Chain letters clog the network like an abscess, infecting another user and causing them to propagate the malady further. The long lists of faceless email addresses at the top of the note are like an engraving, marking on an electronic headstone the lost souls who were willing catalysts in the reproduction of the digital pathogen.

The television squats ugly in the corner, like a square black hole in the living space. It spews out photons, broadcasts a pulsating pot pourri of pictures and shouts endlessly at the viewer. Still the off switch seems like a difficult choice. With the applianced deadened, we feel cast adrift, as if the world is moving on and we're left clinging to the sinking wreck of yesterday's culture. This feeling is re-inforced at the coffee machine next morning, when all talk is of the shooting of a soap star, the winning of an award or the man who answered a lame question and won a fortune. You missed the programme and so you are an outcast. You stand, eyes glazed, not able to give an opinion on something so fatuous yet somehow essential.

It's six minutes to nine in the morning and all is calm. The office is just waking up as you set yourself down in the seat with the broken cushion and plug in your laptop. The occasional 'good morning' drifts down between the screens in the open plan commercial zoo as you record today's answerphone message. At one minute past nine the first electronic raspberry of the day is blown. Oh my, it's an electronic version of the William Tell Overture. Another great symbol of culture is folded up, squeezed dry of any semblance of music, and injected into a plastic turd to be regurgitated like a thumb in a KFC.

In another ten years we'll have mobile communication systems so small that they can be fitted inside the cranium. Homo sapiens nokius will strut up the high street, muttering away to himself, right hand typing on some invisible keyboard and left hand grasping a bag of doughnuts. We will be contactable anywhere, any time by anyone. Instead of asking someone out to dinner, you'll simply headbutt them to swap numbers, and then before you know it you're buying web estate in which to code your dream home, and program your perfect, virtual children. Only then will the human race be truly wireless!

We can strive for this perfect, digital future. Those who refuse the implants will be discarded be forced into slavery, building communication towers in every hamlet, on every hill, in every school and library. The world will be one united network. Countries will become obsolete. Warfare will break out between the virtual states of AOL and MSN. Men, women and children will be sat down in homogenised cells to sit and concentrate on wiping out the oppositions network, gaining market share, grabbing a mind here, selling a special offer there. Bodies will waste away, the mind is kept going by immersion in a sugared, oxygenated solution. Soon, we become immortal, just brains in jars locked in an endless battle of... Beepy beepy beepy.... Oh. Excuse me, I've got to take this call.