Conceptualize – if you still yet possess a scrap of imagination – the modern world through the eyes of the working class even one hundred years earlier. The Industrial Revolution fundamentally altered means of design, production and distribution, changing the Western world dramatically in a relatively short expanse of time than the accumulated contributions of centuries before them. This, in turn, trickled down in some way to even the most remote regions on Earth.
As technology advanced, a new world of possibilities opened to those civilizations at the nexus; these possibilities were explored, with consequences both disastrous and edifying. And technological revolution happened again, and again, and again. The atomic age became the computer age became the information age became the YouTube age. They’re all different names, benchmarks if you will, of the dizzying pace of information acceleration.
The world of centuries past is dead, and not just dead, but built over. Our world would be more alien, our atrocities more baroque, than most would have been inclined to prognosticate. Madmen would have laughed. Beyond even our age’s technologies-cum-banalities, a few storm the very gates of humanity. Their quixotic impulse has a name – transhumanism – and its proponents are altering themselves with technology, thus changing how they (and later, we) interact with the world.
Take Jonathan Oxer, the outgoing president of the Linux Australia community group. The man is so enamored with the convenience technology provides that he has wired his physical, front-of-the-yard mailbox to email him him when he gets mail. He’s even gone so far as to have an RFID chip surgically implanted in his arm, which he swipes in front of the RFID reader on his front door to gain entry into his house.
Oxer’s digital embrace could be a signifier of a larger trend, or fringe environment and body modification with a practical twist. It’s safe to say our counterparts at the start of the last century probably didn’t envision an Australian man getting into his house using radio frequencies when they speculated about the distant future, though.
