If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke that things don't compute, that we need a reboot, or that our memory has been wiped.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that human consciousness is being likened to computer processes in the digital age, highlighting our reliance on technology.
Douglas Rushkoff's quote illustrates the evolving metaphor in which human existence is compared to mechanical and digital systems. Initially, the human body was viewed as a clockwork mechanism, but with the rise of technology, our consciousness is now perceived as analogous to computer processing. This shift underscores our growing dependence on technology and how it permeates our understanding of life, memory, and the functioning of the mind.
In practice
In a conference about technology and philosophy, this quote could illustrate the relationship between humans and machines.
Like most early enthusiasts, I always thought the way the Internet encouraged multitasking made users less vulnerable to manipulation, while simultaneously exploiting even more of our brain's capacity than before. Apparently not.
The faux now of Twitter updates and things pinging at you - all the pulses from digitality that we try to keep up with because we sense that there's something going on that we need to tap into - are artifacts, or symptoms of living in this atemporal reality. And it's not any worse than living in the 'time is money' reality that we're leaving.
Treating an age group as a demographic requires coming up with something that's common to every single one of them. Right?... So it's reductionist in that it reduces an entire segment of civilization down to one person with one habit.
Brains are tricky and adaptable organs. For all the 'neuroplasticity' allowing our brains to reconfigure themselves to the biases of our computers, we are just as neuroplastic in our ability to eventually recover and adapt.
As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
The first step toward maintaining autonomy in any programmed environment is to be aware that there's programming going on. It's as simple as understanding the commercials are there to help sell things. And that TV shows are there to sell commercials, and so on.
The will to domination is a ravenous beast. There are never enough warm bodies to satiate its monstrous hunger. Once alive, this beast grows and grows, feeding on all the life around it, scouring the earth to find new sources of nourishment. This beast lives in each man who battens on female servitude.
In America, as elsewhere, the general irritability level keeps rising.
The price of liberty is something more than eternal vigilance. There must also be eternal advance. We can save the rights we have inherited from our fathers only by winning new ones to bequeath our children.
The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.
War does horrible things to human beings, to societies. It brings out the best, but most often the worst, in our human nature.
For many of the world's conflicts, it is difficult even to conjure up a feasible settlement.
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