Steve Mann attaching electronic devices to his body in his youth. The purpose? To experience a reality that has been technologically mediated. Steve Mann is a cyborg. That is, he’s a human with both biological and artificial parts. Others know him as a professor of engineering at the University of Toronto, and a devoted techno-futurist. Mann’s signature invention is the WearComp, a series of wearable computer devices. One example is the EyeTap, a set of computerized glasses that enhance or diminish objects entering the wearer’s field of view. Using computer technology, he can control what he wishes to see and not see.
Precisely ten years ago, Mann released a book detailing his life as a cyborg. CyborgL Digital Destiny and Human Possibility in the Age of the Wearable Computer is Mann’s manifesto. He’s an inventor with purpose — one deeply rooted in a personal ideology that has shaped his life. Although Mann’s understanding of technology ten years ago was considered radical, his writings forecasted what we have now lived over the past decade of our digital revolution.
Vicarious soliloquy
Over the years, Mann has delivered talks at universities and conferences about wearable computers and technologies. He does so in the comfort of his own home. Wearing the WearCam, a camera attached to his head that projects onto a screen in the conference auditorium, Mann presents his talks using pictures he draws at his desk. He also occasionally looks at himself in the mirror to assure the audience that it is in fact he who is speaking.
The point is to let the audience connect with him on a different level. Instead of simply watching him speak, the audience can “become” him by seeing exactly what he sees. Mann describes this as a deeper identification with another person.
The implications are compelling. How will our perspective on human rights change when we can experience, at least visually, exactly how repressed and mistreated individuals live in their societies? How will aid to a country following a natural disaster change when we can experience the disaster for ourselves?
Humanistic Intelligence (HI)
Artificial intelligence aims to create intelligent machines that can fulfill roles previously played by humans. Mann argues against this goal. Instead, he advocates the advancement of humanistic intelligence.
HI is about using technology to enhance human capacity. Under the HI model, users of a given device can take control any time they wish. The technology is responsive to the users: we shape the computer’s behaviour, rather than having computers shape our activities according to pre-programmed assumptions.
Do we want to wake up in a world where only a computer knows how to drive the bus? Mann hopes for a world where a human bus driver is equipped with a brain-implanted microchip that enhances his attention to make him a safer and more efficient driver.
Free agent
In his book, Mann openly acknowledges that he is alone. He is a one-of-a-kind being, a self-made mechano-human entity. However, he is not alone as a cyborg. Techno-culture has given us the means to become cyborgs — think of your wristwatch, pacemaker, or cellphone. While we rely on techno-culture to mass produce our electronic enhancements, Mann is the only one who creates his own enhancements; he is the free agent.
The free agent tailors technology to his life. Everyone else is forced to embrace the technologies available on the market. Think of every computer operating system you have ever used. Now ask your friends what they use. Are the answers mostly the same?
Cyborg envy
Mann describes the hostile reactions he has received from strangers he encounters. Instead of curiosity, they show an aversion to his weirdness. This, he says, is a symptom of our existence in a world of mass-produced technologies.
Cyborg envy stems from society’s overall failure to implement and explain technology as something that human beings develop and control. Many of us are uncomfortable with the idea of biology and technology merging in one person. Such encounters are, after all, the stuff of myths and legends. Frankenstein’s monster, the Golem of Prague, and even the Terminator are incarnations of the fear that we will one day endanger our humanity through technology.
The free agent embodies these apprehensions because he can create his own artificial self.
I am a camera
The impact of social networking on social movements is older than most people realize. In fact, in the era of the wearable computer, the term social networking will take on new meaning. Every cyborg will be equipped with a wearable camera. Knowing where someone is and what they are doing will no longer be limited to text descriptions. People may be able to see and eventually feel the conditions of where their friends are and what they are doing.
Using his WearCam, Mann can browse the produce aisle at the grocery store while his wife shops from home, essentially shopping through him. Facebook and Twitter have certainly changed relationship dynamics by allowing for the constant supply of updates on what others are doing. How will relationships change once you can “live” the other person, too?
The virus
Pervasive systems like Windows are like viruses. A friend creates a document in Microsoft Word and sends it to you. You need to buy Word to open the document, and so you need to buy Windows to run Word. Hence the virus has spread to you. Now you start learning Word and send documents to your friends. You then become a carrier of the disease.
Mann argues these operating systems are designed to function independently of us. We do not need to know how they work; we only need to apply our needs to their functions. But what happens when something goes wrong? Our total ignorance means we cannot sharpen our own pencils. There is a gap in what should otherwise be a closed loop.
Microsoft only allows us to operate on the principle of a straight line: either the computer tells us what to do or we tell it what to do. The system can’t enhance our intelligence or understanding. If we want to change Windows to operate in a fundamentally different way, we cannot. When our pencils snap, we must hire someone to come and sharpen them for us.
We are only permitted to function in the way Microsoft wants us to. We are trapped in what Mann calls a “desktop prison.”
Totalitarianism
In a world of increasing surveillance, individual privacy will be determined by the large bodies that control surveillance technology. These bodies could also regulate the flow of free information to the public.
Mann fears a world where our ability to communicate with one another will be suppressed. We currently live in a panopticon: a prison where we cannot know when and where we are being watched.
According to Mann, the WearComp helps us reclaim our individual and collective freedoms. By constantly monitoring those who monitor us, individuals gain power over the governing bodies’ primacy in surveillance. Using his WearCam to conduct his own surveillance of surveillance systems and employees in stores, Mann was met with hostility from the corporations’ security guards. This, he argues, is the suppression of the individual’s right to freedom of information.
In the WearCam age, everything an individual sees will be recorded. This information will be distributed freely and will be available to anyone. Similar to the Internet’s impact on civil society, the WearCam will allow for survelliance information to be spread more freely around the world.
Cyborg beauty
Mann’s original motivation in inventing the wearable computer was to mediate reality, and to experience the world in different ways. He discovered that this ability is as much of an aesthetic experience as it is an intellectual or technological one. Currently, artistic endeavors are not considered a particularly potent means of reflecting how new technologies might affect society. This attitude towards the arts hinders our culture’s ability to grapple with technological change in a meaningful way. WearComp can potentially close the gap between art and technology, requiring the user to respond creatively to the world by shaping it, changing it, and exploring it in novel ways. The view through a computer’s lens is essentially an honest one: it demands that we accept artificiality as a given.
