Is the internet a triumph of hype over content? I get caught between the two camps of it being the new wave of corporate control and my initial dream of it being like the consciousness of the planet - the planet dreaming about itself. When it's that side of it, I get very passionate and I adore it, but occasionally I get depressed about all the dot.coms and the dot.communists!

Any favourite places on the net? One of my favourite sites is Dot.com Failures. Another one I enjoy is Dotster, where you can feed in three words and they'll transform them into a new dot.com name. It makes you realise that any name, any sound, any grunt has already been registered. I love the sense that you're more likely to find flights of imagination on the web than in the mainstream media, which has got as straight as it possibly can get.

Is the net bringing people together or is it breeding a generation of loners? It's a combination of the two. Loners are sad people in a community. That's the way the world always was in a way, with people using music, literature and entertainment to find ways of being together. I like the nets weird isolation, the sense that somehow we're all dreaming together.

Are you, or have you ever been, a geek? I kind of flirt with it. I guess I've got it in me, and if I was 20 years younger I'd probably go for it wholeheartedly. There's got to be a sort of middle-class, middle-aged geekiness about the fact that I do my shopping at www.tesco.com and book my holidays through www.virgin.com!

How does the net affect the writer? My favourite type of writing tends to exist on the net. It's uncensored and unedited. A lot of writing that goes on in the mainstream media now is often compressed and fairly tedious. It is often untrained, but I find the most exuberant writing on the net now.

What do you see as being the next stage of the net? I guess it's an ongoing battle and I'm hoping that anarchy is going to win and that business is defeated. At the moment I'm optimistic and I've gone back to thinking the net is the consciousness of the planet in its wildest and most far-fetched sense. I think that some of the business dot.coms are starting to look a little stiff and absurd.

Is the net creating a two tier society? There's always been elitism but I do get the feeling that there's an underclass connected on the net that hasn't been connected before. Although the net will still isolate other people it does seem like a move forward because there are people who were previously denied freedom of expression who are now beginning to get it.

Whose e-mail addresses would you like to have? If they were still alive, I would love to have Samuel Beckett's and Lenny Bruce's. Two others I'd love would be Chris Morris's and Alan Alda's.

Paul Morley's new book Nothing is now available from Faber and Faber.