Tomorrow’s People Will Be Machines
Tuesday, September 18th, 2012
This is my doing. It’s me, and I accept that. Sartre said our actions and decisions make us, and this war is mine. It’s inside me now, and I own that. The world, my isolation – it’s my fault. I’m not saying I caused the political bullshit, but it’s like the pieces of a puzzle. You start with these odd, disconnected bits and assemble the corners, work along the border and fill in the middle from there. At some point you should start to see what the photo is, but I didn’t. There was no box to show me the end goal; it was all blurred. I never even finished the damn thing, but they saw the picture first. Envisioned and given life through my work, there was no way to unsee it, and then they remade whole, damn planet in my image.
Looking back I feel like a naïve child. When we started using DNA to manufacture microprocessors, I should have made the leap. When we tagged ourselves with radio-frequency chips in the name of healthcare, people should have filled the streets in anger, but instead it was all a convenience. We were coddled at every step with the cushy blanket of progress. We dumped ourselves to the Internet, gave it our thoughts, wants, emotions – we became it. We reinvented ourselves as pixels communicating at unprecedented speeds. From the server room to the home then the coffee shop and the pocket, the next logical step was under the skin.
With rampant dematerialization and convergence giving us smaller computers, the lines blurred between our devices. The desktop computer was a television, the laptop made phone calls, the cellular phone checked email and our TVs browsed the Internet. People carried a record store’s worth of music on something the size of a cigarette pack – a library of books the size of just one. We could buy any novel, song or movie in the world and have it on a gadget in our pocket within minutes. It was the fastest and most effortless form of consumption our species invented – the Internet. Once the ones and zeros made their way into every home in the country, there was no coming back. The ease of consumption consumed us all.
Once we were all praying at the altars of God Internet, any advance that made it faster, shinier, more inclusive, involving was lauded as a step in the right direction. We laid bandwidth pipe as fast as we could, replacing old lines with faster ones every few years. Our wireless speeds lagged behind, but even they caught up in the end. The towers went up everywhere, and the signals only got stronger. Corporations spent billions researching and implementing technology to connect us as fast as possible. Once that began, the cell phone companies started selling full size tablets and laptops the same way they sold phones. Nobody needed a dedicated line into their home when they could connect from anywhere in range of a tower. They were obelisks of triumph, the final step to connecting the world and uniting it under one religion – God Internet. Read the rest of this entry »
This is my doing. It’s me, and I accept that. Sartre said our actions and decisions make us, and this war is mine. It’s inside me now, and I own that. The world, my isolation – it’s my fault. I’m not saying I caused the political bullshit, but it’s like the pieces of a puzzle. You start with these odd, disconnected bits and assemble the corners, work along the border and fill in the middle from there. At some point you should start to see what the photo is, but I didn’t. There was no box to show me the end goal; it was all blurred. I never even finished the damn thing, but they saw the picture first. Envisioned and given life through my work, there was no way to unsee it, and then they remade whole, damn planet in my image.
Looking back I feel like a naïve child. When we started using DNA to manufacture microprocessors, I should have made the leap. When we tagged ourselves with radio-frequency chips in the name of healthcare, people should have filled the streets in anger, but instead it was all a convenience. We were coddled at every step with the cushy blanket of progress. We dumped ourselves to the Internet, gave it our thoughts, wants, emotions – we became it. We reinvented ourselves as pixels communicating at unprecedented speeds. From the server room to the home then the coffee shop and the pocket, the next logical step was under the skin.
With rampant dematerialization and convergence giving us smaller computers, the lines blurred between our devices. The desktop computer was a television, the laptop made phone calls, the cellular phone checked email and our TVs browsed the Internet. People carried a record store’s worth of music on something the size of a cigarette pack – a library of books the size of just one. We could buy any novel, song or movie in the world and have it on a gadget in our pocket within minutes. It was the fastest and most effortless form of consumption our species invented – the Internet. Once the ones and zeros made their way into every home in the country, there was no coming back. The ease of consumption consumed us all.
Once we were all praying at the altars of God Internet, any advance that made it faster, shinier, more inclusive, involving was lauded as a step in the right direction. We laid bandwidth pipe as fast as we could, replacing old lines with faster ones every few years. Our wireless speeds lagged behind, but even they caught up in the end. The towers went up everywhere, and the signals only got stronger. Corporations spent billions researching and implementing technology to connect us as fast as possible. Once that began, the cell phone companies started selling full size tablets and laptops the same way they sold phones. Nobody needed a dedicated line into their home when they could connect from anywhere in range of a tower. They were obelisks of triumph, the final step to connecting the world and uniting it under one religion – God Internet. Read the rest of this entry »
