We are the web

Today I read this sexy editorial from Kevin Kelly at wired.com about the consequences of network saturation. He writes…

In 10 years, the system will contain hundreds of millions of miles of fibre-optic neurons linking the billions of ant-smart chips embedded into manufactured products, buried in environmental sensors, staring out from satellite cameras, guiding cars, and saturating our world with enough complexity to begin to learn. We will live inside this thing.

Kelly sees the potentials of web2.o as transforming man-machine relations to such a point that we become co-dependent. Habitual use means reliance; means integration; means transformation.

What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows – about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won’t feel like themselves – as if they’d had a lobotomy.

Although interesting, the themes Kelly refers to the article are starkly similar to a field of study known as Posthumanism. Information flowing freely between organic and mechanic substrates, the transformation of human identity into informational patterns, and distributed cognition are all prevalent themes in posthumanist literature (see this, this and this). Katherine Hayles (pantheon for posthuman academia) argues that historically the specific construction called the human being is giving way to a different construct called the posthuman -“an amalgam of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous reconstruction.”

Whereas Kelly is writing almost whimsically posthumanists write prospectively, extrapolating from current conditions and taking them to semi-rational, maybe-likely conclusions. They interrogate the ‘human’ and welcome in an extropian ‘cyborg’. They discuss the implications for humanity when technology becomes so far integrated our ‘humanity’ is compromised; where does the machine end and the man begin? Cyborgs as a fluid concept. By re-evaluating the role of technology cyborgs then not only exist but also flourishing. For example, Greg Bateson asks “Is the blind man’s can a part of the man?” Is technology independent or an extension of bodies? In this way we may consider ourselves already cyborg outsourcing our hands every time we use a can opener, outsourcing our senses when we use the telephone, outsourcing parts of our cognition every time we use the Internet.

In a similar post fellow NMP-er Heironymusix related this article to an Isaac Asimov novel. Posthumanists also refer to fiction as a legitimate reference for study, fiction often being the exemplification of possible worlds or, as in the case of science fiction, an extrapolation of current conditions.

The evolution of the Posthuman has been a long running process. As technology advances so do we, but technological advance is not a threat because after all we are using it to advance us.

A quote from Joseph Conrad, 1903

There is-let us say- a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! –It knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel I ought to embroider- but it goes on knitting…and the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident- and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it…it knits us in and knits us out. It has knitter time space, pain, death, corruption and despair and all the illusions- and nothing matters.

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