Has technology made you more independent? Sure, you have a car to drive anywhere, but you do so on roads others have built, and you must stop to fuel the car with gasoline others provide. Even that electric car you’ve considered buying requires electricity that you do not produce. It’s difficult to break from the complexities of dependence. But maybe in the future…Alert! Here comes the dream sequence. Cue the dreamy tune and blurry filmography to show the passage of time. **
Time: The not-too-distant future.
Place: Your skin.
Object: Wearable thermoelectric clothes.
Purpose: Turning your entire body into an independent charging machine.
Result: You have become your own power station
Twilight Zone music: do dee do da, do dee do da, do dee do da—boing! And here we are back in the present to consider how technology and incessant inventiveness will affect your life.
A group of collaborating technologists and scientists has made great strides in developing a flexible material that has the potential to turn your body heat into useable electricity. * Attached to human skin, the material will potentially would you into a charging station. Who knows, you might even be able to stop in the mall parking lot to start some poor soul’s dead battery with a charge from your sleeve. Certainly, you won’t be asking, “Where’s my charging cord?” You’ll be wearing it, and it will be directly plugged into the power station called you.
When you’re wearing your thermoelectric fashions at some future event, will someone come up to ask for a light? No, not fire for a cigarette, but rather for some LED embedded in his or her clothing. Nighttime runners, highway flag holders, and bicyclists will do away with reflective tape and flashlights as they become self-lighted. And at extravagant balls, women will wear not besequinned dresses and men not besequinned jackets, but outfits outfitted with a million little LEDs that derive their power from their skin, and those LEDs will glow brighter as the wearers dance and generate more body heat. Eveready and Duracell will go out of business. Copper mines will fail as the demand for wires diminishes.
Of course, given the current drive toward connecting everyone through technology instead of through bars, parties, and chance meetings at the coffee shop, you might wonder whether or not such wearable electronics might also be used to bind people in ways that conflict with their desire for independence. Sure, if you wear your thermoelectric running shirt, you’ll be able to go for a run or drive without having to attach a 10,000-foot extension cord to your smart watch or to your electric car battery, but in your new intimate arrangement with technology, you might risk being connected in ways that impinge on your independence, much in the manner that Google and Amazon know what you want to buy and then direct you toward a product. Will con artists and hackers then figure some way to rob you of your power? Will you say as you stand along life’s highway, “My shirt died”? Will you report, “Someone stole my power”?
Now you have a new problem. Do you order a wearable thermoelectric charging sweat suit on Amazon in the belief that it will make you independent, or do you reject such clothing in the belief that it will make you more connected than you wish? And that dilemma should make you wonder about the nature of your independence and dependence and the dichotomy of mind and body. Is Big Tech on the verge of controlling both your mind and body?
You want to believe you’re independent, that you are a free soul who can survive on your own, and you now suppose that wearable thermoelectrics might help you achieve and maintain said independence. But then, you realize that you didn’t come up with the idea of wearing clothing your body electrifies. And you didn’t invent the actual thermoelectric device that might or might not contain some hidden feature of control. You’re now wondering whether you aren’t the guy who merely uses the wheel someone else invented. Without someone else’s inventiveness, you might be like the Incas who had great roads but no wheels. Without the new thermoelectrics, you will wear nice clothes that do nothing more than generate useless and shocking static electricity you pick up from the rug. Thermoelectric fashion wearers will look on you with disdain. Clothing that merely generates static electricity will be banned. You’ll be forced either by peer pressure or by the Federal Bureau of Wearable Electronics to wear thermoelectric clothing.
Of course, living in a world that others have invented doesn’t mean you can’t live somewhat independently. You can always use objects with slight alterations. And you can always qualify what you mean by independence. Redefining is, after all, a sign of your times. But then, if your independence is merely a matter of slightly altering meaning in a world already created for you, are you not like someone who merely changes the arrangement of furniture in a tract house? All the neighbors live in similar houses with only a limited number of potential furniture arrangements or feng shui? You might think your interior décor is different and a mark of your independence, but a couch is a couch regardless of its superficial covering and its placement blocking the door or steps is simply the fool’s way to independence.
What exactly does “being independent” mean at this point in human history or in the midst of all the inventions of the industrial and technical age? You keep asking, “How independent am I really?” Even without those inventions you are accustomed to using, does the gregarious nature of the species prohibit true individuality and independence?
Were people always mostly dependent? Was unavoidable dependence the reason for philosophy? Did Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle see the need for philosophizing as a mechanism for acquiring some semblance of independence in a world crowded by inventions and interconnected minds? Were they foreshadowing Descartes by saying, “I philosophize; therefore, I am independent.” And as an offshoot of philosophy, isn’t psychology another form of identifying independence or its antithesis?
Shoot! Now you’re concerned not just about the technology others invented for your use, but that your personal philosophy and identity have also already been invented and that you are wearing the mental clothing designed and powered by those ancient philosophers and ancestral members of your culture. Is it possible that your neurons have been electrified by someone else’s philosophical inventiveness? Do they, and not you, power your thoughts?
Does a mere declaration of independence make one independent? Did your high school English teacher make you read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre? Recall that among other themes, the novel focuses on independence. Brontë has the main character Jane say, “I am a free human being with an independent will.” Jane also declares, “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” Are such statements merely a form of defensive defiance designed to support a myth of true independence? Is fictional Jane truly independent? Are you?
In that mind-body dichotomy does either the mind or the body achieve independence? There seems to be little doubt about physical dependence given the enveloping products of industry and technology. Even a hermit gets a start in the context of a society he or she eventually rejects either by going naked or by making clothes from the plants and animals found in the wild.
Would you become more independent if you wore clothing you could use to generate electricity? Can you picture yourself in the wilderness, powering through your thermoelectric clothes an electric stove to cook the food you grew or caught? Is the life of a hermit the only truly independent life? Is the electrified hermit the ultimate example of human independence? Will you order your thermoelectric outfit on Amazon and have it shipped to the woods as you leave behind your physical, social, philosophical, and psychological tract house to start your hermetic life?
Independence. Considering it generates many questions, but few answers.
Notes:
*National Research Council of Science and Technology. 13 Jan. 2021. Flexible thermoelectric devices enable energy harvesting from human skin. TechXplore. Online at https://techxplore.com/news/2021-01-flexible-thermoelectric-devices-enable-energy.html Accessed January 13, 2020.
**Inception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SswRnJgX1_s
Time: The not-too-distant future.
Place: Your skin.
Object: Wearable thermoelectric clothes.
Purpose: Turning your entire body into an independent charging machine.
Result: You have become your own power station
Twilight Zone music: do dee do da, do dee do da, do dee do da—boing! And here we are back in the present to consider how technology and incessant inventiveness will affect your life.
A group of collaborating technologists and scientists has made great strides in developing a flexible material that has the potential to turn your body heat into useable electricity. * Attached to human skin, the material will potentially would you into a charging station. Who knows, you might even be able to stop in the mall parking lot to start some poor soul’s dead battery with a charge from your sleeve. Certainly, you won’t be asking, “Where’s my charging cord?” You’ll be wearing it, and it will be directly plugged into the power station called you.
When you’re wearing your thermoelectric fashions at some future event, will someone come up to ask for a light? No, not fire for a cigarette, but rather for some LED embedded in his or her clothing. Nighttime runners, highway flag holders, and bicyclists will do away with reflective tape and flashlights as they become self-lighted. And at extravagant balls, women will wear not besequinned dresses and men not besequinned jackets, but outfits outfitted with a million little LEDs that derive their power from their skin, and those LEDs will glow brighter as the wearers dance and generate more body heat. Eveready and Duracell will go out of business. Copper mines will fail as the demand for wires diminishes.
Of course, given the current drive toward connecting everyone through technology instead of through bars, parties, and chance meetings at the coffee shop, you might wonder whether or not such wearable electronics might also be used to bind people in ways that conflict with their desire for independence. Sure, if you wear your thermoelectric running shirt, you’ll be able to go for a run or drive without having to attach a 10,000-foot extension cord to your smart watch or to your electric car battery, but in your new intimate arrangement with technology, you might risk being connected in ways that impinge on your independence, much in the manner that Google and Amazon know what you want to buy and then direct you toward a product. Will con artists and hackers then figure some way to rob you of your power? Will you say as you stand along life’s highway, “My shirt died”? Will you report, “Someone stole my power”?
Now you have a new problem. Do you order a wearable thermoelectric charging sweat suit on Amazon in the belief that it will make you independent, or do you reject such clothing in the belief that it will make you more connected than you wish? And that dilemma should make you wonder about the nature of your independence and dependence and the dichotomy of mind and body. Is Big Tech on the verge of controlling both your mind and body?
You want to believe you’re independent, that you are a free soul who can survive on your own, and you now suppose that wearable thermoelectrics might help you achieve and maintain said independence. But then, you realize that you didn’t come up with the idea of wearing clothing your body electrifies. And you didn’t invent the actual thermoelectric device that might or might not contain some hidden feature of control. You’re now wondering whether you aren’t the guy who merely uses the wheel someone else invented. Without someone else’s inventiveness, you might be like the Incas who had great roads but no wheels. Without the new thermoelectrics, you will wear nice clothes that do nothing more than generate useless and shocking static electricity you pick up from the rug. Thermoelectric fashion wearers will look on you with disdain. Clothing that merely generates static electricity will be banned. You’ll be forced either by peer pressure or by the Federal Bureau of Wearable Electronics to wear thermoelectric clothing.
Of course, living in a world that others have invented doesn’t mean you can’t live somewhat independently. You can always use objects with slight alterations. And you can always qualify what you mean by independence. Redefining is, after all, a sign of your times. But then, if your independence is merely a matter of slightly altering meaning in a world already created for you, are you not like someone who merely changes the arrangement of furniture in a tract house? All the neighbors live in similar houses with only a limited number of potential furniture arrangements or feng shui? You might think your interior décor is different and a mark of your independence, but a couch is a couch regardless of its superficial covering and its placement blocking the door or steps is simply the fool’s way to independence.
What exactly does “being independent” mean at this point in human history or in the midst of all the inventions of the industrial and technical age? You keep asking, “How independent am I really?” Even without those inventions you are accustomed to using, does the gregarious nature of the species prohibit true individuality and independence?
Were people always mostly dependent? Was unavoidable dependence the reason for philosophy? Did Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, Heraclitus, Plato, and Aristotle see the need for philosophizing as a mechanism for acquiring some semblance of independence in a world crowded by inventions and interconnected minds? Were they foreshadowing Descartes by saying, “I philosophize; therefore, I am independent.” And as an offshoot of philosophy, isn’t psychology another form of identifying independence or its antithesis?
Shoot! Now you’re concerned not just about the technology others invented for your use, but that your personal philosophy and identity have also already been invented and that you are wearing the mental clothing designed and powered by those ancient philosophers and ancestral members of your culture. Is it possible that your neurons have been electrified by someone else’s philosophical inventiveness? Do they, and not you, power your thoughts?
Does a mere declaration of independence make one independent? Did your high school English teacher make you read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre? Recall that among other themes, the novel focuses on independence. Brontë has the main character Jane say, “I am a free human being with an independent will.” Jane also declares, “I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.” Are such statements merely a form of defensive defiance designed to support a myth of true independence? Is fictional Jane truly independent? Are you?
In that mind-body dichotomy does either the mind or the body achieve independence? There seems to be little doubt about physical dependence given the enveloping products of industry and technology. Even a hermit gets a start in the context of a society he or she eventually rejects either by going naked or by making clothes from the plants and animals found in the wild.
Would you become more independent if you wore clothing you could use to generate electricity? Can you picture yourself in the wilderness, powering through your thermoelectric clothes an electric stove to cook the food you grew or caught? Is the life of a hermit the only truly independent life? Is the electrified hermit the ultimate example of human independence? Will you order your thermoelectric outfit on Amazon and have it shipped to the woods as you leave behind your physical, social, philosophical, and psychological tract house to start your hermetic life?
Independence. Considering it generates many questions, but few answers.
Notes:
*National Research Council of Science and Technology. 13 Jan. 2021. Flexible thermoelectric devices enable energy harvesting from human skin. TechXplore. Online at https://techxplore.com/news/2021-01-flexible-thermoelectric-devices-enable-energy.html Accessed January 13, 2020.
**Inception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SswRnJgX1_s
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