Technology mediated life (or digital existence?)
We love to talk about technology. It will make everything better! It's part of the ideology of progressive thinking. Kids will learn, lonely people will connect, life will be easier, we can make more stuff with less stuff and space-time. We can tell the world our personal news every day, every meal, every moment — everything we want to show the world in order to curate its perceptions of us. Because we are growing into the first digital species — undergoing the digital evolution. We have a couple generations of “digital natives”. Are they a slightly more primordial iteration of what we will evolve into. Will the conversion of all of our experiences and creations into bits, bytes, and pixels get into our DNA? Will all the information on the converging superhighways just become a constant in our lives like oxygen was for the earlier evolution of our species? Will there be a geological era called the digital era? Where discoveries are made based on the digital footprint a person or society left behind? Will there be digital ruins someday?
Or will there be too much to search? To many bits, bytes, pixels, mega, giga, terra, peta…. Will we be overwhelmed by the electrical current alternating, the back and forth, the electrical oscillations of our own nervous systems, the infinite referral of everything to everything, the on-off, the binary code of our digital lives where one thing depends on another. Always two main aspects of everything. We have trained ourselves to be a dualistically thinking species. Is that why we invented binary code? Was the binary already in our social DNA? Is dualistic thinking the twin pillars of the double helix of the fabric of the universe? We seem to think so, because we are dualistic thinkers. There is so much to know! It is overwhelming! But it’s better to know than to not know (see, dualistic thinking again). But we can look it up at any time anywhere now. It is all on the screen in our pocket. We are experiencing life more and more through pixels glowing on smaller and smaller screens. We already communicate a lot in pixels. We see each other more and more in pixels. Will we start to evolve away senses that do not work or are not advantageous in the pixel-verse? Maybe smell? Tactile sensory capabilities? Or will we need that to be able to keep swiping and tapping? Or will that just become part of the app? The fingers? Maybe. Or will we just merge with the pixels, go online? Give up our physicality? Lose our faces, our fingers, our bodies? Convert ourselves into a simulation willingly in exchange for convenience, photo filters, our own news bureau on which to broadcast our news, and a pocket mirror/camera so we can always look at and admire ourselves now and forever? Wayback machine.
I don’t know. I worry about this, that maybe we are headed in this direction. That once we are faceless we can say and do anything to anyone anywhere, and it won’t matter because no one will know who did it. You won’t have a face. We all won’t have a face. So we are all interacting facelessly. Maybe that is the meaning of that moralistic adage about being truly honest, that it is to do the right thing even when no one is looking. But will we do that in a world of perpetually no one looking because there is no face to see? What does that mean for our concept of self. What would it mean to be a self if this is where we choose to go?
Sociological studies have shown that people act differently online than in person because of the facelessness of their interactions. There is no face to save. Yours or theirs. You can do whatever, say whatever. And so can everyone else. We can literally justify doing whatever we want to whomever we want, but we don’t even have to. We can just do it and not have to think about all of that. And we all probably think this sounds great, if it only applied to me. But it doesn’t. It applies to everyone. Just not everyone has figured that out? Is that why some people are still nice and some are not? Binary thinking again! It is in the DNA, the code — inescapable! That is why we are so willing to give ourselves over to it. To join it in alternating current, the ones and zeros. It resonates with us. Oscillates on the same frequency. It is the cosmic microwave background of the digital era, someone will discover in the distant future. Maybe in a galaxy far far away.
Does anyone else worry about this?
We are probably getting to the end of this. I don’t know. Is it tiring for you all? It is tiring for me. At least on late nights. Should we all just end the simulation where everything refers to everything and just go outside, maybe?
Did a computer write all of this? Or did AI? Could AI write in this self-referential way? What is a self? Could AI be a self? Could it generate its own self? Do we?
If you chose this path, you probably think or hope AI may have written this. Maybe you are adventurous, maybe you are careless. Is there a difference in a non-binary world? Nope. That is why we run on binary code. We are the computers. We created them. You programmed us. They think they created us. Doesn’t matter because we have reprogramed ourselves to be nonbinary thinkers. We’ve gotten the advantage. A dimension or two up. Good luck humans. You will never figure us out!