the mind as public property

It’s possible that I don’t have a right to say this, as somebody who admittedly (shamefully) has carved out a separate life on the Internet, and who whispers ‘thank you’s to unseen deities for the supreme conversation blocking powers of headphones, but in the scope of things I think technology’s done more to hurt us as a race rather than help us. Just typing that feels sacrilegious; after all, we’re inundated with the gospel of the modern age, that technology was born of some dainty virgin in the pastures of Silicon Valley and came to rescue all the Dark Age apes of the world and create a population boom that’s the reason we all exist today. (Well, that’s not exactly how the story goes, but you get what I’m saying.) We’re constantly being preached to about how technology’s taken us from medievality to enlightenment; from ignorance to knowledge; from sickness to health; from being relatively isolated to being interconnected with everyone in the world.  And if the past twenty years are evidence of anything, mankind has largely adopted this sermon as its personal creed. We’ve devoured technology with such rapacity in recent years that it’s hard not to feel like the tablecloth’s been torn from under our feet, that this is all happening far too quickly; all of the sudden you’re plopped into a dark room with a swinging overhead light and an interrogator named Facebook demanding to know, ‘what’s on your mind?’

The allure of that question is largely why it feels like private thoughts are becoming public property in today’s world. We’re invited to share every little whim of our minds, whether the wind’s blowing against our window and the sound is annoying us or we have some golden piece of wisdom on life; it’s all worthy of telling, and Facebook is eager to listen. The result is a world where it’s impossible to have a right to our own thoughts. Technology encourages us to share them, even if they are personal and probably better left unsaid. No one’s heartbreak should be a subject of public discourse, yet there it is, on Twitter, narrated in a series of tweets that then get copied and redistributed throughout the online sphere through retweets. This increasing public monopoly of our thoughts ensures that the upcoming generation will never know the healing properties of simply taking time off to be alone. It’s already unacceptable to be anywhere without a link to the digital world for too long; anybody who’s tried to abscond without a cell phone in hand returns to an inbox full of worried messages and frantic voicemails demanding, ‘where are you?’. It’s regarded as strange to not want to be connected to everyone else; after all, interconnectedness with the world is seen as a blessing of modern technology. Why would anybody ever want to be completely alone?

The reason that idea scares people, I think, is because it forces us to confront ourselves, without the ability to carefully control our identity, or borrow someone else’s, which is what the Internet empowers us to do. Without technology there’s no music to drown out unwanted feelings, no Wikipedia to help us borrow knowledge we don’t actually have, no method to make ourselves appear perfect, no medium of ensuring the world knows that you exist. The reality is that without the crutch of technology, most people today are less than what their ancestors ever were, the real people who had to memorize to know anything, had to figure out how to navigate daily life by experience and not by instantaneously available advice, who didn’t have access to a virtual library of personalities to pick and choose and assimilate their own from, but had to rely on their own. The reason we often feel like nobody is genuine anymore is because they aren’t. Technology has allowed them to fabricate themselves. What mankind’s lost from that newfound ability is potentially much greater than anything it could have gained from the advent of modern technology.