on being logged in

There is a small dot next to your name. Green, grey, sometimes yellow. It is the shortest sentence anyone has ever written about a person: here, or not here.

We let the dot speak for us, and it is not a good witness. It says we are present while we sleep with the laptop open. It says we are gone while we read every message from the lock screen, carefully, so that the small word seen never appears. The dot is not exactly a lie. It is a second body that keeps its own hours.

Logging in used to be an event. You sat down, the modem sang its ugly song, and for an hour you were somewhere else. Then you logged out and came back, and the coming back was a kind of proof that there were two places. Now nobody logs out. The session never expires. The somewhere-else has moved into the pocket, the kitchen, the bed, and the border between the two places dissolved so slowly that nobody can name the day it disappeared.

So where are you, right now? Your eyes are here, on this sentence. Three conversations wait in other tabs, frozen in the exact posture you left them in. Someone is looking at a photograph of you that you no longer like. A server in a country you have never visited keeps a sentence you typed at nineteen. All of these are you, in the only sense the network understands: they answer to your name.

Maybe a person was never in one place. Memory always kept copies of us in other people's heads; the network only made the copies visible, searchable, and very hard to throw away. But being remembered is gentle. Being online is something else: being reachable at any moment, and expected to answer.

I keep the dot grey now. Not to hide. To remember that presence is something I do, not something that is done to me.

You are logged in to this page. No one can see that. Stay as long as you like.

eof