The body is the link between the mind and the environment. From the inside out, it is our ‘user interface’ to the world; from the outside in, it is that part of other people’s environment that they associate with us. A society accustomed to the convenience of designed environments will inevitably have designs on their bodies. Who wants badly-dressed, smelly, overweight, spotty, dandruff-ridden misfits in the perfect, shining, modern architecture we have created for ourselves? Who wants saggy, blemished, mis-shapen lines where smooth, clean contemporary lines belong? Every hair, every wrinkle, every mole, every pimple is like a spot of rust on a steel girder, a patch of lichen on a block of concrete, chewing gum on a granite paving stone, bird shit on a smoked glass window. We do not belong in the perfect environments we create for ourselves. We spoil them by our mere existence in them, just as we spoil the natural environment by building them in the first place.
Our bodies are our ‘original sin’ in the consumerist religion. Never mind the sins of the flesh; the sin is the flesh. We face a choice: either retreat back to the grubby, cockroach and mite-infested holes we call home, and interact with the virtual world through a beautiful avatar, surrounded by festering pizze and flat cola; or do penance for our wretchedness on the operating table and have the ‘confidence’ to venture out into the city. There are few flaws that cannot be fixed. Just like the Christian Church in medieval times, some sins can be forgiven, others are deadly, but for an appropriate fee, forgiveness can be obtained. Each cut of the surgeon’s knife is a mortification, a flagellation to repair our faults. And when the bandages are removed, we are reborn, perfect and sinless (once the swelling and bruising dies down).
For those pilgrims unwilling to undergo the rigours of plastic surgery, there are still options. We can paste over the cracks and blemishes in our skin with any number of unctions; we can perfume ourselves to hide our own foul stench; we can anoint our hair with styling products and our scalp with laboratoire-formulated shampoo to keep on top of the dandruff. Our hair can have a glossy sheen in any colour but grey, our skin can glow, our teeth can be purest white.
We shape the environment, the environment shapes us back.
The Ecocyborg Manifesto 