Then a load of tags: #influencer #thoughtleader #Tplus #socialvelocity etcetera etcetera. In Quintalk this was glowing praise. As founder of Bunk and the creator of Tamesis, Quin had a terrific amount of juice within the app’s user base: he might not have more contacts than anyone else, but he was in the top twenty. That kind of recommendation, magnified by that kind of reach, was an immense boost to my Tamesis profile, making me appear far more important and interesting than I really am. The spike in my numbers was astonishing, and was mirrored by bumps on my other social media accounts. This in turn had prompted a flurry of interest and envy from people already in my networks.

A couple of pieces I’ve written have had a few days of intense popularity online, and you could say they had ‘gone viral’ in a small way. Nothing newsworthy, just a few hundred people taking notice all at once, maybe low thousands, not the hundreds of thousands or millions of true virality. Maybe it doesn’t even count. But you only need a few hundred shares or interactions to make it feel as if you are being constantly bombarded with notifications and messages, and it’s possible to see the vortex of interaction start to sustain itself, attention breeding attention, as if it might never stop.

Magazines and writers want this kind of feverish attention, and consultants earn handsome fees telling publishers how to get it. It should feel good. But it doesn’t. It feels horrible. You are no longer in control of something that you have made – it has a volatile life of its own. There’s often a nasty edge, people saying they hate your work or that you’re wrong wrong wrong, or that they simply don’t see what the fuss is about. But even without that, going viral feels horrible. Eyes and minds in the hundreds, come to join you. Hello, here’s a crowd, in your head. Every word, every decision, every silence, up for view. Something big, something much bigger than individual net users, stirred and skulked behind all those screen names and icons; it had noticed you and you didn’t really want it to notice you and you couldn’t take anything back.

Print didn’t feel like this. But in the office, the digitisation effort quietly advanced, scanning, transcribing, proofreading. Every mistake, every bad decision, every borrowed line, brought into view of the unsleeping search, the giant.

After a lull, the drilling started up again next door. The vibration it sent through the fabric of the flat made the woodwork click and buzz and produced a tinny rattle from two cans touching each other on the side table. I moved one, stopping them clattering together, feeling the fillings in my head, the maturation and glory of my headache.