Nano-Technology

I am slowly making headway with Welcome to the Machine (Derrick Jensen and George Draffan), not a light read by any means but fascinating none the less. One particular chapter addresses the predicted effects (all be this hypothetically by the author himself) of nano-technology. “Your body repairs itself through your life by taking material from the environment and discharging it through waste. Eventually, few of the atoms in your body will be the same as those from your youth. But for some reason your identity is continuous.” The idea behind this is that what is effectively your soul (for want of a better word) can therefore be immortalised through some form of backing up system… perhaps! The everlasting man-machine hybrid of the sci-fi villain. However, the author then goes on to point out that this theory totally denies our life experiences having any context; that they are not reliant on other circumstantial events which occur happening in tandem. If the tree falls in the forest and no one hears it etc. The hypothesis, he argues, is a result of our societies’ hatred of the (uncontrollable) body – essentially based on fear of death.

“Just as it would be a mistake to consider the Panopticon to be only a building of stone and glass and light and dark, it is a mistake to consider machines to be only artefacts made of iron and steel, and computers to be only metal boxes housing silicon chips. They are much more. The Panopticon is a social arrangement, a way of life, a way of being in the world and relating to the world and each other. The machine, too, is a social arrangement, a way of being in the world, relating to the world and to each other. And the computer also is a social arrangement, a way of being in the world, relating to the world and to each other. We are inside of the Panopticon, we are inside of the Machine, and we are inside of the Computer.”