"It’s not a question of attention span, because the dominant discursive modes online seems to be the multi-hour-long video essay or the interminable live stream in which literally nothing is said. But digital text makes the distemporality of ordinary text unbearable. To sit still and read a book for hours on the trot, you have to suppress the rising itch that starts on your fingertips and spreads everywhere over your skin. Make this responsive! Make this refresh! You’re experiencing the agony of the dead word of the book, where the future is already set down, waiting for you on the final page, where nothing changes… Digital text, meanwhile, is writing that functions like speech. Like speech it happens in real time, right in front of you, and then afterwards it sinks into the unreachable abysses of the feed. It’s present, it’s alive, while writing is always spectral and disjointed from itself."