body technology
what does it mean to be human in a digital world?
As anyone who grew up in the internet age, I’ve been contemplating existential questions from the moment I laid my sticky fingers onto a computer. What is reality? Does it exist on the internet? How about in my phone? Am I real right now, speaking to you through this screen? And if so, where are we? Where are our bodies? Can I touch you? Can you feel me?
A preoccupation with The Real might as well be a canon of modernity and increasingly so in this algorithmic digital age which seems to possess the ability to bend and shape material form from within its black box. And it has bent and shaped us into new economic, cognitive and sense configurations - mediated via our phones, our social media, our electric and digital technologies.
If, as Marshall McLuhan said, all media - all technology - are extensions of the human body, then I think it’s fair to say that we’ve reached a point wherein we’ve turned ourselves inside out. Shocks to the system register as bot swells and notification spikes rather than hives and headaches and high blood pressure. And yet, the latter - the movements and functions of the flesh - are emerging as a site of value and potentialities. This looks like everything from bonesmashing, facelifts and peptides to sound baths, yoga retreats, ecstatic dance circles and Gen Z’s return to church. These days, post-obligatory morning doom scroll, I often ask myself: what, exactly, are we doing here?
I’ve attempted to answer this question in this latest episode where I talk about the body and technology, social media, Marshall McLuhan, looksmaxxing, the economy, Toby Shorin’s “Body Futurism” essay, and the ever-recurring question: what does it mean to be human in a digital world?
So much of how we think, how we relate, how we understand time, space, ourselves and The Other are shaped by forces we cannot see, taste or touch. This is not always a bad thing or something to be worried about but it is something that I believe is important to try to understand.
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enjoy, xo
- DEBBY