We live intimately among our technologies, our minituraized consumer electronic devices and the increasing intimacy of these devices to our body - in our hands and pockets; as extensions of our bodies as phantom cyber-limbs. Marshall McLuhan’s prophecies carry more weight now than ever before as our technologies exponentially shape our lives, our environments, our habits, and our bodies.
We have to examine our relationships to these digital devices, the platforms and the tools they use, and gain literacy with them in order to engage with what is coming - with what is already here.
Our technologies now not only read, respond to and predict our thoughts, our emotions, our what-will-we-write-next --- to commodify and databank our identities to optimize the algorithms of the advertisements that are fed to us in never ending and always evolving streams ---- we must find tactics to reclaim ourselves - our data bodies and our cellular bodies.
The algorithms we are fed are used to isolate and segment us, they are extensions of techno-capitalism, entangled with colonialism. How do we reclaim our feeds? How do we escape the techno-panopticon that grows in infinite directions, this tentacled and multi-headed hydra of surveillance, exploitation, and data banking of our personal and intimate bits and parts? How do we scramble the data points, the ravenous mouths and eyes? Where are the blind spots in the machine? How can we redesign our technology to free people from oppression instead of continuing to extend the legacy of oppression and exploitation and the requisite industry that drives environmental degradation that is techno-capitalist-colonialism? How do we take these tools and remake them? How do we reclaim and disrupt and reinvent the Global Village?
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You find yourself smooth, your molecules aligned in a new way. You’ve transformed, you have become purified. You now feel yourself moving along a conveyor belt, human hands pick you up, you can feel their gloved fingers on your smooth metal body... you feel their breath on your metal body as you are delicately placed into a circuit board. Here a connection is made, your metal body connected to other energetic mineral bodies completing a circuit, pulsing energy now moving through you, connected to the other metal bodies around you. An encasement is put around you, layers of other minerals in new molecular distributions layered on top of you like the sediments of the past, but this time, smooth and hard and redistributed, a layer of thick polished glass encases you. You can feel the ions in the glass - particles of matter with a tiny electric charge in each one that pulses back towards you. Now among other metals in new molecular arrangements.... still mineral bodies, perfect, aligned, transformed, encased, energized. You, with all of your mineral bodies transformed, redistributed and connected have become... a new technology...
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Do minerals have a consciousness as they pass through the refinement chambers and factories, is there collective consciousness in the materiality of your smartphone, these once ancient minerals. Is your phone alive? You are drawn to it at all times, it’s okay, it’s become an extension of your body. One that you check more than the muscles in your back or your arms or legs. What is this magnetism you feel towards your phone? Could it be the rare earth magnets in your phone that enable your speakers and ringtones, the neodynium and dysprosium. Or could it be the europium, terbium, and yttrium that make the bright colors the bright reds and blues of the notifications and the colors of your texts that you receive, sending dopamine signals to your brain, synapses firing as you look into your screen. Could it be the touch of your finger onto the indium tin oxide coating on your screen that makes a circuit with your finger. That makes the colors dance as you touch them. That lets you hit send - the satisfaction of a text or email or selfie going through the erbium doped fiber optic cables laid upon the deep sea floor that send your messages, your images, your instagram stories at light speed across data centers around the world. That high off of hyper speed data transmission that starts with your body, your finger, touching a screen. Is it magic... or is mineral ghosts, the ghosts of mineral bodies. Your phone rings, awakening you back into the world.
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From Future Mutation: Technology, Shanzhai, and the Evolution of the Species by Anna Greenspan “Not isolated, or distinct from one other, the exchange between nature and artifice is no longer one of simple tasks, where machines serve us, but one of mutual evolution, where organic and inorganic parts learn from each other on a massive, unprecedented scale. The human body unfolds, melding with the mechanosphere.”
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From the Softwar(e) Manifesto by Leily Khatibi and Roya Ebtehaj “Crossing between parallel realities, communication systems are being augmented, and a global village is born. As a consequence of the age of Digital Imperialism, a westernized culture has been imposed; reinforcing capitalism as a universal quality. Ubiquitous algorithms and mathematical models curate and aide decision-making. The ability to collect and analyze massive amounts of structured and unstructured data affects large swaths of people through micro-targeting operations. The information overflow in social networking platforms provides new forms of civic engagement interweaving big data with manipulation strategies. Bias seeps into data that machine learning uses to train on, influencing the predictions it makes. Lack of transparency around these abstract formulas raises issues of dehumanization and emotional excision. Reflecting on the rise and fall of physical barriers dividing contradictory ideologies, these barriers have now metamorphosed into virtual ones to prevent the information perceived. Raw data is buried beneath massive layers of content obstruction. Achieving net neutrality and original, creator-specific digital communications requires liquefying these layers through revolutionary software movements (Softwar(e)). This phenomenon traces the evolution of the internet from a novel playground for social experimentation to something that now more closely resembles a battlefield. Throughout major clashes with cyberspace gatekeepers, people have broken holes in the existing, inhibiting systems—indiscernible from portals for access to pure, unfiltered content.”
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As part of Enigma Symbiotica, Praba Pilar says “We-the hapless, destructive, world-ending celebrants, hopelessly trying to stay up to date, constitute the Cult of the Techno-Logic. Our reverential absorption in technophilia, obscurant of a brutal necrosis, is leading to domination and death for the majority of life on Earth. Can we break the code, dump the cult and create a differential imaginary of culture-one that nurtures an autonomous subjectivity that can tend, inhabit, and dwell on Earth?”
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