I don't have a desktop image. It's best to write against nothing, rather than something. Just having white, pure white, is seductive. Anyone who's ever pissed on snow will understand this.

I must belong to the only generation of writers who've written with all three of inkpen, typewriter and computer. It definitely matters: the technology colours not only the rhythm but the whole logic of what you write. Think of Kafka's obsession with writing machines: the harrow that inscribes the law onto the skin in In the Penal Colony or the mysterious writing desk in Amerika: writing technologies themselves are imbued with terrifying and sacred dimensions, and become the subject, not just the medium, of the story. I used to have a beautiful old German typewriter, that you had to throw your fingers at and the keys would smash into the roller. It felt like a machine-gun or something. I do everything on the laptop now, although I print notes out and mark them up.

"Satin Island" is the provisional title of the next novel – hence "Research for SI" and "si world stuff". It's all about pollution and mutation. It's going to have a leitmotif of a parachutist falling to earth, having realised that his parachute has been sabotaged: his relation to the landscape, death, technology. It's only half-formed at the moment – less than half – that's the 'Parachutist stuff' document.

The "Columbia talk" folder and presentation is a talk I gave to the students and faculty at Columbia University in New York. It's called "Noise, Signal and Word: How Writing Works". I trace the figure of Orpheus from Ovid through Rilke to Cocteau, looking in particular at the roles of transmission and reception. Rilke's Orpheus is associated with a giant ear; Cocteau's spends half his time listening to the radio. I think this has something vital to tell us about what the writer – any writer – is essentially doing.

The best definition of writing I could give would be "letting speak" - if that word "let" is understood in all its double and triple senses: to allow (something or someone else) to speak; to interrupt (hinder) the flow of speech, break language up, allowing for what's unspoken to infiltrate its frequency; to underwrite or lease out speech. The one thing writing's not is straight-up speaking.

I'm not on Twitter. I'm not interested in telling people that I'm stuck in a lift; nor would they be interested in hearing that. The International Necronautical Society has a Twitter feed, which our Chief of Propaganda Anthony Auerbach puts out. When there's no event or publication to announce, the feed defaults to the text of Moby Dick, 140 characters at a time.

The minimised "Sade" document in the dock is because I've been re-reading The 120 Days of Sodom for the first time in 20 years. It's shocking how contemporary it is. He's basically describing Abu Graib or Guantánamo. The first sentence goes something like: "It is in States' interest to maintain an atmosphere of terror or sense of being under threat, so that they can suspend all democratic laws." It could have been written by Giorgio Agamben or Naomi Klein six months ago! There's nothing new: like Joyce says, "the same roturns". In narrative terms, it's amazing: all about replay and repetition: the libertines don't really invent any of their depraved activities; they re-enact the ones these high-class courtesans describe to them. He wrote it in the Bastille, and the manuscript was lost when the prison was stormed; it didn't re-emerge until the early 20th century. According to Georges Bataille, Sade himself caused the storming, by poking his chamber-pot pipe though the bars and, using it as a megaphone, announcing to the crowds that the authorities were executing the prisoners (which they weren't). Supposedly the revolutionary leaders were so eager to find evidence of the ancien régime's depravity that they exhibited a confiscated printing press they'd found there, a contraption with which no ordinary people would be familiar: "Here's their instrument of torture!" The power of technology: it's totem, taboo and the whole caboodle.

I contributed to an anthology called The Empty Page: Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth. My piece was called "Why I want to Fuck Patty Hearst" - a tribute at once to the Sonic Youth song Kool Thing, in (one version of) which the heiress-turned-revolutionary is mentioned, and to Ballard's early story Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. I love Sonic Youth. I met Lee Ranaldo just the other week, and we were chatting about the book. It's got some good pieces in it – a great one by Shelley Jackson, all about goo. The "Verb feed" document is a Burroughsian-style cut-up I did for the BBC radio programme The Verb a few months ago – mixing in the week's headlines with phrases from Ovid and stuff.

Technology reveals us to ourselves as we always in fact were: networked, distributed, laced with code. I use the laptop for everything. I'm not even properly "awake" until it's switched on. Word seems like the "natural" programme to write in now: the default, blank page 2.0. Before I got an iPhone, I used to do this daft thing of phoning myself up if I had a thought while out and about, and telling my home answering machine: "OK, write this down…" Now, you can just talk into the voice-memo app, with its retro oversize mic and quivering needle visual. The internet being just a click away is a blessing and a curse at once: you can find out instantly which year Egypt won independence or who Persephone's mother was, but that essential solitude you need to write gets more and more elusive … While I was writing Remainder I listened to Rachmaninov a lot, just like the hero. And Gorecki and Paart. I like the voicelessness and quasi-repetition. I don't own a Kindle. It's strange: I like reading my own stuff on a screen, and other people's on a page.

I was a guest at Trinity College Dublin recently, and there was a talk, the night before my own, on Darwin's influence on Joyce, given by a "genetic critic". These guys look at progressive handwritten draft phases of literary texts, how they change from one stage to the next, and correlate these with correspondence and notebooks and so on. So you can see exactly when Joyce read Darwin, and then how phrases like "ouragan of spaces" find their way into the Wake manuscript. It's very interesting. Afterwards I was chatting with the speaker and cockily asked him: "So what are you going to do with me, then?" ie with my generation, given that there'll be little or no paper trail. He said: "Dude, we have software that can reconstruct every keystroke you made since the beginning of time – MacBook, floppy discs, the lot."