It’s almost like a nervous tick. Check facebook – check your emails. Things are moving. If not, get them moving.

Moments devoted to oneself are considered unproductive, selfish isolation.

You are a hive being. Everyone is just one click away. You need to remain in constant contact with everyone or they will forget about you, eradicate you, take all value from you.

Do they like this? Do they like that? In the morning you stumble, bleary eyed and tired, to your computer. Coffee is a rush for your body, but online is a rush for your mind. You are no longer alone, no longer forced to watch your dreams, desires and failures play out in your head.

They are right in front of you, subsumed and mixed with the desires of everyone else. You can watch your dreams rise and fall in real time. How many people like this? How many people will come to my event? What is trending?
It’s always on your mind. Makes you itchy and restless whenever you enter one of those strange patches where your drug cannot be supplied and you’re forced to be offline. You are so meaningless in those moments.

You realize that your public persona – now it has a name again, thoughts rise, your own, not the hive thoughts…but everything will be forgotten again under the rush of incoming information – your public persona has forgotten your private persona. Severed itself from it. Cut the virtual umbilical cord. Your public persona is all that exists, apart from this…this madness. All those thoughts that you cannot write down, nor present in a clear light. Your unlikable side.

This darkness that needs a name. This is inside. Private. Private. It takes you on a dizzying spin…for a second.

Then wifi pops back up. You can connect. Rush. Facebook like a deluge of senseless information. Not nonsensical, but senseless, since none of your senses apart from the visual will ever process it. It numbs you once more. Makes you deaf to the voice of your private self. Feeling is reduced once more to little flickers of knowledge on the retina of your consciousness…your consciousness is now one big eye, of course…networks and synapses that mirror the networks you aim to build are inside of it.

Red likes and message numbers are momentarily mistaken for blood – but of course there is no blood here. A rush runs through you as they flicker up and up…you must have hit a virtual nerve. You ask a friend “Are you online” and need a moment to realize that he is sitting right next to you. Distances become meaningless, after all, even very short ones.

Your nervous tick now manifests itself in random likes and terrible spelling. I have no time, comes over you like a disease and you would never guess that it is simply your body momentarily remembering its mortality. Instead you rush even more, take on more tasks all of which you will leave half finished.

Your body is beyond tiredness already and claws the spirit back from the virtual world to envelop it with sleep. It tries to get it used to being corporeal in the several hours that the two spend together sleeping. You would never guess that your mind and your body are sharing a bed like two lovers fallen out with each other.

In the morning you wake up and it’s the spirit that drags the body to the virtual hole, jumping inside gleefully…