Until I started my new job at the BBC – with the exception of miserably short stints in cyber-cafés and the like – I hadn’t used a Windows PC in getting on for two years. Now I’m compelled to. My work e-mail is only accessible if I persuade the hated beast to allow me access. Worse still is the effect this has on my outboard brain – that place where my articulation of ideas occurs, that home of recorded impression. My iBook hippocampus – the component of my prostheses that deals specifically with the creation of memory – has been hacked from the network and sits like a thousand pound brick by my desk all day.
As a result my extended connections to my social network – mediated through my alien stone, my totem computer – continue to atrophy. My sense of what’s going on around me is collapsing. I’m no longer sitting at the centre of the Panopticon. Instead I’m peripheral. What is central is the urinal of Windows machinery that, if I am thirsty for information, I must drink from. The internet that squeezes its way through task managers, continual crashing and word processors in browsers is not an internet I’m familiar with. It’s an ill-formed, thick and sticky horror – like Roast Lamb gone cold and congealed with fat. Coughed up by a used car salesman.
Or maybe the shame is that I’m beginning to get used to it…