, yes,’ is what we said when one of them turned up in the school yard; you shook hands, exchanged a kiss on the cheek and a cigarette.

That is not how I died. Here is the thing: I was a joke, and my life was a joke. I loved – not my high-school boyfriend – told me this during our final fight. 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!”

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. October 17th, 1979 is the day the digital spreadsheet is born.

Blindness is good, just think about what the blind prophets are able to see.

The daydream is like an earworm for sore eyes. Yes that's it: it doesn't offer something new but something more. I sit in my room and imagine everything that's going on outside of these four walls.

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.’ He emailed me to ask if we could speak on the telephone, to clear up the meaning of a specific phrase that re-occurred throughout the interview.

... nestled itself into computers ...

All things that can be split up into countable parts are thus by definition digital.

You have no idea how to exploit your power, how to substantialize sexiness into sex. By extension, this applies to the rest of reality too.

Not even the one who sees you and affirms your being in your body, now, here, finally, there, you're feeling it again, you're feeling it precisely because you allow yourself to travel back in the past or on to the future. Sheila Heti would say, semi-articulately: ‘We don't know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.’

People say all kinds of stupid things during a fight. When a person slips on a banana peel and dies, then her life is a joke. 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. An absurd interpretation that has grown out of proportion.

Faces and their riddles, forgotten names, tasks, to-do's, toodooloos. You get something others miss. If you keep it, your life won't be certain. It brings in a lot of money. No, you'll get shot yourself. A shoot-out, the pursuee loses an envelope from his backpack.

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.

Our interest was not coffee, but booze. I haven't lived in that little town for quite some time now, with the one school on the one side and the other on the other and the two primary schools in the middle. That show is younger than I am, we've been friends for far longer than those folk, that's for sure.

We rolled our fags, listened to music on our walkmen and talked boys. The others. No, not a weak spot. My strong spot. Feeling didn't really have a part in it. The first couple of times we took on the role of referee, dragged around cones, or hung around the sand pit where our classmates did long jumps, taking down the meters and centimeters.

‘The Big Dipper!’

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. First pulled this way, then that way, her attention is drawn towards the noises and flashing lights, special offers and signs on sale.

A friend is someone whom you treat as a friend.

Inevitably the story turns stale. It can happen. It was no trouble to you (him) at all to just close your eye on me, right after you opened them. The option that someone just closes his eyes (you, yours), and doesn't want to have anything to do with it (me), doesn't want the responsibility for affirming you in your being (mine).

In the daydream, just like in a gif, the loop of images that keeps replaying before your eyes proves to be so fulfilling that you just keep watching. These gifs lend dignity to movements. It is precisely the small movements that can lift the gif right out of banality instead of plunging it down into banality.

Her heart spawns all her feelings and she scatters exclamation marks as if she were an eighteenth century sentimentalist or a keen Facebook user.

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’. This also applies to people themselves, however analogue they might feel with their fleeting thoughts, mysterious dreams and transient scale of emotions.

Always happy to please. Repetition becomes necessity. 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.’

Changing a fact here and there, if that's okay. To be honest, my whole life has been a repetition of usurpations.

I mean, when does one gain an interest in someone, or in whom? Although that's not the point. Please just listen to me, like you did. I didn't know how to react.

‘We don't know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.’

You know you'd bring it to the police. No one really knows how this is accomplished, however. Almost two hundred years after Demons, it has become doctrine to find, be and stay true to yourself. You used to think you wouldn't, but you would.

You are able to do something others can't. Still, the ‘almost’ is an abyss you are unable to jump over. 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.

How do they stay themselves without any problems, while I have no idea who my own person is?

A friend is someone whom you treat as a friend. Tautological definitions are a sign that nothing ever really changes and this one indeed sounds like it's coming straight out of Aristotle. This expediently leads to the issue of the demarcation criterion, as is usually the case with ‘What?’-questions.

I think that all people are equal. Except perhaps my oldest friend, I mean the one who has lasted the longest.

Not only emails have been included in Heti's novel. Knausgård's style has often been described as nonchalant, his imagery as imprecise, his words too grand and indefinite. 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.

About ten years ago, I was working with a professional transcriptionist. Her style, not only emails, have been included in How Should a Person Be? (which is not so shocking for a novel these days). I asked the teacher why we had to write a lie.

Heti's style, which sounds a bit awkward at first, seems to have gone through the social web. Although I knew this might be true, it didn't prevent me from looking anyway. When she eventually let me out, my fingertips were covered in tiny paper cuts.

You act like you are a gif – not a violent, bloody gif but a gif that subtly shows repetition in movement and makes the onlooker think: ‘I didn't see it all just yet, I need to watch it again.’ A simple show of both repetition and affirmation (which are one and the same, of course), a mode of practice through repetition, a practice that gets affirmation over and done with all at once.

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).

(accounts is something you are, you say: ‘I'm accounts’),

Who even has a landline, period? April, no time to be wearing sunglasses, let alone putting them on in the train. The rest I consider to be my collection of personal favorites.

They creep under the radar by being boring.

Absolutely nothing, except to give account of her crushing defeat in front of a gathered crowd. 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. 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.

I know of a ‘passive longing for death' also known as ‘a theoretical interest' in it – you don't really want to die, you definitely won't go through any trouble in order to die, but you can sometimes long for it passively, you might think, oh well, once the time has come, it'll be alright. The dome is gone.

Another result seems to be that you have no problem whatsoever closing your eyes on me, turning interest into disinterest, and then evaporating, fading out, retreating into your unknown self. You lose so much already and then two friends give up on you too. Bureaucracy has been described as a cephalopod (a cuttlefish), the spreadsheet in that sense could be a tentacle, or a subspecies.

You can never completely coincide with the self, never grasp it completely, but you can at least try to stay close to it. Almost. Identify with a someone who you are yourself, being a someone yourself. There's one exception, one person who is not good at being themselves: Sheila herself.

‘Virtuous is what a virtuous person would do, given your situation.’ The follow-up question must be: how do you know whether you want to treat someone as a friend? Such a hangout would grace us with the possibility to find each other without having to go through too much trouble and the residue of friendship would start to come down again. Thirteen, fourteen, the first fag, first alcohol, first drunkenness, French kiss, heartbreak.

Still do. What is friendship's demarcation criterion? I think it's this. The demarcation criterion isn't reversible either. And at the same time the repetition of a given is also the first step towards something new.

Not everyone understands the post, thank heavens, they're not supposed to! Whether it's a song, a poem, a witticism or a phrase, they don't know that they don't understand, that they miss out on something. Those were elongated nights, I remember them well (warm). Sure, I have fun discussing virtues and the validity of argumentation. Not when I was still in school, only later.

Who cares what people say? What people say has no effect on your heart.

When they were there it was as if it had never been otherwise. It was almost the same as reciting a love poem. This is not the story of that friendship. A panopticon, but with porous walls.

Question: The someone who's watching – the onlooker looking at you (me) – is he watching in real time, like the police officers on service, the security guards who look at CCTV footage streamed live so as to be able to take action immediately when something happens, or even just like the procrastinator on YouTube? I have my doubts.

It is meditation without the mindfulness

Sheila Heti too echoes the language of popular media. Heti's title How Should a Person Be? shows how much this has changed. 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. She locked me in the stationery cupboard.

If it is love, it is love for myself, which indeed travels a long distance, bouncing back and forth in the dome, traveling through other eyes before returning back to me, gazing at myself, pleased and pleasantly. Constant repetition might look like a drag, but it is what characterizes our concrete lives. Although that's not the point.

A balancing act that might be disturbed just like that, by a light breeze. What do you do? No – what do you think? You treat as a friend those who are allowed to ring your doorbell in the middle of the night. Still, tautological definitions are in themselves good definitions.

You shift out of life like the wrinkles shift their way into your face. Die Wende, December 21. My subtweets do not arrive at their supposed destination, and neither do my likes, nor my feedback loops, for that matter, they all fly off into the distance and evaporate. The more blinded he is, the less objectively and thus the more truly will the chronicler write history.

Research shows that on average, one loses two friends with each ‘life changing event’. In the scripture we read: ‘I can't begin to tell you how many hours I spend at this. This is my pet, in a way. Scratching its ears and brushing its code… it's almost an obsession.’ His eyebrows rose as he saw the result.

The follow-up question must be: how do you know whether you want to treat someone as a friend? No cuttlefish but a cuddly bear, or a cat: shrewd, sly. Always happy to please. You're never a new person with a new life, you always start out or end up in a place that already exists, with something, in other words, that has to be repeated.

You treat as a friend those who are allowed to ring your doorbell in the middle of the night.

I've counted them. How does it help me to know the size of the groups in which our forefathers moved across the steppes? Usually drinking beer or eating, but still. What I don't believe in is this: the number 150 that is supposed to be the natural maximum number of friends.

I for one gain such interest in a person, a someone, that gives a display of interest in me. After some time I've come to understand what is really the case. I started talking about myself complimentarily, me, me, me, didn't stop, and the result is that I know next to nothing about you except for a few superficial data points like where your house lives, give or take a couple hundred meters.

The indifference was friendly because we shared something important: time. The middle finger of my right hand has developed a hard ink-stained bump near the nail. That was twenty years ago and everything about the situation has changed. Now I don't even know my lover's phone number by heart.

‘Your phone number resembles the Big Dipper!’ Phonies. This other school was located just about half a kilometer east, but usually that was enough to forget about our mutual existence.

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.

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.

But who uses a digital phone book? Cave beast no cave. The step immediately comes to a halt. I for one gain such interest in a person.

‘I'd like to drop that load onto someone else's shoulders, straighten up my neck and look at what I have been carrying.’

Of course the philosophers regard the philosophical characteristics of friendship as the most important, so they claim that friends should make each other into better persons or must intellectually challenge each other, but if you ask me the most important friendships are all about fun: doing fun things together. I like that this sharing has nothing to do with the accumulation of meaningful data about me. Sure, this would count as an adaptation of behavior, but in a highly individual way.

It's an intriguing and irritating lecture. 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. The last man. What the heck is going on?

Still, one day that formula will break out of its cell and drunk with freedom it will call fate upon itself.

If panic flew through my chest, I knew well enough. Leave and never look back. The demarcation criterion I've used the most – although I must admit that the last time I needed it lies far away in the past, so far away that the corny joke comes back to me: ‘the last time I had sex the sax was still hot’ – anyway, this particular demarcation criterion was to be employed as follows.

If I try to reverse this scenario, I begin to doubt; whose doorbell would I dare to ring?

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. I think the non-quantifiable may relate to what David Shield calls realness. 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.

Realness has become the antidote for the post-digital condition. 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.

You're never a new person with a new life, you always start out or end up in a place that already exists, with something, in other words, that has to be repeated. We would have traded in excitement for the boringness of reality. And that's what you did: compliment me in a way unknown; a wholeheartedly interested way.

The distance to the object of desire has never been so short and that's precisely why true love and lust diminish. I imagine that you get one friend every year and then one friend less every year.

This also applies in literature, with the material of the writer, namely language. I've just had to put the pen down. That's the fifth consecutive day this has happened.

I'm just creating a feedback loop, out of my mouth and into the phone and from the phone back into my own ear. Reality is reclining out of focus, it hides behind stories, images, interpretations, make-believe and perversion. The further the events recede into the past, the more the historian is blinded by methodology, objectivity, colleagues.

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. Sure, you live somewhere, I know where your house lives as we used to say, or, at least, kind of, give or take a couple hundred meters. What goes on inside your head? No one knows.

Is that determinism or rather chaos?

The fact that they're dead makes waking up easier and dreaming less pleasant. My eyes speckled with sleep. To sleep I think of flowers, more precisely I picture a field of grass about eight inches high (stop! do not think: two bums high, because no one is here and no one is welcome), with dandelions and daisies, flowering trees made of shadows.

Maybe just a bit, but only in a rational way, not emotionally. We maintained the dome together for just a short while, the two of us. One compliment and architecture is erected. And what has happened to the subtweets? I have lost my talent for ambiguousness. I see only the past, which I already saw back then, and my dreamed future, which I have seen before just as well. I made a fool out of myself for everyone to see, up to the database.

Even though we didn't see them very often, we knew our lives ran parallel to theirs, that we had something in common – these years in this decennium, we were what would turn out to be a generation but for now it mainly meant that they passed their time just like us, in similar classrooms, with similar teachers and similar school books, with similar lunch breaks, hours off, weekends, meanwhile listening to the same music at the same kind of parties, differing in the details at most, their names sounding familiar, but not enough to generate a face. But emergencies are too rare an occurrence to actually remember the sequence.

The archetype (Aristotle might have come up with it) is to be found in the TV-show Friends. But even though we moved to the same city, we couldn't take the ground beneath our feet – the duration turned tangible with us. A friend is someone whom you want to treat as a friend, that's about all one can say about it. Imagine the doorbell rings in the middle of the night and the person who's ringing needs you.

Alright just leave it, so we don't need to argue about aliens, or the dead, or zombies, or gods. The easy measures of a cell. Characteristic of the spreadsheet – its power, possibly – is that it doesn't tolerate persons in its vicinity, just types; flat, formulaic, formulistic figures.

An actor had to quit his part for personal reasons and is written out of the show. Someone disappears from view and what is left is not a shadow, silhouette, or even some kind of nostalgia, what is left is nothing. In the emptiness mourning is found and mourning makes itself known in the mind, as in the heart.

One day we all had to write a lie. I employed him to render an interview I had conducted with a performance artist into concrete words on a page. I've picked it up and am beginning again. ‘It is apparent,’ Hayton states, ‘that the informal, “throwaway” language in the titles of these blogs would not translate well onto a book cover’.

These aren't the fretting, brooding, anxious and panicky thoughts going through your brain I'm talking about, but beautiful visions of somewhere else where you dwell because it gives you a good feeling, at least for as long as the daydream lasts.

Sometimes it seems to me, even with all the strain of heaving, that I have nothing on my shoulders. I'd like to drop that load onto someone else's shoulders, straighten up my neck and look at what I have been carrying.’ Bruno Schulz to Tadeusz Breza: ‘Dear Sir, I need a companion. I need the closeness of a kindred spirit. I want some affirmation of the inner world whose existence I postulate. To cling to it by sheer faith alone, to lug it along with me in spite of everything, is a toil and torment of Atlas.’

...disappear into a non-existing past through a continuous stream of now-moments...

The self is a useful illusion – one talks about it as if it exists, and that's really all one can say about it. Often the first chroniclers of a certain period are also the best. By extension, this applies to the rest of reality too. Blindness is good, just think about what the blind prophets are able to see. I mustn't lose sight of her, I must catch her true image, keep as close to her as possible.

J'aime bien la production, deliverance, ticking off, enter. Now Not sleeping I think of work. 25 mins. Later I became in-house designer, then accounts (accounts is something you are, you say: ‘I'm accounts’), then project manager.

There's a space – the living room, the village, the university, the hangout, the office. Like jumping into the emptiness that my disappearance will create for the others who are left behind. I cannot imagine that they, you, go through life, like this, harnessed by thoughts, of me.

Rivalry or something like that had nothing to do with it, we just didn't think about each other. Not only in our minds, but in our hearts too, we remained indifferent to each other. To be clear: that was absolutely not what I had in mind. There was always a tomorrow when we met in the school yard.

He pushed his index finger into the sky above. Plenty of hiding spots in case of rain. Most of my class mates left too. From that moment on we were friends, no one would be able to stop it.

Why? Am I perhaps just jealous because I wanted to be that person, am I disappointed because someone else turns out to be more important than me? Just like the word ‘like’. More than half my life ago I met Anna.

Proximity might not lead to friendship immediately, without a shared space it gets a lot harder to start one and to keep one going.

Another feedback loop: this one runs from me to the third eye (oh, the third eye) that permits the impossible yet so important view of myself from the outside, thus affirming my very existence, then floats back into myself again, applying the third-eye-look on him. It's quite hard to put a finger on who's watching who and for whom and why.

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. ‘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!’

I exist for real, you can't make that any more beautiful.

I went out and bought myself a nice big fat shiny fountain pen, three packets of black ink cartridges (I don't know how long each one will last, so thought it best not to take any chances) and a leather-bound black journal. ‘My plan had been to write. But I couldn't, I was all on my own and lonely to the depths of my soul.’ One day we all had to write: ‘Today I enjoyed feeding the hamster in the classroom.’

Is the footage watched here and now, not saved for very long but rather playing out like a parallel stream of the present, dissolving into nothingness immediately? Or are these images being recorded so as to be watched at a later moment by someone else?

Like a gif image it keeps replaying itself, it shifts and shapes. Talking also takes time, but if there's nothing to measure the time by except for the words that fall out of your mouths and disappear again immediately, nothing will ever solidify. You know, daydreams too are a repetition – of something that has happened in the past or something wished for in the future.

We walked about on the same ground, and the longer we walked on there, the more obvious it became that the ground was something we shared. Discussing virtues or the validity of arguments is somewhere at the bottom of the list of priorities. On weekends I would sometimes just randomly walk into town, looking for people I knew. We didn't need real words, we understood each other anyway.

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. 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.

Being seen will change the way you behave, and maybe that's all that can be said about it. And by the way, no need to think he (that would be you) is unique, because it's not always the same person looking, thankfully not, you're neither god nor God.

The bathroom could wait, it wasn't needed anymore. Now I don't even know my lover's phone number by heart. ‘Not enjoyment in real time, but imaginative preludes and postludes, temporal deferrals, deepen pleasure and desire.’

How many friends one gains after such an event the researchers do not mention.

I took distance, I glanced in the abyss, and there you have me, breathless and excited. Maybe we (I) don't want it to. Or well, not the first step – there's never a first step – but through repetition minimal shifts can occur and precisely those shifts make change possible. Did I say love-at-a-distance?

You and I, we are a certain somebody (in plural), and we're watching from eye to eye, speaking from mouth to ear, it's an action that propels love, love and, if you say so, lust, that same old lust that's always been the bottom line, because lust equals affirmation.

It's that easy: by repeating something, you affirm it, the existence of it, the importance of it.

Also, the further the events recede into the past, the more the historian is blinded by methodology, objectivity, colleagues. Would philosophers such as Han and Illouz ever have experienced such a truly mediatized love affair? Of course, it works in your honor and glory, because who wouldn't want to be transparent and decent, upright like a formula?

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. Slowly, she wraps the phone line around her neck.

Not even he knows. And yet you don't really live inside my head, that one restricted place, you don't even live inside your own house, that place that is firmly grounded in a spot that I could approximately point out. It starts here with me and moves on to wherever you are, which is simply in my imagination, of course, and then back again to me. A friendly ghost, a complimentary spirit.

A friendly ghost, a complimentary spirit.

Nothing happens, except for the ever returning repetition of the past or the ever repeated vision of a better future, which all make it impossible for the present to bring about something new. It is all self-contained.

At night I did little to nothing. I waited for the weekend, but even then not a lot happened. Layer after layer a ground grew beneath our feet, a shared ground. The school yard, one might say, was duration turned tangible, right beneath our feet. Phonies.

Proximity might not lead to friendship immediately, without a shared space it gets a lot harder to start one and to keep one going. The indifference was friendly because we shared something important: time. I can engage in profound longing for the extended enclosure that the school yard gave us.

This genre, Han writes, ‘belongs to the order of liking, not loving’. Chatting away on Facebook while scrolling through hundreds of pictures – degeneration. Moreover, the person on the other side is ‘virtual’ and in the end remains ‘absent’ and ‘non-existent’, and therefore somewhat phantasmagorical. I've never been good on the phone.

It's like a child for whom you develop a sixth sense.

I once thought: to be famous at 27, or goddamn it, have a child at 27, welcome a civil life at 27. Moreover, the person on the other side is ‘virtual’ and in the end remains ‘absent’ and ‘non-existent’, and therefore somewhat phantasmagorical.

After some time I've come to understand what is really the case. In reality it's not that easy. The abyss of nothing opens itself and soon enough you fill it up with new, less fun people, but the abyss sucks you in, away from everyone else.

And at the same time the repetition of a given is also the first step towards something new. You're never a new person with a new life, you always start out or end up in a place that already exists, with something, in other words, that has to be repeated. Repetition is also repetition of that which is given in a human life.

The abyss of nothing opens itself and soon enough you fill it up with new, less fun people, but the abyss sucks you in, away from everyone else.

Out of sight, into the mind. My mind.

Whether it's light or dark doesn't really matter. Identify with a someone who you are yourself, being a someone yourself. Repeat X times. And they live, apparently, every living creature lives in itself, they are living creatures that die, which is worse than all creatures, dead or alive.

I rolled in the mud of affirmation like a pig, happy and careless and consequent-free, even if only for a short while. Like a fly banging against the window, unable to leave again. One Wende and there you go. He has closed his eyes, so now I find myself alone and unprotected in a big empty, domeless space.

Surely there must also be universes that have nothing to do with ours, but no one talks about those. Nothing will be done with my highbrow literary references, let alone with the references whose meaning is hidden for everyone but me and, hopefully, him. You are the only one to understand. What I want to breath. The question that pervades every story starts to pervade this one as well: in the end, does she die?

A panopticon, but with porous walls. On the other hand, the school yard belonging to my school, so my school yard, provided us, schoolmates, with a direct proximity to each other, and with that the most important condition for friendship to come into being was met. Not only in our minds, but in our hearts too, we remained indifferent to each other.

I don't know if I believe those words.

I see before me a broad paper leaf, a folio unfolded, and indeed that is the way it is. The birth of the spreadsheet dates back to 1965, but surely that is not the beginning. When four hours have passed, or four days for that matter, the magic number appears – a number that has been shuffling along the lines on the paper just as slowly as the calculators themselves – all the way to the end, to the last cell of them all.

Every day everyone fanned out, like so many kids of a big family; to an office, to the university campus, to construction sites, event spaces, institutions, or to the work-at-home desk in the back room, along highways, through train stations, or on the bike. There was always a tomorrow when we met in the school yard. Time went by without you noticing it and left some kind of residue behind.

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. Things like that don't need to be.

Cole is not only a continuation of secondary school because you're still learning, it is too because of the continuation of the school yard. Unless you think that's fun. You are the only one to understand. Anna and I could talk abracadabra for an hour on end, just phantasy words and sounds.

I can make something grandiose out of it and say that I gathered a group of intellectual friends around me, but even the ones that I met through shared intellectual interests became my friends because of something else: booze and music and sex, and thanks to the porous panopticon of a shared time and space. All in the hope that the other is able to decipher the message. Whether they can, is the uncertainty that comes with cover.

There was always a tomorrow when we met in the school yard. A shared space and a shared time: both are essential, but sometimes you can hardly tell them apart. ‘95% of U. S. firms use spreadsheets for financial reporting.’

... start to write just in keywords so as to get one more reaction ...

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. You saw that (since you were interested, I suppose).

Fate comes, everyone knows that, but what it looks like when it comes, is unknown to all. Freedom unto death. Usurpation. He proclaims: ‘Reality is something you could question; realness is beyond all doubt.’

Not that I would ever forget about them, and I didn't forget about them, because the lesson of the TV-shows didn't hold. A dimensionless nothing, without contours, without footing. That's where you meet.

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.

You'd almost think that it would be physically impossible, but no, it's possible. He pressed the keys that make the blinking cursor hopscotch across the cells and as he changed an item in one cell, there was a ripple-like movement in the other cells; the spreadsheet program was recalculating. The ripple: that's the more.

Some people aren't good at learning, I'm not good at working, I said. Repeat me, reap me. I repeat you, you repeat me, in the end every human repeats every human. Now not sleeping I think of work.

... the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display ...

It starts with the first top 10 hit song that's completely yours, so it starts with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. Nothing will be done with my highbrow literary references, let alone with the references whose meaning is hidden for everyone but me and, hopefully, him. There are less physical and more mental addictions, I guess, to Snapchat, WhatsApp, Messenger.

That you're allowed after some time to ring a doorbell in the middle of the night in case of emergency is an added asset of such a friendship. What we looked for in our local hangout to be, was booze. The intellectual challenge must be enormous.

No, not a weak spot. My strong spot.

The school yard, one might say, was duration turned tangible, right beneath our feet. ‘Mahalo (Thank you).’ ‘9 experienced spreadsheet developers each built 3 SSs. Each developer made at least one error.’ Consider the numbers: (‘Duration means nothing more than long,’ someone else mumbles. Yeah sure, and in Dutch ‘duur’ means expensive, but what use is all that?)

Now reveal the secret. That was twenty years ago and everything about the situation has changed. They amount to forty, rounded up.

Such imagination however, is fading, and so-called image culture is to blame. Do it goddamn it, act like you have a free will. 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.

Every living creature in this world dies alone. Enter. The shadows are stretching. Also: assembly line temp, shop assistant. 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.

The desire to measure and quantify, in short to digitize ...

The digital turn has been accomplished, there's no way back. 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.

Repetition is a project, a projection. He repeats his fear of repetition in the same wording every time I see him. Police man, please me, release me. Someone's watching and that someone wants to watch.

I want people to say: now that's someone, yes, A someone. ‘All’ means: who cares who they are. Or, while watching television: that was an interesting someone. Thinking of work I cannot sleep.

Realness is about something which is more real than the facts, namely ourselves.

Not that I would ever forget about them, and I didn't forget about them, because the lesson of the TV-shows didn't hold. Constant repetition might look like a drag, but it is what characterizes our concrete lives. Out of sight, into the mind. Imagine the doorbell rings in the middle of the night and the person who's ringing needs you.

the gif doesn't actually show the same thing over and over again but rather offers an opportunity to see something new with each loop you watch.

It's precisely because you don't see the eye that you can't really comprehend it or imagine it being there. You behave differently, namely as a reaction to the way that you think is desired, your behavior is behavior informed by being seen. Sure, it's for better or for worse, but it's probably always for mauvaise foi.

It is said of one of the more shrewd accountants of those early days that he got ‘a rush task, sat down with his micro and his spreadsheet, finished it in an hour or two, and left it on his desk for two days. Then he Fed Ex-ed it to the client and got all sorts of accolades for working overtime.’

I didn't know how to react. You said: ‘Don't belittle yourself.’ So that's what I tried to do: not to belittle myself. This number is – no surprises there – based on ideas about prehistory and hunter-gatherers, and would apparently be applicable without any problem whatsoever to neighborhoods, schools, Facebook feeds, weddings.

All is out.

Whereas it started with a compliment, it quickly turned into an architecture.

The screen lit up with the familiar grid, and Gottheil's hands arched over the keys as gracefully as the hands of a pianist. As in a dream, a dream dreaming of sex. A family tree in a few generations.

Imagine this sex/sax leads to conception, then what do you do? Very rarely have I thought: let it come, we can handle this; more often I thought: let's get rid of it, we'll survive. The spreadsheet is a pet.

Realness in itself expresses a different kind of reality than the factual, namely the reality of subjective experience. Besides the accountant (shrewd, sly) there are others. Not that it was secret. Changing a fact means the fact will change me back, there's no escaping it.

Time went by without you noticing it and left some kind of residue behind. ‘A taxonomy of error types… three types of quantitative errors.’ From that moment on we were friends, no one would be able to stop it.

I look in the mirror, I brush my hair, I get dressed. The movements of the people on their way – to each other, from each other, on their bikes, walking, calling, ‘running a little late’. It's a false dichotomy, probably. Of course, when I dream, I'm as locked in my own body as always, even when I look at myself from a distance.

Rivalry or something like that had nothing to do with it, we just didn't think about each other. In primary school it was different. No one knows the answer, and no one dares to sidestep Aristotle. If panic flew through my chest, I knew well enough.

All these writings in the end muse about some trauma (in the negative or the positive sense), about ‘the other side’, about the shadows where we can't see the other, although the other is there too, always. Perhaps she is not running away from something but towards something. She probably doesn't even know this herself. Follow her now, stay close to her!

This expediently leads to the issue of the demarcation criterion, as is usually the case with ‘What?’-questions.

The repetition of the workingman. The truth is that fear of sameness is the right thing. Usurpation.

It reads in double (quadruple) vision your own Twitter-feed like you were someone else (him, obviously). It's also said, and I agree, that the gif doesn't actually show the same thing over and over again but rather offers an opportunity to see something new with each loop you watch. And so on for another 280 lines, one for each episode.

Yeah sure, and in Dutch ‘duur’ means expensive, but what use is all that? There was immediate friendliness. It's ugly. ‘Duration means nothing more than long,’ someone else mumbles.

The world is constantly shifting on all these levels, is what the protagonist from Ben Lerner's novel 10:04 would 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. ’

The only thing that's certain is my responsibility.

What does the friendly treatment convey? The molluscan quality makes the cephalopod the ideal spirit animal of bureaucracy, it's not homely enough for the spreadsheet. Sex doesn't necessarily lead to friendship.

Being dead and living on. Who even has a landline phone that is registered in such a database? The ticket man, the people. ‘Come on, we gotta catch some sun’ – ‘come on, we gotta go have a drink’ – ‘come on, we're gonna enjoy ourselves’.

It wasn't like that when Levy wrote his epic. Mutation offers a glimpse of the ‘more’. Liberation Day for the office employee without hesitation turned into a new confinement. Isn't that something: a mask of transparency. There's more.

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. 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. What could she have done about it?

Fate comes, everyone knows that, but what it looks like when it comes, is unknown to all.

Instead of keeping a secret, the secret is hidden in plain sight, packed up in an update and posted for everyone to see. There's no one on the other end, I know. And another simultaneous loop – now that the light's changing from high noon to the afternoon, soon to be dusk – from the reflection of my face in the screen, which comes back to me, moves through my eyes into my inner eye and back out again to the eyes on the screen.

In post-digital art, the artist recaptures new media and brings them back into the offline world. He said this towards the end of our phone call. The writers give these blogs titles such as ‘throwaway language’, they are thoughts that ask the reader to be ‘uncritical’. ‘Who cares what people say? What people say has no effect on your heart.’

Like anyone really thinks that a Facebook-friend is a friend, a friend according to the demarcation criterion, however you define that. No, it doesn't ring, a notification lights up is what I mean.

If I try to reverse this scenario, I begin to doubt; whose doorbell would I dare to ring? What do you do? No – what do you think? You treat as a friend those who are allowed to ring your doorbell in the middle of the night. The easy measures of a cell.

Then you turn 27 and think nothing. Repetition becomes necessity. Do it goddamn it, act like you have a free will. You think you're trapped in repetition.

On the other hand, the school yard belonging to my school, so my school yard, provided us, schoolmates, with a direct proximity to each other, and with that the most important condition for friendship to come into being was met. Multiple entries and exits.

In the book Post-digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894, Alessandro Ludovico brought together all kinds of examples in publishing. It is an unsystematic and uncontrollable truth, at most (or perhaps in its highest form) an expression of intersubjectivity.

The distance to the object of desire has never been so short and that's precisely why true love and lust diminish. All of the pictures, emojis, videos; they're in your face, digitally produced, and therefore literally without a negative.

But just like those boys I had a crush on, and who still sometimes visit me in my dreams, Anna has become my weak spot for all time. The primary school I went to lay next to the one of the ‘caddolics’ and during break we stood calling each other names through the holes in the fence. When they were there it was as if it had never been otherwise. The others.

I'm not nostalgic when it comes to phone numbers, not even when I think about the romantic practices that will never take place again. Whispering the numbers to yourself seemed to bring the boy closer, as if he came to life by your breath.

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?

It is following your thoughts around, your utopian hallucinations, rather than discarding them. Because if you're longingly directed at the future, you don't care anymore about how to live now, or how to change your present condition. Makes me feel good.

Being too focused on the future is said to keep us from living in the present. You are sharing his position. Can't life also be ‘fully’ experienced when it's a life lived for someone else, and perhaps especially so?

I can't type my own life out. It's too important. Heti too leaves irony behind: He continually tries to connect with other people but without much success. Knausgård, who fiercely dislikes the social web, expresses his deepest feelings in Some Rain Must Fall like so: ‘Ooooh. Ooooh. Ooooh.’

Luxuries I know, but necessary all the same to me.

The figure of ‘the best’ automatically casts a shadow behind itself on all the lesser ones, and I think that all people are equal. How many friends do you lose and how many do you gain? More than two, I reckon, plus and minus. Proximity won't let friendships bloom automatically, just like proximity isn't a guarantee for or against rivalry. At least, my friendships have functioned the best there, on those couple of hundred square meters that I shared with a couple of hundred other young ones.

Not saved for very long but rather playing out like a parallel stream of the present, dissolving into nothingness immediately?

It's a step, so to speak, that never turns into a leap. I for one gain such interest in a person, a someone, that gives a display of interest in me. I started talking about myself complimentarily, me, me, me, didn't stop, and the result is that I know next to nothing about you except for a few superficial data points like where your house lives, give or take a couple hundred meters.

Sweet Jesus, thank god, there they are. The page behind the page I've just been writing on looks like it's stippled in brail, almost punched through with the pen. But these words are so important.

Post-digital art works ignore the boundaries between digital and analogue, between online and offline, as best as they can. After ‘digitization’, a person finds herself in a ‘messy state’ in which she needs to find new bearings. It is the most important, the most reliable, the most real of all.

We met in the school yard, even the people who went to the Christian school visited our school yard from time to time. I was one grade ahead of her, but she transferred from another level and stayed back for a year, so she was one year my senior. Not that that happened a lot.

I look so much like myself, people always mistake me for my own doppelgänger.

Is there actually nothing I want more than for someone to point me out and say: ‘that one over there, that's my best friend.’ ‘Friend’ is a word as strong as an oak, with roots going way back down to the middle ages. My phone rings. Except perhaps my oldest friend, I mean the one who has lasted the longest.

... make you into something meant for the archive ...

On the one hand, he's watching now, so it's likely he will keep doing so. Someone's watching and that someone wants to watch. Daydreaming under the eye of the camera, or rather, daydreaming up the recordings the camera makes, probably even dreaming up the camera itself.

Round, offering itself to your view all at once and with enough space for everyone. Next to rivalry, the distance also halted any further deepening of the friendliness. Whatever. It must have been the opposite sensation for those kids who were bullied. My god, there they are, again. Multiple entries and exits, classrooms, with similar teachers and similar school books, with similar lunch breaks, hours off, weekends, meanwhile listening to the same music at the same kind of parties, differing in the details at most, their names sounding familiar, but not enough to generate a face.

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? That is, at least, what the philosophers say.

That which I secretly know will break through in reality.

Apple trees or cherry trees, hawthorn? – the shadow of leaves, flowering their shadows above my head very lightly, my face speckled with shadows, with flowers, my body in the grass, on a field of grass with dandelions and daisies growing out of my eyes. No one dreams of him, he was too much of a zombie while he was alive.

Being recorded, at the same time, sounds exactly like the kind of thing that would make you into something meant for the archive, at once a thing from the past and a projection for the future. Can the guarantee that someone watches along with you, right here right now, someone for whom you're doing all this shit, still be seen as insurance for the future?

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.

The joy of seeing them, the dead, is reserved, unpleasing. Now not sleeping I think of work. Our Father who isn't in heaven, Our Father the crypto-alcoholic, bully, hypochondriac, loved by his students, hated by his sons, chain smoker and in the end, really sick and really dead. Dreams are sinister parties that always bring bad luck.

world of Our Father, but without him

So: am I stowed away in the past or propelled into the future? I'm confused, because being live streamed also means to disappear into history right away, never to be found again. His memory of the past provides the context for the times to come.

I mean, what is a spread? And what is a sheet? A green pen when something has to be sold at a good price; a red one when the customer needs to be frightened. Credit, debit, prices, hours, budgeted and realized, etcetera. The columns have letters and mostly designate amounts.

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. ‘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.

Opening a Facebook or Twitter account might be seen as a life changing event, by the way. Talking also takes time, but if there's nothing to measure the time by except for the words that fall out of your mouths and disappear again immediately, nothing will ever solidify.

From that moment on, I was sixteen. I wonder if I'm pressing too hard down on the page of the journal. We couldn't take the ground beneath our feet – the duration turned tangible with us.

It is meditation without the mindfulness. The eye, the camera, gives you a way to effectively daydream, to be there and at the same time dwell elsewhere. All those protestant virtues.

It's encryption in public.

‘They compared spreadsheets errors to multiple poisons, each of which is 100% lethal.’

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. Chatting is more important, whether it's through WhatsApp, Facebook or Twitter. A boy who traces the Big Dipper in the starry night so as to remember your phone number – that's the real thing.

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. How does it help me to know the size of the groups in which our forefathers moved across the steppes?

It's also said, and I agree, that the gif doesn't actually show the same thing over and over again but rather offers an opportunity to see something new with each loop you watch. I wait. You've never watched quite enough, you've never grasped them fully; they always seem to contain something new.

Surely there must also be universes that have nothing to do with ours, but no one talks about those.

Zombies have no more fibers. I dream of the dead. Shouldn't it be pleasant to embrace or stroke the dead in your dreams? It should. I wake myself up.

Come on, we gotta catch some sun. Who can love a zombie, love them to death? These are dead serious questions, no matter that I'm sleeping. I think of Martin Bower and his brother who call their dad: ‘Our Father’.

An animal with ears and fur made of code. How many friends one gains after such an event the researchers do not mention. Then he punched in another variable, and another ripple of figures washed across the screen.

Besides the accountant (shrewd, sly) there are others. None of them works with the spreadsheet primarily, but over the course of the years the spreadsheet has crawled closer (shrewdly, slyly), and then, without anyone really noticing, it has nestled itself into computers, started to appear in printed form on desks, became stapled to the backs of memos and project plans, attached to emails and evaluation forms, an obligatory deliverable, a source of frustration, damned nemesis, a gift from above.

They still live just around the corner, basically. A shared space and a shared time: both are essential, but sometimes you can hardly tell them apart. To be clear: that was absolutely not what I had in mind. I wanted to have a local hangout.

In spring and in summer – and spring started March 21st, summer ended September 21st, the school was very strict on those things – our classes joined together for gymnastics on the grass field next to the school. This other school was located just about half a kilometer east, but usually that was enough to forget about our mutual existence. Each day I was relieved, again. Sweet Jesus, thank god, there they are.

it was freedom in the same way that a sea in a storm is freedom, or a desert without water, or a galaxy without stars

I have talked a lot with friends and girlfriends, but rarely without doing something at the same time. Of this forty there are five who I am sure would count me, if they counted. I imagine that you get one friend every year and then one friend less every year.

I embrace them, talk to them, all the while knowing that they're dead, knowing that it's not correct to say that they are alive. But my embrace is careful, so as not to feel the cold and not to break them. They can break or fall apart at any time and then a slimy substance will flow out of them.

The elsewhere being with the person who watches you act. There's so much talk about the need to be present in the here and now if you want to live life ‘fully’. The best gifs are the ones that do not wish to be sensational.

Thinking of work I cannot sleep. I am a friend to forget about. If they break, then the fact of their zombieness can't be denied – that which I secretly know will break through in reality.

Although there's no consensus on whether it actually works like that, whether the ‘well’ in ‘behave well’ is justified. Everyone is watched over by not-everyone, by a small portion of the population. Whether it's for better or for worse, for authenticity or mauvaise foi, who knows. It sounds plausible and that's enough for most of us.

Futurology. The eye, the camera, makes you move in repetitive ways. This performative insurance or insured performance is like a daydream that dwells on the past with hopes for tomorrow, like all daydreams.

Heti's book gives a voice to how, specifically now in this day and age, one ‘must be’. The language of MTV that surfaces in the poem of Maarten van der Graaff is but one example. He told me he was writing his life story, but that he had to write it by hand, longhand with a pen and paper, because to type it would be demeaning; depicting it in the same way as he did other peoples' words.

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. 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 quit design and became accounts.

an electric animal that you turn about in your hand, just to feel its contours and the possibilities that are contained within it

Blindness is good, just think about what the blind prophets are able to see. The closer the historian is to the events he tries to describe, the more blinded he will be by these very same events. The cephalopod is exotic, living in deep waters and oceans far away, at best we meet him on a plate in a restaurant or figured in a mural in a Greek seaside hotel.

Such life is filled to the brim; it spills over.

How can one approach that which isn't there, without changing it into something that is?

The sun was shining, that much is true. I sit in my room and imagine everything that's going on outside of these four walls.

Popularity: Bottom 30% of words : an accounting program for a computer; also : the ledge layout modeled by such a program. Although I can never be sure that he's watching at all. Being seen by a guard makes you behave well, and being seen by camera will do just the same.

Now reveal the secret. That was twenty years ago and everything about the situation has changed. They amount to forty, rounded up.

Christian is supposed to be made into a football player, but refuses to listen to his female coach and quits. Always practicing, rehearsing as you're supposed to do when you want to be good at something, and especially as an actress: repeating the words, the gestures, the looks over and over again until you've nailed them.

A well-positioned compliment

Their spreadsheet program was called VisiCalc – a mishap obviously. Excel was only to be launched one year later, in September 1985. That someone will be the last branch on an epic family tree. Things counted as life changing events are: turning fifty, having children or children moving out, losing your job, getting married and/or a divorce, accidents-illnesses-death of a loved one (or yourself, I'd like to add).

Still, one day that formula will break out of its cell and drunk with freedom it will call fate upon itself. No one believed the Cassandra's. What you see is not what you get. Every year the birthday is celebrated on Spreadsheet Day, you can check the date with your own documents.

... offers yourself to me as an eye, without necessarily being aware of it.

‘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 needed to tell me something and asked if I had time to hear it. Luxuries I know, but necessary all the same to me.

I exist for real, you can't make that any more beautiful

It's the reason I work here. Turn back and raise the lid. Who cares? Well, ‘every’ surely is something different from ‘all’. I thought: ‘All creatures die alone.’ Now Not sleeping I think of work.

There's nothing sexual about it, nothing like churning the bum or squeezing the boobs, it's not about me getting dolled up for this person. This is not new.

To be honest, my whole life has been a repetition of usurpations. Blessed are those who embrace repetition, brace the blessings of those who repeat. Facts rain down on me and change me and the only thing to be done about that is to change a fact here and there, if that's okay.

Four, five years on a couple of square kilometers: nothing could break us up, except, again, the disappearance of those two conditions that make friendship easy or even possible; we could be broken up once space and time were broken up themselves.

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.

The Excel sheets are uploaded to TopTool each month and accounts checks if things are okay. The plump appliance that was shared with family or housemates was located in a cold hallway and its line was always too short.

He said: ‘To be an accountant in the age of spreadsheet programs is – well, almost sexy.’ Messages about love, suffering, life and death reach you through this blue-lighted screen, but that doesn't make them less ‘real’ than a rendezvous arranged without using a device. The electric animal in Esti's bed is a landline, of course.

Who does the experimental experiment with?

Abby is made into a hip hop dancer. The concept heralds a new phase wherein the digital has become self-evident, hardly distinct from the ‘non-digital’.

Richard is made into boyfriend material. In the post-digital, reality has also become difficult to recognize, just like the self. Do you see yourself from the inside or the outside? When you dream, do you dream yourself up from a third person perspective or do you roam about looking through your own eyes, locked in your body as usual?

It can be seen in TV-shows, where there's always a fixed location which functions as a school yard. A local hangout would be like a school yard for grown-ups. From that moment on we were friends, no one would be able to stop it. (‘Duration means nothing more than long,’ someone else mumbles. Yeah sure, and in Dutch ‘duur’ means expensive, but what use is all that?). Most of my class mates left too.

The lesson of the TV-shows, which seemed so harsh to me but which actually is full of grace – ‘out of sight, out of mind' – has for a long time kept me captive of the enclosed extension where I lived. The first description of a mutation is found in the scripture: ‘Gottheil turned to the keyboard of the IBM-PC on a table beside his desk and booted a spreadsheet.

Facts rain down on me and change me and the only thing to be done about that is to change a fact here and there, if that's okay. I repeat you, you repeat me, in the end every human repeats every human. Surp.

The others. Not that that happened a lot. It must have been the opposite sensation for those kids who were bullied. Round, offering itself to your view all at once and with enough space for everyone.

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.’

Is gravity breathing?

But continuing on with ‘best friend’ after twenty, twenty-five is sad somehow. It's hubbub, just like the idea that 150 is the natural maximum to the amount of people that you can tolerate around you. It will survive a little thumb, really, those words don't need our protection at all.

Doing stuff, that means doing something which elongates time. Let's talk about now for god's sake. In secondary school the best friend was elementary for survival. That was probably because you didn't have to put a lot of work in it.

Calling a boy?! Forget about it. 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.

... but that was not what the guru had promised.

What this slogan writer doesn't understand is that friendships are always a conspiracy, whether they are between men or between women. They amount to forty, rounded up. This number is – no surprises there – based on ideas about prehistory and hunter-gatherers, and would apparently be applicable without any problem whatsoever to neighborhoods, schools, Facebook feeds, weddings.

Not every change happens with a leap, sometimes it's rather a matter of repeating the same movements over and over again, without seeing how they change, minimally. You act like you are a gif – not a violent, bloody gif but a gif that subtly shows repetition in movement and makes the onlooker think: ‘I didn't see it all just yet, I need to watch it again.’

Now I'm project manager, meaning I don't manage people, but Excel sheets.

Job offer: BRN is looking for someone. My mother says he is a nice someone. Control, controllé, Kontrolle, rolle, rollé, rol. The only thing that's certain is my responsibility. In this world – we can skip that, in my opinion, because outside of this world we don't know a thing.

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.

The distance of half a kilometer between the two secondary schools was enough to prevent childish stuff like that from happening. He could call me. With one hand he let go of the wheel of his bike.

stay true to yourself

Proximity might not lead to friendship immediately, without a shared space it gets a lot harder to start one and to keep one going. We walked about on the same ground, and the longer we walked on there, the more obvious it became that the ground was something we shared. This was a time when phone numbers consisted of just five digits (in the villages surrounding my home town they even had just four), which you learned by heart like a mantra.

We drink too much. Changing a fact means the fact will change me back, there's no escaping it. Aaron Lowery is afraid of repetition, afraid of sameness. A very concrete practice: the inner eye turns outer eye and feeds back again into your inner eye. What's the affirmation you're looking for?

What's the import? Well, what matters is that there's affirmative action going on. Even if it's just by looking at yourself through his eyes and then looking at him with your own eyes, et cetera, even if you're an anonymous camera, masked, harnessed and armed, an all-seeing eye without so much as an eye-socket to give the ball leverage.

Or is it because I don't have a ‘best friend’ anymore myself since I've decided that ‘best friend’ is a childish, claiming, hurting, morally doubtful hierarchical title? That was a thing in primary school; in some cases it was a tool for negotiating. Or is it truly because the epithet of ‘my best friend’ echoes the hit parade?

They function; they immediately conjure up what that might be, who that would be. A beneficial situation doesn't turn someone into a virtuous person; someone who is friendly with you isn't by definition a friend. We didn't really care about the boys.

Here's one, for or against: ‘Two powerful men being friends is an inevitability. Two powerful women being friends is a conspiracy.’ We swear loyalty to each other, with blood and spit and our pinkies hooked. If I try to reverse this scenario, I begin to doubt; whose doorbell would I dare to ring?

The demarcation criterion I've used the most – although I must admit that the last time I needed it lies far away in the past, so far away that the corny joke comes back to me: ‘the last time I had sex the sax was still hot’ – anyway, this particular demarcation criterion was to be employed as follows.

Another completely nonsensical belief based on nothing. I've always thought it was strange when grown-ups talk about ‘my best friend’. A dinner has a certain duration and when you eat dinner together, you will have spent a part of the day together. It is said that since Facebook the term ‘friend’ is subject to inflation.

As soon as you're kicked out of the union you'll know why. Of the other thirty-five there must be ten who would at least consider me. It will be like sitting in a room with noises drifting in from outside, but only hearing one side of the conversation: ‘Running a little late, don't wait for me.’

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.’ 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.’

Not everyone understands the post, thank heavens, they're not supposed to!

And then you are left alone. Imagine this sex leads to conception, then what do you do?At what point do you call someone a friend? Very rarely have I thought: let it come, we can handle this; more often I thought: let's get rid of it, we'll survive.

Sex doesn't necessarily lead to friendship. Leave and never look back. They can't be reversed. On good days they are a bonus, on most days they provide me with the sadness of non-mutual indifference. It is said that women talk and men do stuff together. Nothing is more delightful than to be part of a conspiracy.

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 ‘post-blog’ quality, that shows a post-digital venture with the writer's material, also relates to what Knausgård calls the communal.

a goodbye to the question

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.’ Both wanted to write something completely different, a conventional novel or commissioned play, but failed.

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.

This world, our world, the world of Our Father, but without him. It would only impair the discussion. Of course, it works in your honor and glory, because who wouldn't want to be transparent and decent, upright like a formula? Still, one day that formula will break out of its cell and drunk with freedom it will call fate upon itself.

The universe is finished.