The Future Is Wetware


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Before I begin, let’s mull something Trump said once. As I remember it, Trump rambled something about how “the Deep State” could “read our minds” via our microwaves or some shit. Is it possible it wasn’t what we thought — his addled brain coming up with bullshit — but something he actually knew about once he became president?

I doubt it, but it makes you think.

I mean, here I am thinking Big Tech can read my mind — just imagine what the NSA or MI6 can do. And it starts to get a little spooky when you think how much of our lives are rigged up to the Internet. The first thing we may have to worry about when the Singularity turns hard isn’t the Terminator, but our fucking government controlling us to an unprecedented level.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand: the future is wetware.

What I mean by this is, if you assume that the technology to read our minds already exists, what if you took it to the next level and figured out a way to use our own wetware as our next Internet. Using a device found in Arthur C. Clarke’s 3001: Final Odyssey, you could totally re-imagine human interaction with the digital realm.

You could send “m-mail” from mind to mind. Watch video in your mind’s eye. Listen to music in your mind. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that it might even be possible to use your own mind’s processing power to help things along. That may be pushing it, but it seems something to think about.

The point of all of this is — why the fuck are we talking about Clubhouse — which is nothing more than a re-imagined rural partyline –instead of jawdropping changes in the human experience like the Internet became over about 20 years.

What is wrong with us? Where are our Snowdens of yesterday?

Anyway, seems like about $1 trillion is being left on the table because of the shortsightedness of the nerds of Silicon Valley.