Prisoners of Conciousness

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. 

Image by Hector Aramburo