Paranioa will destory ya
Once I had a paranoid friend. Let’s call him Rob. Rob had his brain stuck on three basic theories that obsessed him constantly. First, he was convinced that the government had a massive scheme to implant tracking chips into all its citizens – all of us.
”Don’t get the shot,” he warned me solemnly from the depths of his smoke-filled apartment. Nice guy, Rob, good chess player. Anyway, Rob also told me about the “lizard people,” whom he was sure filled all high-ranking positions of government.
”If you watch real close, Cheney’s tongue will whip out of his mouth and lick his eyeball.” That’s what Rob said, but I’ve been watching for a while, and I haven’t seen it yet.
Rob’s third favorite theory was that the world would end in 2012 because the Mayans had predicted it, and all their predictions had hit the mark.
One day, though, I learned something shocking about Rob. His ideas were not his own – he had assumed them from what he had read on the internet. Poor Rob. It was a cruel irony. A machine had invaded his brain. Unknowingly, he had been assimilated. Rob was a cyborg.
The classic cyborg, or cybernetic organism, is a being that is half man/half machine, and the unspoken question has always been who/which is really in control? Modern-day cyborgs walk relatively unnoticed among us. Those who have implanted pacemakers or, cooler yet, thought-controlled bionic prostheses, technically qualify as cyborgs and do not scare us. You need look no further than your friendly neighborhood internet search engine to find intriguing articles about cyborgs, including Donna Haraway’s fascinating “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” as well a variety of “Are You a Cyborg?” quizzes.
I ask you, though, can’t the strength of the human/machine merger be just as powerful even if there isn’t the “attached at the hip” kind of permanently joined physical connection? Can’t an equally strong bond be formed primarily in the human mind? Don’t we have more than just a physical attachment?
At the risk of sounding like a needy girlfriend wanting more, I propose that we are already quite married to our machines; that the honeymoon has long been over and out of sight does not mean out of mind. In recent years the definition of cyborg has been pushed to include not only the physical human/machine connection but also a social and intellectual one. This definition recognizes that humans are either willingly or compulsively including machines in every aspect of their lives. The human/machine connection isn’t forced. Parts are not attached that cannot be disconnected, discarded or lost. The human can let go of the machine at any time. That’s right, she can walk away, quit, whenever she wants. Not being irrevocably attached to the machine, our human can stop using it.
But she doesn’t. Not only does she not want to live without her machines, she no longer knows how.
But getting back to Rob – Rob was so worried that a government official would implant a tracking device into him that he didn’t realize he already carried one around – his cell phone. Triangulation has been helpful to law enforcement in narrowing the location of criminal suspects to a certain area, and is becoming popular with parents (see Disney’s new phone deal) to keep track of their children. It won’t be long before spouses and/or luvahs pick up on this technology so that eventually, not only will everyone always be able to reach you, they’ll also know where you are. With the fast-paced progress made in video technology, it shouldn’t be impossible for them to see what you’re doing, if not from your own cell phone, then possibly from the remote camera that’s somewhere in your vicinity.
Rob need not have been ashamed. He was not alone. We have all become self-denying cyborgs and it’s time we all came out. Join hands, brothers and sisters. Lift your fingers from your keyboards. Look up from your computer monitors, put down your cell phones and yank the plastic out of your ears. Admit for just one moment, admit what we must know is true. We cannot live without machines. We wear them, we drive them, we hold them, we scold them, we play them, we watch them. They cook our food and wash our clothes, and wash our dishes, and wash our cars. They entertain us and wake us and tell us when to stop and when to go. They give us our news, tell us our time, know where we’re going and know where we’ve been. They allow us to do all manner of work, from our jobs to cleaning our homes.
Machines are our partners in every sense of the word. We cannot live without them. We cannot think without them. They have become part of us and we of them. We stare at them endlessly, daily, devotedly, much like we might have stared into our lover’s eyes had we lived a hundred years ago. Sure, we can put them down at any time, but like addicts we don’t want to and don’t know how. There is but one thing we can do. We can own our absolute and undeniable dependence on zeros and ones. Do it for yourselves. Do it for your country. Do it before 2012. Because first we must admit the truth before we can be free.
