RE: Fragments of myself I've outsourced

I miss writing things by hand.

I read this great book called The Feed, about a (near) future where our brains are connected to the Internet. Some people would limit their use of it, but most people didn't live in the 'real' world at all.

When 'the feed' went down completely, many died, their brains so wired in to the system that they'd continue to search for information that wasn't there, causing their brains to just break. To survive, one had to learn everything because nothing was retained, from the most basic skills. I liked it because it was not hard to imagine humans at this point - and I read it YEARS ago so we are more at that point now.

As Elon Musk very rightly pointed out, "we're cyborgs already"

Lol. People have been conceptualising humans as cyborgs for decades. I remember writing a short story of a mother whose boy was so intertwined with the machine she could not tell where the machine began and where her son ended. I did a great unit called Cyberpunk - think Ballard's Crash, Gibsons Neuromancer, Bladerunner. So fascinating. Even the medicalization of our bodies makes us cyborg - implants, spectacles, pacemakers, insulin, and so on - we are so intertwined with technology that it seems that it was it is to be human.

I guess being older than you and interested in technology since Dad got the family computer back in .. maybe 1986? - and being a sci fi/dystopian/post apocalyptic buff, I've seen how we have changed over the years and become more and more closer to the future we always envisaged in fiction. Have you read EM Firsters 'The Machine Stops'? Go find it.

I seem to have got to the point that should be all be chipped, id have to make the decision to run for the hills and go cold turkey. I remember vividly the decades without the feed, you see. It wasnt til my 30s that the Internet started seeping into our very souls. It's easy for me to say I miss the golden years, but dammit, I miss being bored and that being okay, and I miss not having to 2FA MY ENTIRE LIFE and I miss my attention span just being there without having to exercise the fucker because I've accidentally gone down a reel rabbit hole that I didn't even mean to and find myself sucked into without my consent.

Yes, Elon, we are cyborgs. We have always been cyborgs, since man first figured out a stick did better than a hand. But I don't know if that's a justification for where we are at now. I don't know where the machine stops and I begin.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34326012-the-feed

If you Google The Machine stops you'll find a PDF copy of the short story.