5:25 PM Friday, March 30, 2012
For I-don’t-know-how-long now I’ve made a habit of reserving an hour or two in the later afternoon to leave my apartment and type voluminous spews of text into a mobile device. I’ve done this in some way or other since 2006, and for about 2 years now I’ve used a foldable full-size keyboard made by Freedom Pro. The postings all went to Sorabji.MOBI until the keyboard stopped working last week. I’ve adjusted my routine by posting instead to trusty old Sorabji.com using a netbook.
One of the more immutable qualities of this lifestyle I’ve chosen is the solitude. I have no clients and even if I did they’d probably be in other states, lingering in the digital void as telephone voices and e-colleagues but not actual flesh-and-blood human beings.
Out of some pathetic need for non-digital interaction I studiously and deliberately march out almost every day to a coffee shop or a library or a beer hall and I type words, typing not for the pursuit of literary excellence but for the delusion of distraction and the illusion of human contact.
I’ve come to believe that there is something metaphysical but still very real about the disjunctive space occupied by human beings who exist entirely behind the curtain of digital interactions. I’ve seen years of my life wasted in relationships and hysterias that never stepped from behind the computer screens and into reality — and why would they exit the space in which they thrived?
These experiences of irrealities-so-real make me think that human consciousness itself will one day be digitized. If we can have full relationships without seeing each other and have sex without touching then why can’t the balance of solitary human experience fill the same stage? I would like to share the fiber of my consciousness to the cloud, the the P2P, to all the world’s stage of communication and storage protocols — from abandoned Gopher and FTP servers to footlockers and storage crates to whatever format is next in the future of what I predict will be infinite digital storage. I would pursue this not in the interest of making my clatter of thoughts available to others for computational fodder but because it might represent my only opportunity to live forever. This human body is an inferior vessel, the ultimate in mostly single-use componentry that is discarded and left to rot in greater volume than all the Poland Spring water bottles ever produced. But if the mind and the consciousness that animates this body has a chance to survive as a data stream then eternal life might be possible within inorganic life vessels.
Human consciousness will, I believe, be the final frontier for commercial search engines. Once all the books are scanned and indexed, once the tweets and the twats and the newsies and the floozies are instantly made searchable and the monetization widgets are slapped all around then there will be nothing left to index but air, nothing else but the mindstreams and the casual stream-of-consciousnesses zipping through the not-yet-search-optimized brains of human beings.
I think we, as a species which credits its world domination to its superior intelligence, will be disappointed at how little there is to index in these warm, wet brains of ours.
Digitization of human consciousness (as with relationships and rebellions) will hyperventilate the process of being alive. For better or worse the inevitable digitization of human consciousness will hyperventilate the process of being alive.
