It is no secret that materialism thrives in today’s society, especially in the American culture. We are in love with material things. These things are becoming part of us; at the same time they are becoming less material and more digital. For instance the cell phone is a constant reminder that we need to be connected, fulfilling a primal desire of belonging to a tribe. For a lot of us our lives revolve around being connected to these digital tribes. We are being controlled by this technology.
Since Google announced the release of
“Google glasses” there has been a lot of theories and speculation on the
potential of this technology. As consumers we are lazy, we love commodities,
the allure of technological advancements to make our lives easier is
overpowering us. As technology evolves it will become more intrusive disguised
as comfort. Soon voice commands are not going to be convenient enough and
we will need to be wired directly through our brains to access digital
information. It will be the beginning of singularity, the cyborg era.
Everybody is going to be walking around
with accessibility to a database directly from our brains. The mere action of
thinking will bring up access to infinite amount of information available
through the Internet. This of course will come with the deserved dangers of
misuse of this technology. In the same spirit as today cyber criminals hack
into websites to steal credit card information, there will be hackers accessing
our brains for different purposes. Torture, pleasure, escapism, fetishes,
education and even imprisonment will be delivered through manipulation of our
minds.
Recent political events (see the NSA
fiasco) have showed us that governments are not timid about manipulation of
technology and information to meet a certain agenda. It is irrelevant whether
their intent is motivated by justice or evil, the point is that this is already
happening. They will try to rationalize this intrusiveness as a means to a
justice adequate for the time. This will come as imprisonment of consciousness,
the restraining of freedom through hacking the human brain.
Hefty campaign donations will still lead to
federal contracts and private companies will still capitalize on the business
of imprisonment. The typology of prisons will dramatically change. There will
no longer be the necessity for monolithic walls enclosing a community of
criminals. Natural disasters caused by global warming will destroy the
cityscape. There will still be a need to where to store the bodies of the prisoners,
an incubator where they will be “connected” to their respective sentence.
The fast and extreme changes in climate
will force these incubators to be flexible and able to relocate at the drop of
a dime. They will attach like parasites to any convenient remains of buildings.
This architecture will have to be pushed away, far from the sight of the mass
population. It will constantly be morphing, moving, re-inventing but never
forgiving.
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| Image by Hector Aramburo |
