I don’t have any photos in my wallet, but my phone’s memory is full of screenshots. articulating this identity have never been more accessible. In 2017 Vulture published “The Rise and curating media but also of policing access. to pwn one’s statement and appropriate a There is an app for everything nowadays, and chunk of the share. Let’s admit it, though, in They are no longer images per se—more like a pile of sentimental memorabilia, or better yet of the No-Context Screenshot”1, speculating about the ‘distinct flavor’ and ‘escape velocity’ once we open it on our smartphone, we fall the gambit of lurking, blocking, and mining silent bystanders of my attempt to cure the screenshots gained that year.

I click, drag, dump, screenshot, move, delete, organize, and forget about the items on my are the days of posting a song lyric as an away message, but the impulse remains, be it in a desktop. It is a space of constant upheaval and an intimate look into what I may or may not different form. Singing, unlike a vlog or a casual talking video, is an obvious performance. It be thinking about during a given moment in time. I feel a tiny little rush when I glance at lays no claim to being authentic or relatable—things that are seen as highly profitable both someone’s desktop, over their shoulder at a coffee shop or on the projector before a presentation. socially and financially in our modern online world. I’ve been particularly interested in karaoke The desktop is the computer’s bedroom. The bedroom, once a private space that only those close to us had access to, has been thrust because it allows anyone to become a performer regardless of talent or musical skill, and while it is probably considered ‘cringe’ to post videos of yourself doing karaoke, the desire is there. into the public sphere via the internet over the past 20 years. In 2003, I started uploading Sometimes my karaoke videos get uploaded to YouTube, often they won’t. While recording photos of myself in my teenage bedroom onto blogging websites, posing in front of my bright these webcam performances there is a second performance happening on the desktop. I arrange yellow walls plastered with show flyers and ripped out magazine pages. My bedroom has been and resize windows—fitting my Photo Booth application next to a window that has a YouTube highly documented since the age of 14—I’m now 33. It has served as a backdrop for webcam karaoke video with lyrics. I began to screenshot these performances, as they were happening, videos, selfies and as a studio. There is a record of every place I’ve lived. I’ve noticed how, hitting Shift, Command, 3 as I would sing. Sometimes I would capture a single moment in a not just my bedroom, but all of our bedrooms, have evolved over time with frequent exposure song, a lyric that felt fitting to my mood, or a pose that looked flattering. Other times I would to the internet and the imagined others who would be interacting with them from their own screenshot the performance repeatedly, only to go back later and pick out the best one. bedrooms. The bedroom, once a reflection of our unkempt, messy interior worlds, has become a highly curated and manicured backdrop. Online, the bedroom becomes a set, a place where we perform. I see this most acutely on platforms such as YouTube or Twitch, where intimacy is performed for a living. Objects in the background of these videos are perfectly placed—a plant, a candle, a little sign—frame the performer, while staying slightly out of focus. If you flip through enough of these videos, you start to notice the same objects, the same signifiers across channels. Everyone’s bedroom starts to look the same. Most of these videos are not even filmed in bedrooms but in offices, extra rooms and corners of living rooms that are made to look like a bedroom. Unlike the bedroom, the desktop feels like the last unmaintained private space that we have. There are no design or organizational trends to follow and no fear of judgment for having a cluttered space. The desktop and the bedroom are linked to me—while one has evolved along with the way we have come to share online, the other remains somewhat untouched because it is rarely made public. I’m interested in the ways in which the desktop can also become a site for performance and mediation. For years I’ve been filming myself on my computer’s webcam, alone in my room, singing karaoke. There is a long history of people singing alone in their rooms online, from lo-res YouTube videos of ukulele covers to teenagers lip syncing on TikTok. I’m not sure why this impulse to share ourselves singing exists, it’s something very vulnerable that opens us up to criticism, but it also opens the door to connecting with others over the shared love of a particular song and allows us to convey a particular mood or taste without having to articulate it. Gone My screenshots folder is filled with this type of documentation. But these screenshots aren’t just pure documentation of what was occurring on the screen at that moment, they are carefully crafted compositions. The size of the windows, the background image, and even how many icons clutter the desktop were all considered in the making of these images. Even the computer’s default screenshot functions inform the performance. For example, on a Mac computer, where all of these performances happen—I’ve never once thought to do these screenshot performances on my Windows PC because aesthetically, it doesn’t feel right—a screenshot will automatically save to the desktop once it is taken. The screenshots themselves will often start to populate the screen, joining the performance themselves. Sometimes, I will pause to quickly move the screenshot off of the desktop before continuing. How can screenshots function as a site for performance when they flatten an interactive public? The screenshot exists as both an archive and a carefully crafted image. moment? The final output of these performances is almost never the video itself. Often, I The bedroom, due to its consistent exposure and presence as the backdrop of our online lives, wouldn’t even hit record on my computer’s Photo Booth, leaving no record of the actual video has gone from a private space to a highly maintained film set. The desktop, our computer’s itself. All that remains are the screenshots. Occasionally, screen recordings will happen, but that leaves too much pressure to do everything ‘correctly’ in the allotted amount of time, the bedroom, hasn’t received this treatment to the fullest extent, but has the potential to through the act of screenshotting. Here, the screenshot replaces the selfie, livestream and self-recorded screenshot distills the moment succinctly. video as a potential site for performance and mediation.

1. Google ‘staying yourself’ and you’re corrected on the first page of results: according to the search engine what you really want to know more about is how to stay true to yourself. There she goes, a fugitive, my double, a shadow, slipping in and out of the crowd, on the street, down an alley, in and out of the shops. In the sunlight I catch a quick glimpse of her hair, her coat, her face turned towards the side. I mustn’t lose sight of her, I must catch her true image, keep as close to her as possible. But perhaps she is not running away from something but towards something. Where to? She probably doesn’t even know this herself. First pulled this way, then that way, her attention is drawn towards the noises and flashing lights, special offers and signs on sale. People pulling at her sleeve and whispering in her ear, her phone buzzing and singing, the screen lighting up with a merry-go-round of messages. Follow her now, stay close to her! ‘When I set out to come here, I mean, here generally, to this town, ten days ago,’ writes Dostoevsky in Demons through the revolutionary Pyotr Stepanovich, ‘I decided, of course, to adopt a role. The best would be no role at all, just one’s own person, isn’t that so? Nothing is more cunning than one’s own person, because no one will believe you.’ If only things were so simple. Just to be one’s own person without concern about who that person is, about who is adopting a role and who is not and without the need to be known and appreciated by anyone. Almost two hundred years after Demons, it has become doctrine to find, be and stay true to yourself. No one really knows how this is accomplished, however. After all you are also expected to continually rise above yourself and reinvent yourself, again and again. We live in a performance society wherein you design your identity and play different roles in different contexts. Context collapse looms, as you act a role that doesn’t match your public at that particular moment, when for instance a photo of you partying surfaces on your boss’s timeline. And if you can’t manage to act out the performance meticulously, like a magic trick, it’s your own fault, you are obviously incompetent. Being one’s own person so that no one will believe it? I would rather adopt the role of someone else, in the hope that someone, anyone, will believe that it is me. In Sheila Heti’s novel How Should a Person Be? the main character, Sheila, laments: ‘You can admire anyone for being themselves. It’s hard not to, when everyone’s so good at it.’ There’s one exception, one person who is not good at being themselves: Sheila herself. Of course, we all think this: as I follow a shadow that vaguely resembles myself, people around me seem to sail through life with envious ease. How do they manage it? How do they stay themselves without any problems, while I have no idea who my own person is? To answer the question set forth in the title of the novel, Sheila turns to the people around her: friends, boyfriends, artists, career coaches, therapists. She transcribes emails, records conversations, flips through the pages of books and makes an attempt to write. Who she is, how and what she should be, be it hairdresser, queen of blowjobs, playwright, wife or recreational drug user, she does not know. Adopting a role for yourself, like Pyotr put it, may on reflection be an adequate description of modern life. What is the self, after all? Nobody really knows. Self-help gurus claim it is becoming and manifold and at the same time it exists in its authentic form; it is both dependent and ideally autonomous. You can never completely coincide with the self, never grasp it completely, but you can at least try to stay close to it. The self is a useful illusion – one talks about it as if it exists, and that’s really all one can say about it. By extension, this applies to the rest of reality too. Reality is reclining out of focus, it hides behind stories, images, interpretations, make-believe and perversion. ‘Reality’ is only one of the many contexts (and a boring one at that) in a world which is saturated with photos, videos, sounds, music, whispered, shouted and written words, language and signs, links, screens, buttons, interactive installations, acceleration and amnesia. In the post-digital condition it seems the world and reality irreversibly drift apart. 2. ‘Post-digital’ doesn’t mean that the digital era is behind us. The concept heralds a new phase wherein the digital has become self-evident, hardly distinct from the ‘non-digital’. The digital turn has been accomplished, there’s no way back. You’ll just have to put up with it, just like you live with the neutrinos that rage, billions per second, through the material body which is yours. In the post-digital, reality has also become difficult to recognize, just like the self. At the same time, it can’t be avoided either. It seems we are obsessed with reality, but before everything, the (social) media are already there, making an act of it, a story, an anecdote. In a comment on the Dutch poetry blog ooteoote, poet Maarten van der Graaff wrote the following reaction in a discussion that arose around one of his poems: ‘Even if I resist, the world in which I exist invades my language, even with only a slight cough, and that world, next to so many other and far worse things, can be mundane and exhibitionistic (...) This is no joke to me, nor some trendy influence, it is a phenomenon that drives me to despair sometimes.’ The world will always permeate the language of poets, but since the rise of the web, something has changed. There used to be a kind of delay in contact, and also it happened only by invitation – through the newspapers, TV, during dinners with friends, in the pub, at school or on the streets. Now that world is constantly available, at your fingertips, ready to be consumed in real time and acting intrusively when left unattended for too long. The world reveals itself through the screen, like a party crasher who immediately starts overbearing the party. And from all these screens, from the traditional to the new, language can be heard. In another comment Van Der Graaff describes a snapshot of that world and how it entered his poem: In this case, sentences from a episode of MTV Made invade the intimate scene between two lovers. The trivial words speak to me of a world of desire and tragedy. For example, in the concluding scene of the episode, a boy says to a girl: “I want you to feel free again.” Perhaps it is a gesture of kindness but the girl doubts his intentions. She suspects he has a hidden agenda and says: “what a good excuse.” These are no trendy phrases to me. The imperative “play it cool” is pretty creepy if you think a bit about its implications. Someone who always wants to play it cool, could look at everything they see in the world and say “what a good excuse”. MTV Made is a reality show – the hybrid genre in which one never really knows what is ‘real’ or what has been scripted and in which the distinction between the two has become irrelevant. What’s more, in the case of MTV Made, ‘reality’ is played out by teenagers (people who by definition are not what they are to become). They are ‘made’ into something they are not themselves. The Wikipedia-page of the program reads like a poem: ‘Selena is made into a surfer chick. / Richard is made into boyfriend material. / Abby is made into a hip hop dancer. / Christian is supposed to be made into a football player, but refuses to listen to his female coach and quits.’ And so on for another 280 lines, one for each episode. The series are filled with American, semi-articulate people, talking like self-help books, practicing their role in society and reflecting on their emotions with the platitudes that go with that. It doesn’t stop there. Their sentences return, translated into Dutch – ‘speel het cool’ – in the poem by Van der Graaff, published on a Dutch poetry website and reviewed and discussed by other poets, readers and critics in the comment section. I use them in my essay, which is then translated back again into English, and thus the 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.’ What a good excuse. 3. In the highly mediated, post-digital world of today, there is a strong desire for a lost and indisputable reality. An unmovable and formidable reality, which used to be the solid basis for all experience. Karl Ove Knausgård brings this longing to the fore: even though he doesn’t seem particularly fond of the internet, he is somewhat an historian of the post-digital condition. In Some Rain Must Fall, book 5 of* My Struggle*, he tells of his introduction to the world wide web: Something else at Student Radio which I hadn’t seen before was the Internet. This was also addictive. Moving from one page to the next, reading Canadian newspapers, looking at traffic reports in Los Angeles or centrefold models in Playboy, which were so endlessly slow to appear, first the lower part of the picture, which could be anything at all, then it rose gradually, the picture filled the frame like water in a glass, there were the thighs, there, oh, there was … shit, was she wearing panties? … before the breasts, shoulders, neck and face appeared on the computer screen in the empty Student Radio office at midnight. Rachel and me. Toni and me. Susy and me. Hustler, did they have their own website as well? Rilke, had anyone written about his Duino Elegies? Were there any pictures of Tromøya? Knausgård traces the emergence of his series of six novels,My Struggle, back to his dislike for fiction, without really knowing where this dislike came from or what to do about it. For him it had something to do with the fact that the unreal world of the media is ever more present, is gradually becoming the only world we live in. If the whole world is already saturated by fiction, why add more stories to it? Knausgård prefers to show real life, the real life of a real person in an increasingly fake world. So he begins to write about himself – beyond the limited categories of fiction and non-fiction or autobiography and history. Knausgård work, just like Heti’s, has been associated with ‘autofiction’, the French avant-garde genre from the 70s. In autofiction, a transgression is made between reality and fiction as the writer constantly moves between the two. He may use his own name, date of birth and birthplace, the ‘vital data’ for a real person, but after that he flowingly crosses autobiographical and fictional boundaries in his narrative. Moving back and forth between the two does, however, imply that the two domains remain intact. Heti and Knausgård take it a step further; in the post-digital the boundaries between the two have become redundant, and in that case moving back and forth has become impossible. In the sixth and last book of My Struggle, Knausgård writes about ‘virkelighedshunger’: the longing for something real in a world that is becoming more and more unreal. It is the same term that David Shields uses as title for his manifesto in book form: Reality Hunger. Shields argues for a literature that goes beyond the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. Made up of all kinds of quotes and fragments, Shields describes as one of the first the effect of the internet on contemporary literature: a contemporary literature that relates to the existential repercussions of never being offline anymore and which deals with the blurring distinction between private and public, with a world in which connectedness is becoming the driving force of social life. The correspondence between Knausgård’s and Shield’s reality hunger may be a coincidence or not, I don’t know (befitting post-digital times); the original, Norwegian edition of Book 6 was published in 2011, a year after Shield’s manifesto. Both writers do follow the same line of thought. David Shields relates ‘reality hunger’ explicitly to the supremacy of the unreal, to fiction and stories that submerge or even wash reality away. ‘Living as we perforce do in a manufactured and artificial world, we yearn for the “real”, semblances of the real,’ he writes. In a world in which reality has dissolved, like a lump of sugar in a cup of coffee, the very nature of reality has changed. According to Shields we need something that is true and spontaneous to life, even if this used to be viewed as subjective and hence unreliable. ‘We want to pose something non-fictional against all the fabrication – autobiographical frissons or framed or filmed or caught moments that, in their seeming unrehearsedness, possess at least the possibility of breaking through the clutter.’ To be able to handle the default of fiction, Shields seems to say, one can only abide by one’s own experience. 4. Even though reality has become swamped or even has been washed away, we are still yearning for it. In truth, it makes reality hunger futile, just like the longing to stay true to yourself when you can never truly be yourself. ‘What it’s all about,’ the Dutch writer Maartje Wortel writes in her short story ‘Schrijver II’ (‘Writer II’, from the collection Er moet iets gebeuren, which translates to Something’s got to change): ‘I don’t want to lie any more.’ And: ‘I’m not playing a game. On the contrary. I want to show people what they could possibly think if they can think whatever they want.’ It’s about showing what’s underneath all the layers of play and pretense. What becomes visible is not so much a conclusive list of hard facts but moreover, a personally experienced reality or a social reality that can be shared with others. Facts are no longer that interesting, we seem to have lost our appetite for them. Facts can even be just as fake or unreal as the rest. Knausgård writes at the end of the thousand plus pages of Book 6 of My Struggle: ‘We can try to peel away reality, layer after layer, without ever actually reaching the center of it. The last layer just covers the most unreal of everything, the biggest fiction of them all: actuality, or ownedness.’ In Knausgård’s quest for ‘real life’, the focus is not so much on objective facts as on subjective experience. An experience that doesn’t need to be only individual but which can actually point towards something shared or communal, as we’ll see later on. For Shields reality is played out too, and he also counters it with something, a precept: realness. Realness in itself expresses a different kind of reality than the factual, namely the reality of subjective experience. He proclaims: ‘Reality is something you could question; realness is beyond all doubt.’ Whereas reality is only one of many contexts in an assemblage of fictions, realness by definition goes beyond any distinction between the real and unreal. As a kind of urban form of authenticity (or ownedness, if you will), realness offers truth in a world in which factual reality seems to have become irrelevant. It is an unsystematic and uncontrollable truth, at most (or perhaps in its highest form) an expression of intersubjectivity.Realness is about something which is more real than the facts, namely ourselves. There seems to be no other alternative but to resort to ourselves as the ‘real’ world seems increasingly arbitrary and irrational, ruled by crises, unreliable politicians and plastic TV stars who need to be ‘made’; a world that cannot be satisfactorily explained by facts and causality, nor by a religious master plan, a world that is pulling at you from all sides and racing through you, like the billions of neutrinos through the body. Our personal experience, our self, if only a shadow, is the only thing keeping the world together. It is the most important, the most reliable, the most real of all. Realness has become the antidote for the post-digital condition. 5. The ‘post-digital’ was coined as a term in the year 2000 by Kim Cascone in an article on electronic music. Now it is used in the visual arts especially; the possible literary meaning of the term is undefined as of yet. Post-digital refers to a phase that begins when new media are no longer new, maintains theorist Florian Cramer: ‘the term “post-digital” in its simplest sense describes the messy state of media, arts and design after their digitisation’. Post-digital art works ignore the boundaries between digital and analogue, between online and offline, as best as they can. The revolution is over; all we have is the debris it has left behind. One of the strategies artists use to express the implications of this revolution, is to give the digital an analogue appearance. For instance, by putting a life-size Google maps-pin on a roundabout, like the artist Aram Bartholl did, or by printing out thousands of pages from Wikipedia, which happened in an art project by Michael Mandiberg. In the book Post-digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894, Alessandro Ludovico brought together all kinds of examples in publishing. The artists and writers resort to analogue production methods and materials, such as stencil machines and vinyl, but use them to research the digital. One can see this as a yearning towards the analogue but one which is completely situated in the digital. What could the post-digital mean in a literary context? Could it be interpreted even as something existential, just as ‘the post-digital condition’ suggests? I think so. Digitization not only has an impact on media, art and design but also on people. After ‘digitization’, a person finds herself in a ‘messy state’ in which she needs to find new bearings. How can people themselves be digitized? Digitization is usually explained as zeros and ones, computers and information technology but the etymological meaning of ‘digital’ means something else, says Cramer. ‘“Digital” simply means that something is divided into discrete, countable units – countable using whatever system one chooses, whether zeroes and ones, decimal numbers, tally marks on a scrap of paper, or the fingers (digits) of one’s hand – which is where the word “digital” comes from in the first place.’ All things that can be split up into countable parts are thus by definition digital. The alphabet is digital because all the letters are a distinct unit, so are the keys of a piano. A fretless violin is not, it is analogue. A man or a woman is also, presumably, analogue – doesn’t the same etymology say that individual derives from ‘undivided’? Today this is becoming less and less evident, however. The whole world has been put in a digital framework, in other words, everything has become split up and ‘atomized’ into pieces, is regarded as countable. This also applies to people themselves, however analogue they might feel with their fleeting thoughts, mysterious dreams and transient scale of emotions. The desire to measure and quantify, in short to digitize, extends itself to all kinds of humanistic, analogue terrain – all internal activities, mind, body and spirit. Google claims to already know what you are looking for before you have even formulated your question, advertisers comprehend your body and mind better than you understand them yourself, the meaning of happiness can be read from brain activity; and all are based on quantifiable data. The individual can quite easily be split into ever smaller parts, so as to count, analyze and trade her data. Just like the post-digital artist longs for the analogue, so too does the ‘atomized individual’ crave for it, not so much as a factual reality but rather as a non-quantifiable state-of-being. I think the non-quantifiable may relate to what David Shield calls realness. Hunger for a factual reality is perhaps only a symptom of a transition, an illustration of an almost old-fashioned ambition from the time that media could still be ‘new’. In the post-digital world, the hunger for factual reality has changed into a new hunger or even nostalgia, for something that is lost to data, a realness that goes beyond all categorization and counting digits. 6. What could it be then, this realness? Knausgård believes it can be found in art, language, history, domains he calls ‘communal’. These domains are not quantifiable, they are heterogeneous. They can only be experienced individually and shared subjectively. In My Struggle Knausgård makes an attempt to understand how these kinds of ‘fictional’ domains can affect reality. Their impact goes beyond the power of a single person and their strong influence thus questions an individual’s autonomy. This is precisely why this impact is more real than the facts of natural science or the chronology of history. As the Thomas-theorem in sociology states: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ Or to quote Sheila Heti again: ‘We don’t know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.’ The question of how fictions influence our life is obviously not new – let’s say it’s at least as old as the Don Quixote. The capacity to trigger ‘real consequences’ is of course enormously elaborate and occupies not only fiction as a defined category, but the media in general and even, social contexts and culture. As a so-called autonomous human being, you owe everything to yourself – you can be congratulated (and blamed) for everything that happens in your life – at the same time, all these fictions are continually affecting you without you having the power to do anything about it. That tension is central to post-digital literature. Another example is the short story ‘My Life is a Joke’ by Sheila Heti. A woman returns from the after-world to tell the story of her life and death to a public so she can finally rest in peace for eternity. What is her problem? The title already gives it away, her life was a joke: Here is the thing: I was a joke, and my life was a joke. The last man I loved – not my high-school boyfriend – told me this during our final fight. I was thirty-four at the time. During the fight, as I was trying to explain my version of things, he shouted, “You are a joke, and your life is a joke!” It’s an intriguing and irritating lecture. What the heck is going on? People say all kinds of stupid things during a fight. For this woman however this exclamation – ‘You’re a joke’ – is a matter of life and death, literally. She elaborates on the serious consequences the joke has had on her, as it became an epithet of her life: When a person slips on a banana peel and dies, then her life is a joke. Slipping on a banana peel is not how I died. When a person walks into a bar with a rabbi, a priest, and a nun, and that is how she dies, then her life is a joke. That is not how I died. When a person is a chicken who crosses the road to get to the other side, and that is how she dies, then her life is a joke. Well, that is how I died – as a chicken crossing the road to get to the other side. The exclamation that she was a joke and her life was too, may only have been a thoughtless reprimand by an ex-lover, but it has become the mythical essence of her existence. What she is, how she died, the beginning and end of everything. An absurd interpretation that has grown out of proportion. If death is the consequence, if you’re not even allowed to die but need to deliver a theatrical apology in order to truly die, what is real or not becomes completely trivial. What could she have done about it? Absolutely nothing, except to give account of her crushing defeat in front of a gathered crowd. 7. In post-digital art, the artist recaptures new media and brings them back into the offline world. This also applies in literature, with the material of the writer, namely language. The language of MTV that surfaces in the poem of Maarten van der Graaff is but one example. Sheila Heti too echoes the language of popular media. Not only emails have been included in How Should a Person Be? (which is not so shocking for a novel these days), her style, which sounds a bit awkward at first, seems to have gone through the social web. In so doing, the book gives a voice to how, specifically now in this day and age, one ‘must be’. She is, for example, exceptionally good at what sounds like inspirational quotes: ‘Cata­log what you value, then put a fence around these things. Once you have put a fence around something, you know it is something you value.’ Her heart spawns all her feelings and she scatters exclamation marks as if she were an eighteenth century sentimentalist or a keen Facebook user. ‘My heart caught on my rib. If only I could figure out what that was –­ the decision that would benefit everyone – I would do it! Knausgård, who fiercely dislikes the social web, expresses his deepest feelings in Some Rain Must Fall like so: ‘Ooooh. Ooooh. Ooooh.’ Knausgård’s style has often been described as nonchalant, his imagery as imprecise, his words too grand and indefinite. Just like Heti, he can be extremely sentimental. Seen within a post-digital context however, his style gains maximal expression: it focuses on making connections with people, sharing the things you feel and opening up who you really are, whatever that might mean. ‘Everyone was interesting, everyone had something to say that I could listen to and be moved by until I left and they were reclaimed by the darkness.’ He continually tries to connect with other people but without much success. ‘My plan had been to write. But I couldn’t, I was all on my own and lonely to the depths of my soul.’ These are pretty monumental words, yes, which he uses without an inkling of irony. Heti too leaves irony behind: For so long I had been looking hard into every person I met, hoping I might discover in them all the thoughts and feelings I hoped life would give me, but hadn’t. There are some people who say you have to find such things in yourself, that you cannot count on anyone to supply even the smallest crumb that your life lacks. Although I knew this might be true, it didn’t prevent me from looking anyway. Who cares what people say? What people say has no effect on your heart. In a roundabout way, Heti is looking for the wisdom of others; how she may learn from it, even though she doesn’t really want to listen to them when it comes down to it. The expansive, chatty but always hyperbolically serious and tongue-in-cheek way she writes, reminds one of the language of blogs, the online genre which literature has always adamantly tried to avoid. In an article by Kavita Hayton about literary weblogs from 2009, for example, blogs are viewed as an inferior form of writing, only meant as intermezzo and unfit for paper, hence their online existence. The writers give these blogs titles such as ‘throwaway language’, they are thoughts that ask the reader to be ‘uncritical’. In 2009 these words were not positive, let alone possible unique selling points. ‘It is apparent,’ Hayton states, ‘that the informal, “throwaway” language in the titles of these blogs would not translate well onto a book cover’. Heti’s title How Should a Person Be? shows how much this has changed. 8. This ‘post-blog’ quality, that shows a post-digital venture with the writer’s material, also relates to what Knausgård calls the communal. Both Heti and Knausgård maintain the myth that after a long struggle with themselves and the outside world, they quite naturally, even automatically wrote the book we are reading now (in reality, so to speak). Both wanted to write something completely different, a conventional novel or commissioned play, but failed. They struggled with this up to the point of self-hatred and eventually gave up. As happened before on blogs, the writers share with the reader their experience of how much effort is needed to produce something. In the end, they only succeed in writing when they just sit down and let it happen, once they put their ‘adopted role’ on hold, decide to let go and let themselves be carried along with the flow of the world. It is only by surrendering to a kind of écriture automatique that they are able to come closer to themselves and they are longing to show the reader how this process works. Maartje Wortel writes in the aforementioned story ‘Writer II’: ‘Marie. She says she would rather I didn’t write about her. I exist for real, you can’t make that any more beautiful. I don’t want to make it more beautiful, I say.’ She pleads her lover; can she include her in her work? – ‘I would rather you didn’t,’ she says, but the writer goes ahead and does it anyway. Just like Sheila records and transcribes the talks she has with her friend Margaux in How Should a Person be?, even though Margaux doesn’t want her to. The voice of somebody else helps them to find out how to write about themselves, about who they are, even though this eludes them, time and time again. Van der Graaff seems to have let go of principles like these a long time ago. He makes the automatic activity of writing explicit in his poetry volume Dood werk by using stylistic techniques like lists and ‘clocked poetry’. ‘I time the poem to be free,’ he notes, even if it is only a question of sitting down, beginning and producing words. The others will enter by themselves. In what seems almost a striking portrait of Knausgård, he writes: ‘11:30: Somewhere in a poem, / an article, or in a conversation, / I met an exchange student / who during his stay abroad in a country of his own choice / had spoken to no one. / His dry, mineral loneliness touched me / and I thought of all the ambitious, friendly people / who are lonely in a paradise of knowledge, / growth and technology.’ Perhaps everyone is lonely in a paradise of knowledge, growth and technology. In another clocked poem Van der Graaff writes: ‘1:37: I live in Holland. / I am a secret / that is kept by certain / communities, who are not inclined to share.’ A community who keeps secrets, not inclined to share, must be blasphemy to digitization, to a world in which everything is becoming quantifiable and split into data, regardless of the generation of data we are supposed to make happen ourselves through sharing. The analogue, that which cannot be digitized, is kept secret in the heart of the community, and this secret is the ultimate object of desire for the post-digital condition. Sheila Heti writes about how the communal can form a positive experience: ‘Luck unfurled at the slightest touch. I had a sense of the inevitability of things as they occurred. Every move felt part of a pattern, more intelligent than I was, and I merely had to step into the designated place. I knew this was my greatest duty – this was me fulfilling my role.’ It sounds almost like a religious experience. The flipside of this communal pattern is a kind of limitation to one’s freedom. It is the paradox of the post-digital condition: you are supposed to be free and autonomous but you cannot escape all the external and uncontrollable influences that come from the world we live in. The community is both desired and feared, we suffer because of it but at the same time, we seek it. 9. If the communal is the analogue experience we are all looking for, it inherently triggers a contradiction. Language and images surround you in the ugly, trivial, exhibitionistic and messy world that hustles itself into your perception through all kinds of sounds, images, opinions and statements – something you need to resist. At the same time these shared cultural expressions are the interface between the individual and the collective, generating the communal: jokes, the language of self-help books, popular programs, social media, and also history and poetry. They present an opening towards the communal, are an expression of the desire to find a connection with others, to be absorbed in a shared world. At the same time the communal can also feel constraining, a cultural straightjacket even. Knausgård’s hundreds of pages of analysis of a poem by Paul Celan and the autobiography of Hitler in My Struggle: Book 6 are poignantly illustrative of this ongoing duality. For Knausgård the heart forms the symbolic interface between the individual and the communal. Just like Heti, the heart beats through his novel, starting with the very first sentence: ‘For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.’ A heart is somebody’s heart and, at the same time, it is something we all possess. The heart is yours but at the same time, you have no power over it – if it stops, it stops and then everything stops. The heart, Knausgård says, is ultimately both individual and communal at the same time. ‘The heart never errs. The heart never ever errs.’ The heart and its countable heartbeats are perhaps our most precious possession, now under siege by digitization. The internet gave unlimited freedom to be who you wanted to be – an illusion we have been bereaved of long ago. We are being digitized to our hearts and who we are is being reduced to ‘vital data’: name, birthplace, date of birth, and even more datafiable units. To deal with this, I read in the work of these writers, we have to loosen our contrived grip on our own private core, stop resisting so as to be able to move with the flow of the world and swim with the current of the communal. We need to let the world in instead of keeping it out, compensate the digital with the analogue, understood as that which cannot be divided. The individual? Maybe – but it would have to be an individual who does not believe in staying herself, staying true to herself. Maarten van der Graaff writes in the article ‘Druk op huid’ (‘Pressure on the Skin’, published online just like the other comments quoted): ‘The problem is I don’t know how to write about the community. (...) I don’t want to be creative. I want to disengage from my inner world of struggle by just writing “me, me, me” incessantly. Sometimes I think the epic can be achieved through dissolution and entropy. The Epos as an exercise, a series of movements that doesn’t tell the “story of the tribe” but at least, makes it audible as a social sound.’ How might that social sound transmit as? ‘Ooooh. Ooooh. Ooooh.’

Reading instruction: This essay was written to be read on a smartphone. I am a friend to forget about. I sit in my room and imagine everything that’s going on outside of these four walls. The movements of the people on their way – to each other, from each other, on their bikes, walking, calling, ‘running a little late’. I wait. * Research shows that on average, one loses two friends with each ‘life changing event’. 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). You lose so much already and then two friends give up on you too. How many friends one gains after such an event the researchers do not mention. * At what point do you call someone a friend? Formulating an answer to that question is like balancing on a cord drawn across an abyss just to prove to the ones who are securing you with a rope tied around their body that you trust them. A balancing act that might be disturbed just like that, by a light breeze. And then you are left alone. In general the question isn’t taken seriously, or, at most, up to the level of a school essay: ‘Define friendship.’ No one knows the answer, and no one dares to sidestep Aristotle. A friend is someone whom you want to treat as a friend, that’s about all one can say about it. Tautological definitions are a sign that nothing ever really changes and this one indeed sounds like it’s coming straight out of Aristotle. ‘Virtuous is what a virtuous person would do, given your situation.’ A friend is someone whom you treat as a friend. Still, tautological definitions are in themselves good definitions. They function; they immediately conjure up what that might be, who that would be. And they can’t be reversed. A beneficial situation doesn’t turn someone into a virtuous person; someone who is friendly with you isn’t by definition a friend. * The follow-up question must be: how do you know whether you want to treat someone as a friend? What does the friendly treatment convey? This expediently leads to the issue of the demarcation criterion, as is usually the case with ‘What?’-questions. 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. 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. If panic flew through my chest, I knew well enough. Leave and never look back. Sex doesn’t necessarily lead to friendship. What is friendship’s demarcation criterion? I think it’s this. Imagine the doorbell rings in the middle of the night and the person who’s ringing needs you. 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. If I try to reverse this scenario, I begin to doubt; whose doorbell would I dare to ring? The demarcation criterion isn’t reversible either. * What I don’t believe in is this: the number 150 that is supposed to be the natural maximum number of friends. 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. How does it help me to know the size of the groups in which our forefathers moved across the steppes? 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. I’ve counted them. They amount to forty, rounded up. Of this forty there are five who I am sure would count me, if they counted. Of the other thirty-five there must be ten who would at least consider me. The rest I consider to be my collection of personal favorites. No one has to know who they are. On good days they are a bonus, on most days they provide me with the sadness of non-mutual indifference. I imagine that you get one friend every year and then one friend less every year. When you reach eighty, you die. * Slogans for friendship. Here’s one, for or against: ‘Two powerful men being friends is an inevitability. Two powerful women being friends is a conspiracy.’ What this slogan writer doesn’t understand is that friendships are always a conspiracy, whether they are between men or between women. We swear loyalty to each other, with blood and spit and our pinkies hooked. Nothing is more delightful than to be part of a conspiracy. As soon as you’re kicked out of the union you’ll know why. 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.’ * It is said that women talk and men do stuff together. Whether this is true I don’t know. I have talked a lot with friends and girlfriends, but rarely without doing something at the same time. Usually drinking beer or eating, but still. Doing stuff, that means doing something which elongates time. A dinner has a certain duration and when you eat dinner together, you will have spent a part of the day together. 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. * I’ve always thought it was strange when grown-ups talk about ‘my best friend’. That was a thing in primary school; in some cases it was a tool for negotiating. In secondary school the best friend was elementary for survival. But continuing on with ‘best friend’ after twenty, twenty-five is sad somehow. 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? 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.’ 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? Is it because I’m reminded of my own best friends, that chain of ladymaids, those I never see again, whom I have shed like feathers, or with whom I have fallen out of grace myself without ever knowing why? Or is it truly because the epithet of ‘my best friend’ echoes the hit parade? The figure of ‘the best’ automatically casts a shadow behind itself on all the lesser ones, and I think that all people are equal. Except perhaps my oldest friend, I mean the one who has lasted the longest. * My phone rings. No, it doesn’t ring, a notification lights up is what I mean. Let’s talk about now for god’s sake. It is said that since Facebook the term ‘friend’ is subject to inflation. Another completely nonsensical belief based on nothing. Like anyone really thinks that a Facebook-friend is a friend, a friend according to the demarcation criterion, however you define that. It’s hubbub, just like the idea that 150 is the natural maximum to the amount of people that you can tolerate around you. ‘Friend’ is a word as strong as an oak, with roots going way back down to the middle ages. Just like the word ‘like’. It will survive a little thumb, really, those words don’t need our protection at all. Opening a Facebook or Twitter account might be seen as a life changing event, by the way. How many friends do you lose and how many do you gain? More than two, I reckon, plus and minus. * More than half my life ago I met Anna. 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. Older and even more skinny. 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. 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. 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. After a couple of weeks we didn’t bother anymore and stayed in the school yard during gym hour instead. We rolled our fags, listened to music on our walkmen and talked boys. We dug each other to the point of love. We didn’t really care about the boys. 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. No, not a weak spot. My strong spot. * This is not the story of that friendship. It’s the story of all the others. * The others. We met in the school yard, even the people who went to the Christian school visited our school yard from time to time. Not that that happened a lot. This other school was located just about half a kilometer east, but usually that was enough to forget about our mutual existence. 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. 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. We did that because you were supposed to, it’s what we learned from our brothers and sisters. Feeling didn’t really have a part in it. * The distance of half a kilometer between the two secondary schools was enough to prevent childish stuff like that from happening. ‘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. When they were there it was as if it had never been otherwise. There was immediate friendliness. Next to rivalry, the distance also halted any further deepening of the friendliness. Not only in our minds, but in our hearts too, we remained indifferent to each other. The indifference was friendly because we shared something important: time. 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. * 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. 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. That was probably because you didn’t have to put a lot of work in it. Each day you arrived at the school yard, parked your bike, and there they were. It must have been the opposite sensation for those kids who were bullied. My god, there they are, again. Each day I was relieved, again. Sweet Jesus, thank god, there they are. * Proximity won’t let friendships bloom automatically, just like proximity isn’t a guarantee for or against rivalry. 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’. Whatever. I can engage in profound longing for the extended enclosure that the school yard gave us. Round, offering itself to your view all at once and with enough space for everyone. Plenty of hiding spots in case of rain. Multiple entries and exits. A panopticon, but with porous walls. Proximity might not lead to friendship immediately, without a shared space it gets a lot harder to start one and to keep one going. * A shared space and a shared time: both are essential, but sometimes you can hardly tell them apart. 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. Layer after layer a ground grew beneath our feet, a shared ground. 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. From that moment on we were friends, no one would be able to stop it. The school yard, one might say, was duration turned tangible, right beneath our feet. (‘Duration means nothing more than long,’ someone else mumbles. Yeah sure, and in Dutch ‘duur’ means expensive, but what use is all that?) * 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. Most of my class mates left too. They still live just around the corner, basically. But even though we moved to the same city, we couldn’t take the ground beneath our feet – the duration turned tangible with us. 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. At night I did little to nothing. I waited for the weekend, but even then not a lot happened. I wanted to have a local hangout. 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. A local hangout would be like a school yard for grown-ups. It can be seen in TV-shows, where there’s always a fixed location which functions as a school yard. The archetype (Aristotle might have come up with it) is to be found in the TV-show Friends. To be clear: that was absolutely not what I had in mind. That show is younger than I am, we’ve been friends for far longer than those folk, that’s for sure. Phonies. Besides, our interest was not coffee, but booze. * 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. Not just talking, but doing stuff that lets you measure time. Anna and I could talk abracadabra for an hour on end, just phantasy words and sounds. We didn’t need real words, we understood each other anyway. Those were elongated nights, I remember them well (warm). 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. Discussing virtues or the validity of arguments is somewhere at the bottom of the list of priorities. Unless you think that’s fun. What we looked for in our local hangout to be, was booze. No doubt there are friends who like to work out together, who talk about the past, go shopping, drink coffee, make things. All these distinctive friends with all their distinctive ways of having fun. I’ve always considered activities like that bollocks. It all starts with booze, with music and sex, because that’s the start of everything. Thirteen, fourteen, the first fag, first alcohol, first drunkenness, French kiss, heartbreak. It starts with the first top 10 hit song that’s completely yours, so it starts with ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’. How the school yards function now, I don’t know. There are less physical and more mental addictions, I guess, to Snapchat, WhatsApp, Messenger. The intellectual challenge must be enormous. * Sure, I have fun discussing virtues and the validity of argumentation. Not when I was still in school, only later. 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. * College is not only a continuation of secondary school because you’re still learning, it is too because of the continuation of the school yard. It grew and grew around me, until it covered the whole town center. On weekends I would sometimes just randomly walk into town, looking for people I knew. About thirty percent of the times I was lucky and met someone to go to the pub with. (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.) 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. * In TV-shows it goes like this: out of sight, out of mind. There’s a space – the living room, the village, the university, the hangout, the office. That’s where you meet. In case you don’t, no one will notice. An actor had to quit his part for personal reasons and is written out of the show. The ones who are left behind will forget him soon after his final episode of goodbyes. In reality it’s not that easy. Out of sight, into the mind. 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. Someone disappears from view and what is left is not a shadow, silhouette, or even some kind of nostalgia, what is left is nothing. A dimensionless nothing, without contours, without footing. In the emptiness mourning is found and mourning makes itself known in the mind, as in the heart. I’ve often dreamed of disappearing, of dropping myself hundreds of kilometers to the east without telling anyone. Like jumping into the emptiness that my disappearance will create for the others who are left behind. What stops me is myself: I’d still be left with me. * 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 didn’t dare disappear from there for a longer time, afraid that people might forget about me. 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. After some time I’ve come to understand what is really the case. Out of sight, into the mind. My mind. I think about them, day in day out, but the thoughts fall dead in the emptiness. I cannot imagine that they, you, go through life, like this, harnessed by thoughts, of me. * Later still, I became friend of the house, a house. The sequence of those words alone is enough for me to warm up inside. I was like a cat that reported at the back door, knowing there would always be a tray of milk waiting for him. I called or got a message: ‘What you think – dinner?’ and five minutes later I was at their door. I was the friend of them in that house, the reverse was not necessary, my own house was reclusive and would only harbor myself. What happens to the friend of the house when someone moves? This is not a theoretical question, but an existential problem. The movers pack up their lives and continue into their future elsewhere. The friend of the house has nothing to pack. I saw two options. Either you move along or you stay behind. I helped them pack and when everything was stuffed in boxes, I unhousefriended myself. I couldn’t bring the floor of that house wherever I went, like the school yard beneath my feet. It wasn’t my house. * Since the internet time and space have changed. Everything is close, so nothing is close. Everything moves fast, so nothing lasts. More and more of life takes place in non-lieux – places that aren’t real places, places without history, places that can’t be pointed out on a map, which lack in identity and for ever hold you in transit, a commuter or transferring passenger. Social media are non-lieux like that and that’s the reason why the cement holding connections between people together, holding friends together, would be crumbling. ‘Social media’ can’t be pointed out, can’t be traversed, there’s no landscape to longingly watch rushing by as you’re on your way there. It takes no time to get there and that shouldn’t be understood in a positive way, no, it rather signifies how time collapses, which makes all meaning disappear with a hush. Proximity means nothing anymore. And when proximity means nothing anymore, because everyone is always close, then time itself will become weightless, meaningless, because we never spend any time with anyone anymore. Who knows you your whole life? We rush from one friendship to the next with the same ease as we switch from one job to the next. That’s what I read, sort of. * My smartphone is in my hand. It is a space shared with dozens of people, or whatever you want to call them. It is a school yard, panopticon, fence, hangout, campus, city center, house. A kitchen table. The professors pronounce their doom for us, sitting at the kitchen table. Camera on. We’ve lost our ability to talk, we don’t know each other anymore, man has turned into an animal, while he was so productively working on his own civilization (ha ha). No one is able to keep his attention on a conversation for more than a minute anymore, is what they say. The smartphone is guilty, they say. The smartphone drives a wedge in the friendly treatment, in the truly friendly treatment, the treatment of true friends, not the phony connections that dress up in fancy (or ugly) words as old as the middle ages. The smartphone is smart to yield so much money, otherwise it would have been banned already a long time ago. I try to remember conversations I supposedly had before and now miss out on. I had the school yard, the city center, for a short while I even had a local hangout, and the friend-of-the-house-house. There was talking and eating, drinking, dancing and kissing. There were jokes being made: word jokes, bad jokes, inside jokes. What conversations were left behind there, which got lost? I can’t remember and I don’t have to. It is a well-known fact that the conversation we are mourning over is the conversation at the kitchen table, where everyone tells how their day went, one by one. A stringent, although not necessarily wide-spread norm, the holy norm of the higher middle class, a WASP-like utopia born in the nuclear family, one that I know of only through American TV-shows. * There’s no way that Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat are non-identifiable spaces, non-lieux, I will have nothing of it. Don’t they have an address that everyone knows by heart, a location on your home screen where you find your way without having to look? Just like we do with physical places that we frequent more often, we start to recognize the surroundings, even if it takes some time to find our way. Sometimes the trusted surroundings are broken up to renovate parts of them and then people are enraged. Etcetera. Moreover, they are places where we spend a lot of time. Hours and hours each day, week, month, year. Not only do we share the space, those recognizable, designated, shared places – all the people hanging out there are in our proximity and the residue this shared time leaves is just as real as the residue beneath our feet, coming down on the school yard. * Now it goes like this: even if you move out or take off, everything will stay together right there on your phone. No one ever needs to know that you’re gone, ’cause you’re never really gone. If you break yourself lose from the enclosed extension of the school yard that doesn’t necessarily mean that you write yourself out of the minds. The minds of your friends are all there, always, just like it was with the porously-walled panopticon that was the school yard. Even if you want to, you cannot write yourself out of minds. How can I forget them when they turn up again every day, here or there, wherever, online, on my phone, on my laptop, during work, on the train, at home, in bed, everywhere. My phone has become nothing less than the ground that I walk on. * Idea: a plug-in or app called ‘Ranking Your Friends’, which based on your social networks puts all your friends in order, the order of importance, status, seniority, whatever you wish. Undoubtedly such a thing exists already. I once saw a Facebook app that visualized the mutual relationships of all your connections and, oh, how great it felt when it turned out that for one of my friends (10) I was in the center of everything. It exists, no matter what. The algorithmic ordering of the feed as you see it when you’re logged in puts your friends in order all the time. That’s nothing more than the result of the game ‘Ranking Your Friends’, a game that has everyone hooked and which we keep playing over and over. Who do you see, who don’t you see? Every action is a move in the game, whether you want to play or not. The algorithm don’t lie. In this way, the most successful friends turn into the least forgettable ones. Although, when you’re a nobody in real life – someone whom no one will think of by themselves – then at least online you can keep the memory of yourself alive. They won’t be able to ignore you, because you keep turning up at the top of their feed every time. * I’ve heard say that ‘there is status updates, but no friendship updates.’ I didn’t immediately understand whether it referred to status updates put on Facebook or updates in your actual status – your salary and your prestige and everything that tags along: the social circles you move in, jokes you make, what you eat, where you go out – that leave your friends hanging. The friends don’t update along but are left behind. Update into obsolescence. ‘Sorry, drinks are calling.’ Maybe there’s no difference. If a status is updated ‘in real life’, you can see it doing the same on the social networks: the meter starts to count, first a few are added, then handfuls, dozens, hundreds at once. In this violence of the masses the old friendships are rendered invisible, they will always succumb to those with greater status. This other sort of status update can just as well be regarded as a friend update. People need to be tagged in pictures, a little box circumscribing their faces. On Twitter: the reply, the favorite, the retweet. Everyone’s promoted. You, you, and you! The less often you are invited to join, the faster you run behind in the game of rankings, without mercy you float downwards, to that unholy place that no-one ever reaches in their scrollings, or even further, into the bottomless pit from where no update is ever called up to parade on the feeds of the network. You’re parading alright, but only in front of the mirror and behind the mirror there is no-one left. Worst of all is demotion. You’ve been hidden, muted, ignored, given the silent treatment, like could happen in the school yard. Unlike was the case there, online there’s no one to notice. Demotion is invisible. It makes the humiliation a lonely thing (yes, that is possible), solely those who are not-updated-anymore feel that they’re left behind by the happy crew. Only the bots call for them still. * I recount my friends: on Facebook 489, on Twitter 1465, on Instagram 74. The magical line of 2000 (well over 10x150) has been crossed. Although those last two categories technically aren’t friends, but followers. In real life it’s still 40. 5+10+25. I try to unthink the numbers and only to picture the faces, the color of the hair and eyes, the names of the children and of the pets that I looked after, but before I know it I’ve counted to 25, because that’s how many children they have made, and 10, the pets, and 5, the ones who share their name with one of the other children or pets. I’m just not able to demetricate myself. * I’m digressing. The kitchen table, back to the kitchen table. Camera’s on. The kitchen table of the nuclear family is the unity of friendliness, that’s how it goes nowadays. Everyone is supposed to be friendish, your mother and father to begin with. If you’re not my friend, you’re my enemy, in between there’s nothing. Not at home, not anywhere. It’s not necessary to have a laughing fit, surely, but if you can’t handle a joke, if you don’t have a system of idiomatic jokes at your disposal, if goddamnit you don’t understand my jokes, then remove yourself from my kitchen table. * Those people who call you by your first name all the time. Those people, Anna. Don’t miss out, Josh. Last chance, John. It’s the first name treatment, the great equalizer. Everywhere everyone addresses you in the same way – as long-awaited, as old acquaintance, as way back when, as friend. Hi friend, hi Tom and Dick and Anna too. They want to sell you stuff, like I don’t get that! Hi marketer! Hi ad man, hi communications worker, get lost, you commicaterslaver! When I’ve been trolling around, lazily filling out forms, the algorithm speaks to me: hi M, hi X, hi what de fuck. Like being John Malkovich in the movie Being John Malkovich there’s no escaping your own name. Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich. (But I already knew that: even if you disappear towards the east, you’ll still be chained to yourself.) No one believes companies to really be your friend. The reverse might be true: we count companies to our friends because they’re always there for us, always have something waiting for us, never disappoint us and are always ready to please us. You’re always allowed to visit their website in the middle of the night. Friends could take that as an example. Can’t they treat me a bit more like a product? Haven’t I deserved that? * By the way, don’t expect this familiarity to be heartfelt, the first name treatment is automated, as we all know. So please, just automate your own smile as well if it doesn’t come naturally, and your good-spirited greeting too. And in case you don’t feel like it, don’t be surprised if you die alone, zero (0) friends, found rotting and foul-smelling in your dirty apartment after a week or two. Isn’t that how friendship is threatened, rather than by an inflation in words? It turns into a product that is subject to the laws of demand and supply, a product that companies can provide better, faster, more accurately and cheaper than people themselves. * Someone is being loud in the street. ‘I gave my students an assignment. They have to write about a dilemma that’s bothering them, now, in this very moment. You know, confrontation, collision, it’s either/or is what I say to them; you have to make a choice, it is your responsibility, DOING NOTHING IS A CHOICE IN ITSELF, and the result will be tragic, I don’t forget to mention that, it’ll always be an unhappy end in some way or another, a dilemma means needing to sacrifice something or someone, perhaps yourself, and that’s why it makes you feel bad and won’t leave you alone, you’re being tossed back and forth between conflicting interests, desires, fears, but you must, you MUST, you MUST DO something. And always there are a few who write about their hesitations in ending a friendship.’ ‘Remarkable,’ the other says. * I have moved again, way more than half a kilometer east, but not way way more. I have pulled myself out of the enclosed extension of the school yard and landed in a desert made of concrete and steel, like a giant has picked me up from the rumble below with its thumb and finger and has dropped the figurine a bit further ahead. I myself was the giant, of course, I was giant and figurine all at once. From high on up in the sky, bungling by the back of my coat, in between a thumb and finger as big as myself, I saw them, my friends, distancing themselves from me, or I from them. The house I was a friend of, the local hangout and far out back, the school yard. And suddenly I saw it! They where standing at the school yard, not still, but again, not the same one, but another. The school belonged to their kids! I had nothing to find there, moreover, if I would be hanging out there each day surely I would get arrested on account of suspicious behavior. * I don’t think about my friends from primary school a lot, the girlfriends whom I haven’t seen for about twenty years. I can wax very sentimental over them. I still feel as if I’m connected to them through a steel cable. We never talk, at most we like each other’s new profile pic. I see that one of them has seven children by now, not including two foster kids. Not because she’s religious, but rather, I presume, a hippie. The children have strange names, the household seems medieval. I see that an other is still together with her high school sweetheart, the boy who was there already twenty years ago, he is a man now. I see that she is pregnant again, sixteen or seventeen years after the first one, but fathered again by that same boy, man. I see that the third still is a horse-loving girl, a horse-loving woman I should say, but how no matter much I try to close read her updates and pictures, I can’t find out whether she’s in a relationship, likes men or women, if besides a dog she has children, or maybe, maybe, maybe. Should one of these beautiful women show up on my doorstep, broke, doing heroin, chased, wounded, or whatever might be the case, I would pull them in by their arm, stick my head out of the door, look left and right, then rapidly close the door, turn the key and say: ‘Tell me.’ * The first time I heard gossiping I must have been around seven years old. I was sitting in the municipal pool with two of my class mates. One said: ‘Kelly’s nails are so ugly, did you see?’ I was stupefied, I never could have thought you could do something like that with language. (Of course I didn’t think that, but I can’t describe it another way.) Saying something about someone who wasn’t there, and not just something like ‘I played with Kelly’ or ‘Kelly’s coming over’ or ‘Tomorrow’s Kelly’s birthday’ or – and this would’ve been close, but still factual – ‘Kelly still believes in Santa Claus’, no, not a statement that informs you of something, but a remark like a poke in your ribs, a remark that set things moving. Moving within me, because now I had to answer and not just like that, not just like ‘yeah I know’ or ‘you got a present?’ or even ‘ha ha, I don’t!’, no, something flushed through those words, something that I might as well call morality. Whatever I’d say, it would establish an alliance: for or against Kelly. And with that: for or against the gossiper. So I said nothing, but listened to my other class mate who answered: ‘Yeah, gross, her nails are so ugly.’ * Josh was my best friend. Evidently I was secretly in love with him. I didn’t dare tell him because my greatest fear was to get turned down. Would it have been different if there was texting, Facebook, WhatsApp? I think so. It’s so much easier to say what you think in 160 characters that might have been sent to the wrong person ‘by accident’. At times my crush on Josh passed – quite often it did actually, because as a teenager I was in love with many people. I kept dreaming about him until years later, long after we didn’t meet up anymore. I dreamt everything turned out right. Then I ran into him. I was well on my way to forget him, so when I saw him I said, as if it hadn’t taken me half a dozen years to get there: ‘I used to be so much in love with you, I was convinced you were the love of my life.’ He said: ‘Same. Me too.’ Here’s a slogan for friendship for you: ‘A woman and a men being lovers is a friendship-bomb.’ I let the bomb explode in his face. * In the end friendship isn’t a product, it’s destruction. A self-igniting friendship bomb. The crack in the seamless, happy, content, familiar, is where true friendship reveals itself, but then boom! it goes up in the air. I read about the terror of presence and think of the corny social network Hyves, where everything was covered in the vaseline filter of innocence: Ich bin dabei! I’m absent. My chat function is turned off by default. My response time lies well over five seconds. I read everything, but the degree of my interactivity is unpredictable. I won’t let myself be pushed about. Now I hardly get any messages at all. Sometimes I take a tour of the networks, leaving a trace of hearts and smileys, so as to return to myself the glow of presence. It’s like I’m trying to make an energy saving bulb light up using a bike, I can see a shimmer of light in the distance, but my legs always get tired first. * My phone sends me a notification: ‘Wer am meisten liebt, ist der Unterlegene und muss leiden.’ Translate.