I blink my eyes against the bright...

Writing Exercise - Stravinsky’s “The Rites of Spring”

On the topic of convergence, I'm reminded of Regina Spektor's song "Machine". "My eyes are bifocal, My hands are septjointed, I live in the future, In my prewar apartment, And I count all my blessings, I have friends in high places, And I'm upgraded daily, All my wires without traces, Hooked into machine ..."

As technology becomes more and more consolidated, it's only a matter of time before we do away with cramming more applications and possibilities into cell phones and start cramming it into ourselves, instead.

Of course, we are still human. And because of this there is a general anxiety about opening ourselves up too much to technology - there are too many cultural fears about introducing anything into our bodies, especially something which operates in a very different way to our own thought process. Still, if we were to open ourselves up completely to technology and the processes that we already rely on to make our lives easier, what would we be capable of?

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I blink my eyes against the bright stage lights as I wait for the man to finish talking and present me with my award. This sort of thing has become boring - there is none of the excitement that recieving public acclamation used to give me. It's like a boring dream on repeat that I just want to wake up from. Every minute that I stand here, on this stage, is a minute that I could be elsewhere, doing something else. Not that I'm limited to just the here and now - that will never be the case again.

I have become the multitasker extrordinaire. I can still remember what it felt like, after each addon was implanted, after each new possibility synched in with my brain and opened me up to the world. They say that we (well, you) only use ten percent of the brain. I am what can happen if we augment ourselves with technology to utilize the other 90 percent.

A lot of it is just storage space, really. It's only through technology and run commands that the cacophony of information stored on the grey matter hard drives can be directed and utilized, marshaled by processes into orderly forms of information and productivity. I am the most productive that a human being can be. If you can still call me a human being.

Oh sure, some of you know what I'm talking about, this feeling that I am describing. With your inset mp3 players, your bifocal eyes, your daily upgrades against viral infections. But none of you has the sheer amount of addons and apps that I do. That's partly because none of you are willing to take that step - to turn yourself over to the machine. There are still too many negative stigma's attached to being this networked. It's all down to those scary scifi's of the early 80's that were made when people were still scared of technology.

You need to open yourself up to what technology can do for you. Literally. Open up your body to it and just jam those circuits and processors in. I'm standing here on this platform, listening to this man talk about my works for the good of humankind, but I'm also surfing the net, commenting on a forum (under an alias, of course, carefully routed through three different isp's so that no one can trace anything back to me, because what a PR disaster that could be), I'm organizing my music directory, I'm scouring the crowd for threat, I'm listening to the police scanner and noting down the jobs that I'll go take care of as soon as this is wrapped up. I'm also resting a small portion of my brain - allowing it to go offline and running the protocols that it's responsible for with another part. Sure, there's the possibility of overheating or overtaxing the processors, but after all this time I've got the process down pretty well, and it means I don't sleep anymore. I just allow parts of my processor to go offline and rest, accessing the data through a more circuitous route.

There's so much more that I can do now that I've been upgraded, augmented, synchronised, converged. It's why I'm more than you all - why I'm better than you all. It's why I'm superhuman, a superhero.

Sometimes I think about going evil - god knows I'd be good at it. All it would take is a little bit of coding to rewrite my processes and thought pathways and I could rule this sorry rock. But that's a lot of responsibility - if I ruled the world then I'd actually have to rule it. I wouldn't be able to let a little of myself escape into the internet, into a world where no one can recognize my face (or lack thereof). It's easier just to do this, to do what the public expects of me, and to keep upgrading and slowly escaping.

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I like the idea of turning this character into a game character. As the player progresses through the game world, s/he would be able to upgrade the PC body by utilizing technology found. Success in the game would be entirely dependent on how innovative the player is with the material - it's one thing to attach a gun to an arm, it's another entirely to be innovative and create a repeating crossbow launcher which sets the arrows on fire before launching them out of found wood and a flint set.