Outsourcing of consciousness. The past.
The biological tissue is still intact, yet already completely ensnared in input-output interfaces.
The world of "approximate thinking" is already yesterday. When memory is outsourced to the cloud, a person loses their inner system of coordinates. It is impossible to build a logical chain when the foundational facts blur and demand constant external confirmation. Thought becomes shallow, fractal.
Man no longer builds mental maps of spaces. GPS does it for him. Without a smartphone screen, a man gets lost three blocks from his own home. The hippocampus atrophies — the region of the brain responsible for orientation. Along with it disappears the physical sensation of "I am here." The space around becomes just as approximate and virtual as our knowledge itself.
What to listen to? What to watch in the evening? Who to go on a date with? Which job offer to choose? We entrust these decisions to recommendation systems and neural networks. Intuition and will grow dull. A person surrenders the right to chance, to error, to personal taste. We think we are choosing a film, but in reality we are consuming the output of a calculation. The very mechanism of desire has been delegated away.
We measure stress, quality of sleep, and levels of happiness through the sensors of smartwatches. We have forgotten how to understand our own condition from within. Moreover, mental hygiene and the "correct" reactions — how to grieve, how to rejoice, how to extend politically correct sympathy — are drawn from ready-made templates and social guidelines. A person does not know what he feels until an app shows him a heart rate graph, or until he reads a post that validates his emotions. Emotions themselves are packaged into external containers.
We believe that an event hasn't truly "happened" until it has been captured and shown to the world. We watch a concert, a sunset, or an accident through a phone screen, recording video we will never watch again. Losing the very essence of the word event. The retina of the eye is replaced by the camera lens. We do not live through the experience — we outsource it to a digital gallery, leaving ourselves with nothing but a surrogate of presence.
The world of "approximate thinking" is already yesterday. When memory is outsourced to the cloud, a person loses their inner system of coordinates. It is impossible to build a logical chain when the foundational facts blur and demand constant external confirmation. Thought becomes shallow, fractal.
Man no longer builds mental maps of spaces. GPS does it for him. Without a smartphone screen, a man gets lost three blocks from his own home. The hippocampus atrophies — the region of the brain responsible for orientation. Along with it disappears the physical sensation of "I am here." The space around becomes just as approximate and virtual as our knowledge itself.
What to listen to? What to watch in the evening? Who to go on a date with? Which job offer to choose? We entrust these decisions to recommendation systems and neural networks. Intuition and will grow dull. A person surrenders the right to chance, to error, to personal taste. We think we are choosing a film, but in reality we are consuming the output of a calculation. The very mechanism of desire has been delegated away.
We measure stress, quality of sleep, and levels of happiness through the sensors of smartwatches. We have forgotten how to understand our own condition from within. Moreover, mental hygiene and the "correct" reactions — how to grieve, how to rejoice, how to extend politically correct sympathy — are drawn from ready-made templates and social guidelines. A person does not know what he feels until an app shows him a heart rate graph, or until he reads a post that validates his emotions. Emotions themselves are packaged into external containers.
We believe that an event hasn't truly "happened" until it has been captured and shown to the world. We watch a concert, a sunset, or an accident through a phone screen, recording video we will never watch again. Losing the very essence of the word event. The retina of the eye is replaced by the camera lens. We do not live through the experience — we outsource it to a digital gallery, leaving ourselves with nothing but a surrogate of presence.