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Steve Bosserman

The Boundary Between Our Bodies and Our Tech - Pacific Standard - 0 views

psmag.com/...etween-our-bodies-and-our-tech

identity self boundaries brain-machine interface

shared by Steve Bosserman on 28 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • At the beginning of his recent book, The Internet of Us, Lynch uses a thought experiment to illustrate how thin this boundary is. Imagine a device that could implant the functions of a smartphone directly into your brain so that your thoughts could control these functions. It would be a remarkable extension of the brain's abilities, but also, in a sense, it wouldn't be all that different from our current lives, in which the varied and almost limitless connective powers of the smartphone are with us nearly 100 percent of the time, even if they aren't—yet—a physiological part of us.
  • The debate over what it means for us to be so connected all the time is still in its infancy, and there are wildly differing perspectives on what it could mean for us as a species. One result of these collapsing borders, however, is less ambiguous, and it's becoming a common subject of activism and advocacy among the technologically minded. While many of us think of the smartphone as a portal for accessing the outside world, the reciprocity of the device, as well as the larger pattern of our behavior online, means the portal goes the other way as well: It's a means for others to access us.
  • "This is where the fundamental democracy deficit comes from: You have this incredibly concentrated private power with zero transparency or democratic oversight or accountability, and then they have this unprecedented wealth of data about their users to work with," Weigel says. "We've allowed these private companies to take over a lot of functions that we have historically thought of as public functions or social goods, like letting Google be the world's library. Democracy and the very concept of social goods—that tradition is so eroded in the United States that people were ready to let these private companies assume control."
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  • Lynch, the University of Connecticut philosophy professor, also believes that one of our best hopes comes from the bottom up, in the form of actually educating people about the products that they spend so much time using. We should know and be aware of how these companies work, how they track our behavior, and how they make recommendations to us based on our behavior and that of others. Essentially, we need to understand the fundamental difference between our behavior IRL and in the digital sphere—a difference that, despite the erosion of boundaries, still stands."Whether we know it or not, the connections that we make on the Internet are being used to cultivate an identity for us—an identity that is then sold to us afterward," Lynch says. "Google tells you what questions to ask, and then it gives you the answers to those questions."
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