Want to get out and see more of the city? Stop paying for Internet service, then pirate your neighbor’s until she locks it and forces you to wander Portland looking for open networks. Today, I am doing my computing in the law annex of the downtown library. I smell decaying ink, paper turning into dust. I love it.

I check my email: fifteen unread messages, nonprofits begging for money, Gwyneth Paltrow’s newsletter (why the hell is it called Goop?). “You have a Facebook message,” the screen glows—my thumb slides over the trackpad, the pointer clicks on a name I don’t recognize.

“Hey Nick,” I read. “You might not remember me from the party a while back, but we made out and it was great. We should do it again soon. What do you say?” The homeless man next to me at the table hacks with the frightening cough of a tuberculosis patient; my face flushes to match the oxblood color of the law books around me. Jesus Christ, I think with a sigh, how do I get myself into this shit?

Now, I am walking into the Hawthorne Hideaway—the red neon light shines across the floor, red-faced people full of beer and loud laughter. Tonight is quiz night, pencils and pads sitting at each table. Why do people still bother holding pub quizzes in an era of iPhones? We can find everything on the Internet, history and identity alike are easily reduced to search engine ad words.

I and everyone else I know are highly Google-able, the World Wide Web strewn with lists of our favorite books and bands, drunken photos and rambling status updates. This is precisely how this man found me, playing the strange modern game of Guess Who—sliding his thumb over the screen of his iPhone to scan his friends’ friend lists to find the bearded boy who kissed him one drunken night.

I’m here to meet him because he already knows me. I suppose I’m not “meeting” him, really—I am correcting an imbalance that disturbs me. Luckily, we are a highly trackable generation; we’ve left clues of identity through our Facebook pages and our Link-edIn profiles.

I am here because he found me, yes; I am also here because I found him, pieced together the fragments of his identity and stitched it into something cohesive in my mind like some hard-drinking, postmodern Nancy Drew. Through the magic of the Internet, I know where this man works, where he went to school, the way his Boy Scout Halloween costume stretched across his chest on October 31. I may have blacked out our initial meeting, but who needs memories when there’s Facebook?

Next to the curved brass of the bar, a man runs his finger along the rim of his pint glass. Light bounces off of him, shoots into my eye and is turned into electrical surges, shooting up and down my spine and firing through my brain. Dim recollections come back to me, only reinforcing the facts I discerned through MySpace. Impulses coarse through the nerves of my legs. I walk up to him.

“Hi,” I say, falsely assertive to cover my nervousness. “I’m Nick.”

He sets his beer down onto the bar, perfectly matching the ring of condensation. He looks at me; electricity travels through wires to the bulbs above our heads, spilling their light across the wooden bar and the white of the teeth in his smile, the gloss of his beard. I don’t fight it—my eyes dilate to take it all in, light converts back to electrical charges, chemicals secrete and interact in my brain, the primal technology of my body responds to the juiced light and the handsome man.

I suppose we’ve always been part of networks, vast webs of social interactions and alliances. The only difference in the modern era is that they’re now codified digitally; the breadcrumb trails are traceable all the way back to the great unsolvable mystery of who we actually are. I look him in the eye with feigned confidence—Who the hell are you? I think. Who the hell am I?

The man turns his barstool toward me. “Yes, Nick,” he says, a cocky grin spreading across his face. “I know you.”