I read an article by Sam Knight in the New Yorker about whatsapp. I read it in several goes, unable to pursue it start to finish. Each time I started at a different point and registered a different thought about our detachment from our lives, the saturation of that detachment, the loss of solitude. We are — you are, I don't have a phone — all writing diaries on our phones, wallpapering our current lives with phatic white noise, ready for the moment of total amnesia. Which has already arrived.
25 million times a second after the World Cup in Dubai, whatsapp buzzed. A new fabric of the earth.
I write a diary. With a pen on paper. A fountain pen, with ink, paper of a certain size and texture. For many years I wrote every day, and cheated if I missed a day. Now I write every day or two or three. And it's gnomic or banal. The gnomic I need to write. No one is reading it. I'm talking to myself. The banal is, yes, banal, and crucial to sanity. Descriptions of stasis and departure are crucial. Frogspawn and pussy willow. The back of the cat looking out at a hooded crow. Wake up.
WhatsApp is phatic before anything else. It is an architecture of presence. It winks with life, informing you who is online and when they were last seen. Tiny bundles of data—relayed on the app's servers through sockets, or continuous connections—tell you that your best friend is typing.
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