The Evolution of Surveillance, Part 4: Augments & Amputees

Beta-testing Google Glass was only the beginning. Uninstalling AR dinosaurs taught me no man’s an island…and that we must be far more careful about who gets administrative access to our minds.

About:

This continues my now-ancient essay series on my experience as a Google Glass Explorer and the lens it offered me on the evolution of intelligence and cognitive/sensory arms races going back half a billion years. Before you dive in you may want to read Parts 1, 2, and 3, but this one was written to stand on its own. (The essay linking this series into my larger body of work is The Future Is Indistinguishable from Magic, which I discussed as a guest on Weird Studies Podcast Episode 26 for those curious about my thoughts on the agency of objects and materials and a nondual philosophy of science.)

Inspirations:

Manfred Macx’s exocortex from Charles Stross’ novel Accelerando, Siri Keaton from Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight; The Information Theory of Individuality; Laurence Gonzales’ Surviving Survival, an excruciating and illuminating book about trauma; and William Gibson’s 2010 comment that we have become a coral reef. All of which feel uncomfortably personal.

Themes:

Emergent individuality exerts a pressure of simplification on the agents of which it’s composed. Diversity and hyper-specialization are encouraged in the stable, niche-rich body of the super-organismal hyperobject. New opportunities arise to sculpt one lineage into both smarter and dumber forms of itself. What are the relative rarities of these outcomes?

Colonizing the imagination: the difference between the dinosaurs I saw like ghosts haunting my childhood and the after-images of AR dinosaurs lingering like phosphenes in the game-rewarded networks of my head meat. Loss of technological prosthesis as an occupational risk of being cyborg — the self a plural, discontinuous, unfixed, emergent, vulnerable.