I’ve just read High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby, and isn’t it good? Best first book since Iain Banks’s Wasp Factory. (Oh, except this wasn’t his first book. I just wanted somewhere to say how much I liked Wasp Factory really.)

Anyway, it’s a story about the incomprehensibility of everything we do, and how love tears up a perfectly normal person, and the fact that this is perfectly normal. The narrator spends his life bored and directionless, renting videos and watching them alone, and stuff like that, and it occurred to me: this guy is offline. It was written in 1995, so he could’ve at least had a nasty Compuserve account or something. Anything would’ve been better than being so cut off from people and information.

Life must’ve been awful before there was an Internet to turn to. They say talking to people involved getting in a grotty unplugged taxi and sitting a filthy offline pub. Did people really do that? Phones, you say? How can you have a decent conversation when you aren’t allowed thinking time? Maybe that’s why technological isolates are so unhappy… they’ve never had a conversation with someone who actually thought about what they said. How profound can you get before the 2 seconds is up and the pause becomes socially unacceptable?

In fact, life must’ve been awful before there was Google to turn to. I believe the phrase goes: “did people just, like, not know stuff?” It doesn’t stop there. Life before Linux kernel 2.4.18? Did people just, like, put up with the Firewire bugs? And I’ve only just installed a proper Bayesian spam filter. What did I do before that? I barely remember. I think this is a reverse Singularity: there will come a point in your life where you can’t understand, or even imagine, living how you used to.