“We’re all cyborgs now,” the anthropologist Amber...

“We’re all cyborgs now,” the anthropologist Amber Case said in a TED talk in 2010. For thousands of years, she said, tool-use had been “a physical modification of self. Now what we’re looking at is not a physical extension of the self but an extension of the mental self.” Our devices allow us to compress time and space in a way that we’re able to mentally transport ourselves between planes of existence with the touch of a button. (Or, rather, a digital rendering of a button.) Someone told me recently that John Perry Barlow, pre-smartphones, defined cyberspace as like “the place you go when you’re on the phone,” and Case, who grew up in thrall to the idea of instantaneous travel, realized, while writing a thesis on cellphones, that “everyone was carrying around wormholes in their pocket.” As she puts it: “You have a different type of time on every single device that you use… . And because of that, you start to dig around for your external memories — where did you leave them? So now we’re all these paleontologists that are digging for things that we’ve lost on our external brains that we’re carrying around in our pockets.”

The Dilemma of Being a Cyborg - NYTimes.com (via wildcat2030)

(via wildcat2030)

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