Web Balloon Blows

Hot Air on Humans

– In the future, we’ll have the Internet injected directly in our veins.
My friend’s face illuminates as if lit by the glare of a computer screen.
– We’ll stop by at a station, a clinic, and have our customary fix, just like an addict can have his dose by just handing his registration card. It’ll be either a daily allowance or a seven-day kit, purchasable with some form of organic currency (blood pints, anyone?), holography and extra memory at additional costs.
Before I consider who’d be licensed to prescribe such a medicine, he’s off, lost in his glowing reverie, elaborating further ways access to the World Wide Web will register every human activity in the coming eras.
– I don’t know what will come first: technological sophistication, which would probably be exponential to its usefulness and development stage, or interweaved access to our bodies. But both should be here soon, for sure.
I check today’s news on my mobile phone headset while thinking how speed may be the stick by which such connectivity may be measured.
Most of everything is already turned into a race, these days. We’re living in a bubble of delusional accessibility, one that permeates every human interaction. Through the malleable lenses of this bubble, every artifice is fair game to express our innermost thoughts.
We’re already convinced everything we think about or learn or remember or need to know should be immediately shared with the rest of the world, which is certainly highly interested in what we have to say. That’s what passes as communication nowadays.
– Before we’re able to travel at light speeds to every corner of the world, we’ll be there through the constant flow of the Web circulating within our system. Vacations will be dreamt about, not spent at, just like Philip K. Dick imagined. Except that we’ll pay a premium for total recalling it.
As applications for mobile devices multiply, though, some see them as a way to break the apparent transparency of the Internet and the chance to rebuild private spaces gone for good from the physical reality. I’m not so sure.
For as much as wealthy elites will easily create their own niches to safeguard themselves against the commoner’s threat, as it’s always been, the allure of the open road, the pull of unlawful street corners and schemes, the siren call for breaking the social contract, violently or not, will remain as powerful as ever.
– Imagine being able to possess someone else’s experiences just by the touch of a virtual key? A stranger’s celebration, an unknown group of people’s party, even a song shared by a small community in some remote quadrant, will all be available for the taking, paid for or stolen by anyone else. Including you.
I’m still not sure but it’s a fascinating thought. Even when I consider that all of the above belongs to the realm of “a” possible future – just like time machines or our little house on a Martian prairie – to some extent, the physical, 24/7 connectivity of the Internet with our mindsets is already here. The next frontier, the body.