Introduction to Mental Cybernetics

For a very long time, homo sapiens only used physical tools. We clubbed animals (and each other) over the head with sticks. We built traps to catch things (and each other). Eventually we got a little bit past all of that and built traveling machines like airplanes, cars, motorcycles, and Segways.

All of these tools, inventions, simply extended our physical selves. We could drive to the store in five minutes instead of walking for fifteen. We could hop on a plane in New York and be in San Francisco later that day.

Then all of a sudden, humanity began to develop mental tools. As far as we can tell, this happened around the first time a computer was networked to another computer in the world. We jumped on Telnet and started downloading text from a computer on the other side of the world.

Gradually, over time, these tools grew in complexity. Infoseek gave way to Google. AIM gave way to Twitter. All of these tools will give way to ever more simple and yet fundamentally complex tools which we use every day.

Tools grew into networks, relaying information faster than any human can create it. Kevin Kelly notes in What Technology Wants that the Internet now generates more information than we put into it. Who can explain where that information comes from? The networks.

At some point in the last year, there was a shift in how these tools related to human kind.

For a long time, we were building the machine. Putting endless amounts of time and effort into a system that would augment us. We slaved over code, generated endless websites, we flooded the system with data like throwing ideas at walls. What would stick?

The humans on the other end of the pipes rewarded those who created the newest technologies by adopting them, they rewarded the new ideas by perpetuating them.

Then one day it all shifted, for a few of us. All of the years of code, all of the years of programming reality, the old reality gave way to a new reality –one where the computers support us, and we’re allowed to be human again.

This didn’t happen for everyone at once. Augmented humanity is a small group of people, whose pasts are deeply rooted in the birth of the Internet. Augmented humanity is also every child born now, digital natives, kids face-deep in their iPhones at age 9. Augmented humanity is every person who finds a way to send an idea into an endless feedback loop that results in supporting their existing life.

Every human who turns off the screen, and let’s the computer reflect the answers back on the rest of humanity has become augmented.

Every human who jumps out of bed in the morning with an idea that they know is worth spreading, and then they throw it out and it flies virally out into the ether has become augmented.

Every human who never gets lost, because they have a data-wormhole in their pocket that tells them where everything is, where all of their friends are, where their next meal is going to be is an augmented human.

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A brief history of a cyborg.

I began to notice that I’d become a cybernetic life-form, for real, on a drive down the California coast in November of 2010.

The sun was setting over Santa Barbara.

The day had started out like any other. I woke up in San Francisco where my tiny room situated within a larger apartment, was located at the time. My room only contained a bed, a few books, a closet with a few changes of clothes, and my laptop. I’d been writing about living with less for a year, but that was all about to change.

I walked outside, grabbed a coffee. I checked my email for my usual 15-30 minutes per day, and began figuring out how I was going to get to Los Angeles by the end of the day.

A few days earlier, using the expanded mental tools of an augmented human, I rented a Zipcar (a Mazda 3) for three days. I located the Zipcar three blocks from the coffee shop using an iPhone App. If I couldn’t find the car, with the app I could honk it to let it know where it was. With the iPhone App, I could unlock the car from anywhere. With a tiny plastic access card, I was able to swipe in and other of the car instantly.

Oh, also the car had been partially been paid for by affiliate revenue that I’d generated off my blog by encouraging others to ditch their expensive cars and switch over to Zipcars.

The cute half-asian barista was playing a particularly good album, but I didn’t know what it was. Previously I would have needed to get up the courage to be that guy who asked what the music was in the coffee shop, but I didn’t need to anymore. I popped open Shazam on my iPhone and I was able to know within 30 seconds what album was playing, which led to a link to download the album instantly — which I did.

Now I had the music I was going to blast in my cyborg car on my augmented human journey down the California coast.

I returned home, threw a few pairs of clothes into a a bag, and headed out of the door. Within a few moments I was swiped into a car I’d reserved from my pocket only a few days ago. I plugged in my iPhone and was blasting music I’d only downloaded an hour ago. Within moments I was headed down to Los Angeles for Thanksgiving dinner, where I’d only told them a few days ago when I was coming.

I didn’t even know where I was going either. I’d never driven from SF to LA before, didn’t know any of the roads, and I didn’t even need to stop and get a map. I simply plugged “LA” into my iPhone and within moments it was telling me where to go.

Fast-forward three hours later, I’d played through the album I’d downloaded from the cloud around four times solid. The sun was setting over the ocean to the west. I had the windows down on my Mazda 3, cold air was rushing across my face… and it hit me:

I was a cyborg. I had been from the start.

My brain had been rewired since the dawn of the Internet to be ready for this moment — when our relationship with the machines shifted from us serving them to them serving us.

Quickly the ocean gave way to the massive interconnected machine that is Los Angeles, and I felt that something was different than when I’d been there in the past. Maybe it was that I knew exactly where I was going, even though I’d only been to LA once in the past and had never driven there? Maybe the traffic was synced up at 90 miles per hour in a way that hadn’t happened before. Maybe it was the ambient vibe of the music I’d downloaded only seven hours earlier from the cloud.

It doesn’t matter what combination of circumstances brought me here, but this much was clear: I was a member of augmented humanity.

I then set out on a journey to meet as many of us as I could find.

–

When people find out that I’m a cyborg, they’re a little concerned.

Isn’t it weird to be half-machine/half-human they ask me? I can only say it seems to be better.

Before I was a cyborg, I was confused a lot of the time. I had to rely on days/weeks/months of exploration. I couldn’t simply download the helicopter flight manual anywhere and at any time if I needed to know something.

Humans used to have to remember things: George Washington was born when? Now, who cares. Within moments I can have the answer to any question answered. If it isn’t a question that Google can answer, I send a note out to Twitter and one of my cybernetic compadres can usually answer it within seconds.

This streamlines the entire world in a way that many people are barely even aware of yet. We went from being isolated entities within a confused system, to tiny little networked biological creatures with our brains plugged into the cloud.

Unknowingly, our entire society has began to become networked into one giant super-organism connected by fiber-optics, wifi, and the little screens that we all use to look deep into the machine.

The first augmented humans are rooted deep into the history of the Internet.

We came into existence shortly after the Internet was first switched on. I was a bored kid, wandering around the house when our family computer first found it’s way out into the preliminary cloud. Connecting was hard back then. “cd ..?” But over time it got better. Quickly we upgraded from Telnet to the next generation of Internet systems.

The first browsers came into existence, does anyone remember Netscape 1? The first augmented humans do. We waited patiently overnight as a 1 megabyte file downloaded onto our desktops.

I created my first website around the age of twelve. I hand-coded a basic little site on Geocities. It was one-page site on evolution, but not the kind of evolution that you’d think. I’d been playing a Will Wright game where you slowly evolved digital fish for a digital fish tank over time. Using platform algorithms and genetics, I created a race of super-fish, and then released them out onto the Internet.

Back then, it was extremely hard to find websites, so only a few people came to download.

Eventually the early augmented humans stayed up all night chatting with girls across town over AIM, feeling connected to another over text when we couldn’t be connected in person.

Websites morphed into early blogs, blogs into portfolios, portfolios back into blogs. A few dozen hits turned into hundreds, thousands, and then tens of thousands per month.

Through all of that, most of us didn’t realize what was happening. It’s difficult to see too far into the future. We didn’t foresee the mental shift until it happened, and our minds exploded wide open in a destabilizing flash of new experience.

Stop by Ebookling on February 15 to catch the release of Everett Bogue’s new ebook, along with a bunch of other great works produced by independent authors.