The feeling of flowing down the bloodstream of the news on a rapidly deflating life raft: you’re about to drown, but at least you’re not missing anything. What are non-Twitter users missing by not joining in that ‘communal mind? They never have a normal sit-down with ANYONE, so they all just assume that things should be moving to the point where we’re inside each other’s minds wearing complimentary slippers. This is what happens when you let the tech guys be in charge. We’ll have capsule hotels inside our minds, probably, and people will have to come check in for an hour whenever they want to have a cup of tea and a sit-down. It’s going to be SO gross, whatever it is. If Twitter is a 21st century version of neighbourly gossip over the yard fence, what shape will chit-chat take in 2121? How will we connect, and in what language? You can feel it happening, sometimes all the way across the world. Being read is a little bit like that for me. In Haven Kimmel’s memoir A Girl Named Skippy, she talks about the delicious uncanny sensation she gets when her friend draws her. I would just have to supply all the teacup pigs and new species of tree frog myself, which would have cost a little more effort. It’s true – it’s being spoken of as a specifically internet novel, but my stream of consciousness might look like this even if the internet had never been invented. How does it feel for you, when we read your words? It felt eerily familiar and simultaneously alien. When you write about entering the portal in No One, I wasn’t thinking of the internet at first – it felt instead as though you’d hinged back your cranium and let me peer inside the portal of your head to read your random, dancing thoughts. Do you want the people you’re reading about to have driver’s licences, or do you want them to have been conceptualised by some dead guy in a waistcoat who was mad about the Industrial Revolution? They hear themselves ticking down, and they know that the question is: to what? Both books and the portal are a place to watch that happen, except that in the portal they are real.

Human beings are something that time is alive in for a little while, they are clocks that understand something of their workings.

In both books and in the portal, you are watching people pass: going about their days, eating breakfasts that are both transitory and immortal, taking off one pair of pants and putting on another. Should we look to books or to the portal for answers? ‘What is a human being?’ asks the protagonist of No One. My irrational answer is: 20,000 TWEETS? WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING WITH MY LIFE? Even in those moments when I was living my realest and most urgent life, my phone was in my back pocket, and I knew that the stream of some other consciousness was going on in there, electric and alive, as the life goes on in some closed book on your bookshelf. I have always felt them to be intertwined.

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