I am not a cyborg, but I might as well be one.
There was a very local electrical stoppage in my neighborhood a few days ago. A three block radius was blacked out from early afternoon until power was restored at about seven p.m. Not the end of the world. My family could drive to a nearby supermarket to buy sandwiches because the electric stove was out and we wanted to keep the refrigerator as cold as possible by not opening it. My daughter in law was also able to inspect where the repair crew was working. The power stoppage was therefore hardly noteworthy but it was nonetheless unsettling because no electricity meant no computer, no television and no lights, though my cell phone had enough battery life to outlast the outage. Where would we be without these now essential appliances? I was not plugged into most of my devices, and with the overcast sky, I had no strong light to let me read, and so I went into a cocoon, bundled up in a jacket and blanket, because there was impending snow, even so late in March, and dozed through the afternoon, expecting to deal with the darkness with a pencil flashlight (my family gets prepared) though that turned out unnecessary.
There is no need for the implants dreamed by science fiction to realize how dependent people are on their appliances, the implants so far only used for medical devices, like stents and bypass surgery, which just is the replumbing of veins in your heart. All those appliances work on electricity, even if many of them need trace amounts, electricity the universal conduit of power (horses are not needed to make television work) and so easily taken for granted except when appliances don’t work and that reminds me to have standby battery operated lamps and radios for an emergency.
Most disconcerting was the absence of television which allowed me to be at Command Central to hear unfolding events, such as Douglas MacArthur’s valedictory address to Congress when he returned back to the United States after having been fired by Truman in 1951, especially in that I was three miles away from Rockefeller Center and so thought of national news as my real local news. I kept up with the umbilical cord to news when I turned on the tv as soon as I got home from work in the Sixties to see if since I last checked there had been another assassination, a time when these things did seem to happen, though not frequently, not since the attack on Ronald Reagan, maybe because the Secret Service is better at its job, or because the fad of assassinations has passed. I still check up on cable news every day and evening but they have difficulty filling out their non stop news because most days are quiet, punctuated with whether Trump or his tormentors are filing one legal motion or another. Just one more day of anticipating an Israeli attack on Rafah or maybe a ceasefire to make that unnecessary. Everyday of news is just incremental except for those days that are decisive, like Jan. 6th and Oct. 7th. I am connected everywhere in the world as it is happening through my appliance. No Dick Tracy wrist radio required, though I guess an iphone is a much richer equivalent than that.
Not far behind on my devices is my tv set as that is connected with my streaming channels so that I can sample and judge what might be called the collective culture, ever evolving with its movies and stand up comedians to create and document what is conventionally outrageous as well as what is topical, there being no end of spy movies and romcoms and telling sexual jokes as old as Aristophanes. Do I notice a slight twist or inflection in current preoccupations? Has Trump lost a bit more of his fascination? Are love stories less sweet? Things in culture move slowly, barely to be discerned and maybe not at all, given our limits of sampling, but then suddenly upon us when things change quickly, everyone to appreciate the new thing, like a war or an election, forgetting what has proceeded but taken still with the freshness of the new: what is the character of the new President? What twist can Anya Taylor Joy give to “Emma”? Culture, after all, descends upon the viewership just as it has when publishers decide which novels to publish. We are consumers of culture though doing so always means evaluating it, deciding without any particular expertise, whether a bit of culture is enticing or beside the point, some people taken for many years with “The Price is Right” or David Lean movies even those in black and white and to be reclaimed from the streaming archives.
Nor is politics to be isolated from culture as that is presented in streaming services. I regularly watch the White House almost daily press briefing which goes out of its way not to anticipate what the President and the Executive are doing but will unfold what is the White House official position even if insisting not to negotiate about things going underway. The press conference is useful in telling what are the current issues concerned by the press, whether it means, today, developments, non disclosed, about the ship accident in Baltimore, or unverified or acknowledged atrocities committed by the IDF in Gaza. The default position is to provide platitudes rather than information, willing only to admit, for example, that the discussion today between Israel and the United States are being done through Zoom. I am impressed with the electronic security of these conversations. I do get a sense of this as the latest news there is, the state of play, even as the press conference is not looking much into the future other than that Biden will go to Baltimore on Friday. I am up to the minute and will hear from a disaster and read artful essays about the state of public affairs as well as essays that excavate and exhibit personal moods.
Another device of which I was bereft during the electrical stoppage was my computer which offers on YouTube not only the White House briefing and the congressional hearings where I can rant at the ranting congress people on both sides of the aisle but also engage in writings what seems to be the old fashioned ability to engage in a blog, which everyone seems to do these days, everyone with a place to put their takes on the news or their own families, or on Facebook, to show off children’s drawings or favorite poems or photos. The world of the computer allows everyone to put in an opinion, is deeply democratic in that everyone can express their opinions no matter how small the audience. Everyone‘s opinions are entitled to respect even if the content is bizarre or stupid. Elections are not the only way to contribute and participate in the public arena. But more than that, letter writing, which was supposed to dry out because students had become verbal rather than literate, has had a new source of creativity in that people send to one another short messages of family gossip and also longer artful essays about public events or personal observations. Literary art is all around us and I am noticeably upset when my email productions are interrupted even for just a long afternoon.
Remember that there were Committees of Correspondence conducted just before the American Revolution to try out what was unfolding, and for a while a new and self conscious Committees of Correspondence to explore the impending and escalating Vietnam War, where expert opinion showed what might happen in Indochina even if McNamara lied and said there were not sufficient experts for the American government to get a handle on the situation. And there might be Committees of Correspondence to legally deal with Trump’s authoritarian streak should he be reelected. Whether with a quill pen or a Smith Corona portable typewriter or an internet vehicle, history can occur because of communication devices.
An even more profound appliance than television or the computer is my old fashioned clock radio. Most devices these days, like iphones and computers, change the time automatically when daylight savings time or outages occur, but my clock radio has to be reset when there has to be a change or there is an interruption. Otherwise, the time will recommence at the time at which it was interrupted. So for a brief period of time, hours long, time is suspended because it is not measured. I know that time is to be understood as something deeper than just its measurement. Time is duration, a sense of a moment passing or enduring. I can experience the difference between time past and present time in my brain and I can speculate about time in the future. But Aristotle correctly thinks of time in terms of its measurement.Time is marked by changes, whether biological or historical or otherwise, and so I mark time as changing when it is quantified down to minutes and seconds or even the nanoseconds that pass before a Google search is completed and so I am left a bit adrift if I cannot look at my clock radio and see the digital numbers change every minute. What my time is is where I am and it constantly changes as well as marks me as a permanent present and so clock time is also real time.
Here are some takeaways from my period of electrical stoppage. First, science fiction is not about the future. It is about the present except with some flourishes that make it seem futuristic. Fritz Lang’s classic “Metropolis” is about the conflict of the plutocratic class and the working class and a Mary like savior who would bridge the gap, an audience wondering whether the angelic robot is Jane Adams or maybe Evita Peron, offering lotteries and giveaways to solace the poor. The workers in “Metropolis” walk like automatons, hunched over, when they report to their shifts, but that ios a flourish. Maybe, as in the movies, coal miners went down into the pit with pride. Life is more complicated than science fiction. Similarly, available appliances make no need for implants so that we can track road routes and reservations at restaurants.
Second, I am connected to my appliances, even if they are not implanted, because I need them to be part of my culture and my politics and my physical well being. The vehicles of necessity may change even if the idea of culture itself, as a world of changing opinions and which preceded Plato for unspecified ages of culture,which Plato believed could become more secure if it were based on truth, which is non-changing and so permanent, no longer following fancy, which remains the arbiter of culture, we never having accomplished a way to do away with imagination, even if some Twentieth Century regimes tried.
Third, I am, however, secure in my selfhood aside from my appliances. I can feel myself breathing and feeling warm and thinking or even just being when I am unattached from my appliances. But without them, it is difficult to communicate, even to think progressively. Spinopza needed to read Aristotle so as to reflect on whatAristotle got wrong. A book is an appliance and so don’t be afraid of AI to get rid of drudgery, such as essays, so as to make it easier to do harder things, like make new vaccines or engage in in vitro genetic deformities. Unlike Plato, inventing books was an advance, and so is electricity and so is genetic transformation, just as Aldous Huxley said it was.