My phone has not buzzed or twitched or mewled for attention, but I still pull it out of my pocket anyway. Ahead of me, above me, the red man will soon turn green, and my brain requires distraction until then. My thumb flicks right, then up, then up again and down. With no conscious decision to do so, I’m looking at one newsfeed or another. There are no notifications for me, but I pull the graphics on the screen down to refresh the app just in case. Sometimes there’s a lag.

The red man turns green. I walk.

It’s a cold winter’s evening, it’s already dark and there’s a haze of drizzle in the air. I don’t mind terribly, it makes me feel romantic. Besides, if that were the sort of thing you minded, you shouldn’t be living in Wellington.

I’m listening to music through earbuds, conscious that it’s taxing my data but in need of something to input into my head. My brain is no longer comfortable to exist without stimuli of some sort. I try to remember before cell phones because I am old enough for that luxury. I remember a music festival when I was fifteen (1996) where we all knew the rule: if you lost your mates early in the day, you’d be buggered trying to find them again. I remember another time (1998?) arriving at a lunch and sitting for an hour before I realised that my date wasn’t showing. I found a payphone, dialled my home answerphone service and discovered an apologetic message left an hour and twenty minutes earlier. We used to waste time like that. We used to plan down to the minute when we’d be meeting a person, and get stressed if we knew we’d be five minutes late because we had no way of communicating with that person to let them know, and what if they thought we weren’t coming, or if they left the agreed-upon spot to go looking for us? I remember an earlier time (1995?) when I needed my dad to drop me off at the shopping centre to meet my first-ever then-new girlfriend. He dawdled and I was forty-five minutes late. She scowled at me, and continued to do so for the next year until we busted up.

Phones. Social media. Buzz buzz, little white numbers in red circles driving you crazy. We went from knowing nothing about each other’s lives to knowing everything. People complain either way.

I’m wearing a merino beanie. My face is cold but my head is too hot. The drizzle turns into rain. I’m walking up Willis towards Aro. I enjoy the reflection of the neon lights on the wet ground. It makes everything look like Blade Runner. Wellington doesn’t often have the opportunity to look futuristic, so it’s important to note these things.

In science fiction stories (and let’s remember that if we could tell ourselves in 1995 what 2015 would look like, it would be a science fiction story) there’s often an advanced race that can communicate with each other through a shared hive mind. As I walk in the wet, slightly hunched and feeling dramatic, I wonder if they all started with Facebook. I wonder if Facebook travels around the galaxy landing on the planets of undeveloped civilisations like the monolith in 2001. Facebook probably bought out the monolith after its early start-up success with the apes.

I used to work in a video store, and an old friendly racist used to stop by in the middle of the day to hire horror movies and chat. His favourite theory was that the Chinese would take over the planet because they had one of those hive-mind cultures. “Like ants,” he’d say, sort of cheerfully. He didn’t seem to care about the impending cultural invasion. “They’ve earned it,” he’d say.

I step out onto a street and pull back just in time to miss a courier van with a blaring horn. A muscular Polynesian dude swears at me out the window, but I don’t quite catch it. What was I thinking about?

The album I’m listening to concludes and within seconds I couldn’t tell you what it was. There’s silence through the buds. I leave them in anyway, but the sounds of the city seep in, a little muffled. I score a few dirty looks as I try to weave through a crowd of people waiting for a bus. An old white guy deliberately steps in my way, presumably to block me in case I’m thinking of pushing in front of the line. He doesn’t look at me, stares straight ahead, back curved and chest and massive belly pushed out. Mine, he conveys, in that way that people and animals do.

Maybe we’re not so sci-fi after all. Maybe we’re closer to the apes than we are to the hive mind. Or maybe we’ve missed a step and jumped straight from just out of the caves to flying spaceships and listening to streaming music that doesn’t actually exist anywhere. Give a monkey a bone and he’ll use it as a weapon. Give him an iPhone and he’ll look up porn in the dentist’s waiting room.

I’ve never done that, by the way. It was just the silliest place I could think of to look up porn. I imagine the dental administrator looking disapprovingly over his or her glasses, and you’d say, “Well, that’ll teach you for only having last year’s Women’s Days!”

Without realising, I’m looking at my phone again, my thumb doing its pre-ordained dance back to one newsfeed or another. It’s exactly the same as it was a few minutes ago, with just one extra story at the top. A friend I don’t like much is saying something annoying. His life is good, apparently, and it leaves a sour taste in my mouth. It’s a sharp little sting like those sour lollies you used to buy on a dare as a kid. I guess that’s why I look, for that little sour hit.

Two young women fall in behind me as I walk. One says, “Yeah, he’s in a band, they’re really up and coming.” The other says, “Ugh, everyone’s up and coming these days.”

In the hive mind, experience is unnecessary because there only exists a single, robust viewpoint, and no need for growth. In the hive mind, art cannot be created because unique insight is impossible. Bees and ants and the theoretical Chinese in old racists’ imaginations never turn to each other and say, “Listen, there’s something I have to tell you.”

Nearing the end of Willis, I turn into Aro, and the city’s gone and now it’s the suburbs. If I were to keep walking, eventually I’d get to the hills with the trees, and then more trees on a steeper hill, and then eventually water, I guess. That’s the problem with New Zealand: you can only walk so far in one direction before you have to turn back. I wonder: in the hive mind, is running away possible? Perhaps, but you’d spend the rest of your life wondering if it were truly you that ran away, or whether it was a function of the hive ejecting an unwanted element. A man on a ledge yells, “Don’t try to stop me!”, and everyone holds up their palms reassuringly and says, “Nono, it’s fine, we’re actually totally on board with this.”

A car drives past, a bunch of young white dudes with thumping music, one hangs out the window and shouts something at me. There is no hive mind, I decide. The bees can see each other, are pressed right up in each other’s little insect faces, but none of them has the first fucking idea of what’s really going on.

My phone buzzes, and in seconds I’m looking at a photo of me I’ve never seen before, from some foreign land I was in two years ago, apparently. I don’t need to look up to know when to turn left onto my driveway, it all happens automatically. All other thoughts are lost.