Trail Trials

Cycling is one of the most efficient modes of transport there is. On a flat, smooth surface, the effort required to cycle is almost negligible. Mountain biking, by contrast, is a sport involving the use of bicycles on terrain unsuitable for bicycles. It can qualify as an ‘extreme sport’, at least insofar as it entails risks of injury and even death, when going down a mountain rather than up. Naturally, it requires a few thousand pounds of specialist equipment, not to mention lycra clothing. God forbid that one should take an ordinary bicycle to a mountain – one lacking suspension, disc brakes, titanium this, specially reinforced that, and Shimano the other – or wear street clothes.

There are, I imagine, many schools of thought as to what mountain biking is all about. To me, unqualified though I may be to comment, if one takes a bicycle to a place unfit for bicycles in order to test one’s bicycling skills, then there should be in the mind of cyclist a degree of acceptance of the unsuitability of the terrain. In other words, rather than wishing the terrain were other than it is, the ‘true’ mountain biker negotiates it successfully through their exceptional dexterity and mastery of the bicycle. If you’re going to wish the terrain were different, then surely you would be better off cycling elsewhere than in the, for want of a better word, wilderness.

An alternative perspective on what mountain biking is all about is evidenced by the introduction of special mountain biking trails in areas fortunate enough to feature appropriate topography. Here, what there is of ‘nature’ is simply a backdrop to a manufactured cycleway that has been engineered to provide the cyclist with the means to self-administer a dose of adrenalin. Berms, jumps, table-tops, and drop-offs are all constructed and maintained, and at quite some expense, with the usual justifications of providing an ‘experience’ and a ‘destination’ that will boost the local economy, put the location on the map, and so forth. Multiple such trails then compete with each other for the attention of the local, regional, national and even global community of adrenalin-junkies to parade their respective equipment, lycra, sunglasses, death-wishes and mid-life crises. Were it not for the skills and mastery of the bicycle that are also required to navigate them without injury, such trails might as well be roller-coasters. Both are fun, though.

This is what ‘nature’ can become. Not a place to be, not a place to adapt to, but a place to be adapted so that people can have a thrilling ‘experience’ from educating themselves to risking their lives, usually signed by some idiotic flapping sail-shaped signs and accompanied by a cafeteria, gift shop and/or visitor centre. Somewhere to ‘go to’ with your bikes strapped to the roof of your SUV, wearing special clothes you wouldn’t wear every day. Or which you do wear every day as a sign to others that you’re the kind of person who might head off on an adventure at any minute, or have just come back from one.

The two different attitudes to mountain biking, then, reflect a fundamental dichotomy in how we relate to nature as humans. In one, we learn to accept what is there and work with it. In the other, what is there is not good enough, and we change it so that it fulfils its ‘purpose’ to us better. The former is how we live in nature and see ourselves as part of it; the latter is a trail to the ecocyborg we have already ridden a long way along.

Augmented Reality

Apple’s new Vision Pro goggles have taken augmented reality (AR) to the next level. Rather than trying to put digital content onto the real world, they convert the real world into digital content and augment that. (This, at least, is my reading of the ‘virtually lag-free’ statement on Apple’s web page.) Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series occasionally riffs on the potentially dystopian aspects of AR, such as in the episode ‘Men Against Fire‘ and ‘White Christmas‘. But AR has some interesting implications from an ecocyborg perspective.

These googles are effectively augmenting their humans — they, like many everyday IT tools we take for granted — turn us into cyborgs while using them. Critically, however, they are a ‘shortcut’ to ecocyborgs. They can change our perceptions of the environment around us digitally, rather than through engineering. Do ecocyborgs necessarily have to be meat (and/or veg) ware? Must they be entirely physical phenomena, rather than at least partly virtual? By altering how we see the world around us, these kinds of tool might be able to help us live comfortably in spaces we would ‘naturally’ find uncomfortable. It is not so difficult to imagine a company running your habitation telling you to leave your goggles on for ‘the best user experience’…

Much more interesting, however, is that the virtual augmentation of physical space manifests multiple realities. If everyone is wearing goggles, there is no longer a single, common, shared world-out-there to discuss. Instead there are multiple, independently constructed realities — parallel digital overlays on the (single) physical world — that cannot necessarily be unified. Ecocyborgs are the death of nature; augmented reality the death of science. Sort of. You’ll still die if you walk off a physical cliff your goggles have told you is a more pleasing plain. But maybe your grieving friends can use simulations of you to continue to interact with their conceptualizations of you after you are dead. (Another theme explored by Black Mirror.) Perhaps this can be done so seamlessly that they don’t even know you are dead — for them, you are still alive, so long as they keep the goggles on.

The potential of AR is immense — imagine visiting a ruin and being able to see it restored. The meeting use case explored on the Vision Pro website could render travelling for conferences a thing of the past. However, the ability to wilfully alter one’s reality is a power that can easily be misused. Your goggles could, for example, ensure all the people you see are beautiful people — which is the thin end of a potentially very sinister and/or creepy wedge.

A central principle behind the ecocyborg is the coevolution of (post-)humans, (post-)environments and technology. We change our environment, supposedly imposing our will on it — making it more ‘us’ — but forget that changing our environment changes our ‘selves’, which logically and ironically makes us less ‘us’. The self that made the decision to change its environment is not the self that ends up living those changes. Each of these changes is mediated through technology, which also coevolves with humans and their environments in accordance with demand, materials, trade and pollution.

AR allows us to change at least the appearance of our environment with no more physical effort than the click of a button or the swipe of a hand. How will that change us? Will it make us more tolerant of deficiencies in unaugmented reality? Why go to the effort of mowing the lawn when AR can just show you your garden with a mown lawn rather than the ‘unsightly’ long grass? Or will it make us less satisfied with the way things are because AR is always showing us something better? Will we become so attached to AR devices that we wear them habitually, or even start to experience mental or physiological symptoms when the devices are switched off or run out of power? Are there religious uses for AR? Maybe fundamentalists could use AR to show demons and angels fighting over strangers’ souls, or perhaps even censor material around them that is contrary to dogma. Flat earthers can see the world as though it really is flat. Could AR mean the end of the beauty industry? Perhaps we will generate avatars of ourselves for others in AR to see us how we would like to be seen… Will it then be rude — even discriminatory — not to use AR to see people how they want others to see them? And what about the clashes of different people’s augmentations of reality? Will we fight over them? Will we hack others’ ARs to force them to see things our way — or even to see a flat plain when there is a cliff? At a larger scale, will companies pay AR manufacturers to cover up evidence of environmental misdeeds — nobody sees the polluted river unless they take their headset off — by then a sort of ‘red pill‘ experience?

More importantly, does AR mean the ecocyborg is no longer necessary? I think not. The Vision Pro is to sight what the Sony Walkman was to hearing. But humans have many other senses and needs, which ecocyborgs will be required to satisfy: hunger, thirst, thermal comfort and immune system training at a basic level, but also gadgets and the energy to power them, sanitation, circular consumption and distribution of materials, and space to allow free expression.

Cognition and Hypocognition

With my colleague, Bruce Edmonds, I have finally managed to publish a paper mentioning the ecocyborg. Putting a concept that has, to some extent been something personal, into a scientific article — particularly a co-written one — felt a bit like an ‘exposure’. Was this thought something that could withstand the scrutiny of peer review? Seemingly yes (though not without major revisions…).

How on earth did I end up writing the piece with Bruce? The context is a special issue of Futures on ‘Simulation and Dissimulation’ put together in the Covid crisis, in which various governments from local to national used computer simulations as part of the decision-making process. Though a potential source of consternation, it seemed important to emphasize that decision-making processes not using simulation are no less potentially flawed. After all, in complex systems, whatever makes us think humans necessarily have the cognitive wherewithal to make ‘the right’ decisions? ‘Hypocognition’ is a term apparently coined by social anthropologist Robert Levy in a study of Tahitians. It has been adopted by Kruger and Dunning to describe the psychological phenomenon in which people with insufficient knowledge can overestimate their capability. It is where the Dunning-Kruger effect comes from. It seemed a bit hypocognitive to implicitly assume that humans would definitely make good decisions without computers by raising the issue of dis-simulations in the first place. (Not that we should necessarily trust computer simulations any more than we should trust other humans…)

That’s all very well, but where does the ecocyborg come in? Once we accept that we need to augment our cognition with computer simulations, we have crossed a line. Computers have become embedded in decisions about humans’ relationships with the environment. We think and behave differently in the environment as a result, and the environment itself is then other than it would have been had we not used computers. This isn’t necessarily full ecocyborg yet, but it’s certainly a step on the path.

It felt a bit like a ‘revelation’ that there were no social-ecological systems as such — when microplastics exist at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the top of Mount Everest, and in placentas, technology has embedded itself everywhere. Just as there are no ‘pristine’ ecosystems untouched by humanity, there are no ‘pure’ social-ecological systems untouched by technology. That seems to be a radical claim to make, but I realize as I write this that I believe it.

The surprising bit of the article to me was the conclusion. It was Bruce who wrote the text for the concluding sentence of the article, “An alternative to being prejudiced against these strange new beings is to embrace them and educate them to be well-adjusted and useful members of our society.” This was so different to my instinctive reactions, which I think could be largely characterized as fear and grief. But however much we may be afraid of the power of technology (most major human innovations from agriculture to the internet have been the subject of anxiety) and grieve the loss of Nature, there needs to be an acceptance that we are all, through our daily choices and behaviours, eliminating Nature, changing the climate, and radically altering our relationship with the environment. Wouldn’t it be better to do that mindfully, rather than by ‘accident’ as a by-product of making our lives more convenient and comfortable? And if our minds are not up to the job, is it so wrong to augment our cognition with computation?

Becoming gods

The other day I was a virtual attendee at a workshop in Colorado. The main topic of discussion was ‘climate intervention‘. Climate intervention is deliberate human activity aimed at changing the climate – typically with a view to ameliorating the effects of climate change. There are various technologies that could be used for this purpose, from planting trees through injecting chemicals (such as sulfur dioxide) into the stratosphere, to putting giant reflectors in space.

I was not ready for the impact the discussion of all this would have on my emotional state. Though I have attended academic events on the general theme of sustainability for several years, this was the first climate change specific event I’d been to. Though I see from my smartwatch data that my heart rate was no greater than normal when working, I did find myself experiencing a rising sense of panic. A lump was in my throat, and I could not settle in the evening. I did not want us to undertake these interventions.

Neil Stephenson‘s book ‘Termination Shock‘ explores a scenario around geoengineering. I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but the main point I want to make anyway is that this meeting I was attending was essentially discussing seriously something that has been the subject of a relatively recent science fiction novel. Neil Stephenson foresaw the metaverse in my favourite book, Snow Crash. I hope Termination Shock isn’t another dystopian prophesy.

The motivation for undertaking such drastic action is clear in the opening passages of another cli-fi book, The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. These passages contain a scene in which millions are killed by a heat wave that is unsurvivable without air conditioning, which leads to a power cut. We concentrate a lot on temperature when discussing the climate. It is 1.5C we are trying to limit ourselves to, and when we fail as we are expected to do before the end of the decade, every 0.1C of mean annual global surface temperature increase we prevent is still important. No mention of humidity, however, which is important for two reasons. First, increasing mean annual temperature and increasing humidity are expected to coincide as warmer air can hold more moisture. Second, the combination of heat and humidity is what kills us through hyperthermia.

So-called ‘wet bulb’ temperatures above 35C lead to the human body being unable to cool itself through sweating, and breaching this threashold is made more likely through climate change. Of course, it’s not like a 34.9C wet-bulb temperature is fine, and 35C is fatal. Heatwaves with 28C wet bulb temperature led to high excess deaths in Europe. However, 35C wet bulb is the point at which even a healthy person cannot maintain their body at the right temperature due simply to the laws of physics, with death in hours.

There is, then, a risk as the climate warms, that more parts of the world will become uninhabitable to humans without appropriate accommodation and technology. Since higher humidity is associated with coastal areas, where many of the world’s largest cities are located, these problems will be faced by more populous areas, creating pressure for migration, building and infrastructure design, energy use, technology development, and geoengineering. Essentially, we build ecocyborgs in these areas, people living there run away to more inhabitable parts of the world, and/or we modify the whole world’s climate in the opposite direction to that we’ve been doing since the Industrial Revolution. Of these, only migration avoids choices that entail learning how to make uninhabitable areas inhabitable on the kind of large scale that would be needed for humans to live on other planets than Earth. Our behaviour is putting us into a corner in which ecocyborgs and planetary-scale geoengineering become necessary for our survival.

Non-sense

A bear’s sense of smell is several hundred times better than a human’s. An eagle’s eyesight 4-5 times better. Birds can sense the earth’s magnetic field. Dolphins, bats and elephants have amazing hearing. The superior senses of various animals to those of humans emphasize to me how much more embedded they are in their environment. If we do not sense our environment in such depth, we cannot process information about it. If we cannot process information about it, what are we perceiving? How ‘off’ can our perceptions be and us still expect to survive in the environment?

Living ‘in’ the environment rather than ‘on‘ it means perceiving it in depth, and responding to those perceptions. Yet in comparison with non-human animals, it seems our perceptions of the environment are anything but deep. However, there is a fascinating podcast about spiders I highly recommend. In it, we learn about how a spider’s web is part of its ‘umwelt‘, an extension to its body that enhances its perception of the environment. The web is, in other words, a part of the spider — even if it seems separate. Technology has done the same to us. I can know about a fire or a flood on the other side of the world through the internet (the World-Wide Web). That web is part of my umwelt, and my senses extend far beyond the immediate environment my eyes can see, my skin can feel, my nose can smell, or my ears can hear. In a way, technology has corrected for the lack of sensory depth provided by nature. If I so choose, I can learn about the environment from the microbial to the galactic, all through the internet. There is even a livestream of the view of the earth from the space station — something no non-human animal could ever have seen.

The separateness of the spider and its web emphasizes a further point: while we may see cyborgs in sci-fi as the melding of meatware and hardware, there is in fact no need to go as far as surgical implants to become a cyborg. We can extend our umwelt through physical interaction with external technology. Thus, using technology, be it a land-line phone, radio, television, or the internet, already makes us cyborgs: our sensory perceptions have been enhanced; neurones in our brains are storing knowledge we could not access without these technologies, as well as information on how to use them. Humans began to become cyborgs with the invention of the telegraph.

There is another, more interesting lesson from the spider and its web. Unlike spiders, we share the technology used to extend our umwelt. Hence, in a way that was never possible previously, our umwelts intersect. Specifically, if a web is part of the spider’s sensory machinery — not to be seen as separate from the spider, and the internet is similarly part of ours, then since we don’t each have our own internet, we are now parts of each other, and the internet has made us so. Our consciousnesses are now interconnected. This is an astonishing thing for me to find myself writing — a sort of techno-mysticism (I am not the first to coin that term).

To separate us from the internet is to deprive us of a sense, like losing a sense of smell. But more than this, it deprives us of a connectivity with each other that is now part of our everyday existence. No wonder people joke about WiFi (and, funnily enough, battery life — something only a cyborg would worry about) needing to be added to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

I suggested earlier that we can have superior, deep, senses of the environment through technology, emphasizing ‘if we so choose’. The internet also contains a huge amount of material that is nothing to do with sensing or learning about the environment; indeed it contains active misinformation, as well as fantasy. The internet can be used to escape from the environment rather than perceive it in greater depth. It can subsitute our senses of the environment with senses of alternative realities — non-sense. These alternative realities are now parts of our realities, affecting our neural wiring, discourse and behaviour. As much as the internet can enhance our awareness of the environment, then, it can also enhance our misperception of it, and how ‘off’ our behaviour is, as I raised in the opening paragraph. The question remains, then, of whether we can still expect to survive in the environment…

Systemic gaslighting

Gaslighting is a form of abuse in a relationship by which one partner psychologically manipulates the other into believing they are mad. Wikipedia tells me it’s from a 1940s film called ‘Gaslight‘, which is why I sometimes find the term difficult to remember: I haven’t watched the film.

Though mainly focused on abusive sexual partnerships, gaslighting can also happen in the workplace as a tool for controlling employees when managers’ systems don’t work, or simply because some people are unpleasant and enjoy that sort of thing. For a brief spell, I acted as a union rep: the role is essentially to act as a companion for people when the workplace relationship has broken down. It is surprising how often people internalize problems that workplace management systems have failed to anticipate or handle well. Sometimes, people do go a bit mad — most commonly over-interpreting behaviours of others to look for signs that they are being singled out. (I hesitate to use the term ‘paranoia’.)

Managers of workplaces design systems to ensure they run smoothly and achieve the organization’s goals. Into those designs, they bring their worldview, culture and way of thinking. Coupled with the authority they are accorded, it can be hard for them to admit that their perfectly reasonable seeming system is flawed in a way that systemically prejudices some people from thriving in it. Hence, there is ‘something wrong’ with those who do not, and the temptation to abuse the power that comes with their authority in defence of the designed system.

Beyond the workplace, this can scale up to the national level, where laws are made that, to some extent or another, favour some people over others — not necessarily intentionally so. Unintentional discrimination isn’t on the same level as gaslighting. But the tools of psychological manipulation used by abusers to gaslight their victim are deployed by states and media corporations through propaganda and debating styles: withholding information, countering information that does not fit the abuser’s perspective, discounting information provided to them, jocular verbal abuse, and trivializing people’s sense of self-worth.

This is not to allow that every individual has a sacred right to behave how they please, with no regard for the welfare of others. This is not about ethics and moral conduct: the Global Ethic Project is about finding universal values that cut across all the world’s religions. Rather, this is a concern about how systems of management and governance can lead to individuals whose moral conduct is no worse than anyone else’s ending up believing there is something wrong with them, arising simply from ‘arbitrary’ personal characteristics. Further, it is the about the efforts taken by those wanting to defend the systems to reinforce such beliefs.

When we design the ecosystems in which we live, is there any reason to believe that similar phenomena will not occur? Think about how some engineers treat users of computer software who don’t understand how it works. When you log a helpdesk call, is there not a tendency for them to give you the impression you’re the one with the problem, not the software? What will happen when we live in designed ecosystems, then? When we have a problem with the way things work, with the ‘services’ ‘provisioned’ by the ecosystem (language too awful to comprehend but nonetheless used), won’t we be made to feel like we are the ones at fault? “No-one else has this problem,” you can hear them saying. And bit-by-bit you’ll be undermined and either learn to live with a permanent sense of discomfort that something about the whole world in which you live is wrong, or go mad.

Think about the portrayal of environmental protesters in the media: not typically as rational, sensible, ‘normal’ humans with legitimate concerns, but as luddites, NIMBYs, crusties, anarchists, marijuana addicts, and tree-huggers. Whether effective in making the individuals concerned feel undermined or not, isn’t it at least attempted gaslighting? And isn’t it really about defending a system that works very well indeed for some, but not for others, and especially not the environment?

At the same time, it is not as though Nature is entirely neutral, except, perhaps insofar as lacking intentionality implies neutrality. There’s a reason we have innovated over the millennia to make our lives more convenient, to cure the sick and to ease suffering. As a mother, Nature is somewhat harsh. The weak, the sick, the reckless, the unlucky: all can be victims of her whims. As humans I think we have the ambition at least ideally to be more compassionate and forgiving. Some ecosystems simply do not provide for the needs of humans without modification and invention. Arguably, and perhaps in her efforts to defend herself, Nature also has some gaslighting behaviours: she withholds information and certainly does little to give one the impression of being worth anything.

Dysembodiment

When I first encountered mind-body dualism as a philosophy, I pictured monks frustrated with their bodies wishing their minds could be dissociated from them so that they could avoid the ‘temptations’ associated with ‘the flesh’. Supposedly ‘pure’ minds are not troubled by the need for food and water, thermal comfort, sexual fantasies, or urgent needs to defacate while trying to concentrate on something. No wonder religions tend to idealize a disembodied afterlife where our souls persist after our flesh decays. Remembering that, in evolutionary terms at least, the various parts of our bodies are the emergent products of networks of interdependent collaborations among cells that have specialized their functions, it is not difficult to imagine that one part of the body might become irritated with the behaviour of another. But mind and body seem to be a particularly vulnerable fault line.

When I become ill, or my tinnitus worsens, or whatever internal pipework in my face it is that means I hear my breathing rather like the space-walk scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey, I feel that irritation intensely. Sometimes, there is even no bodily provocation for such irritation at all. I have wished I didn’t have to breathe, that my heart would stop beating, that I didn’t need sleep, or that my body would cease causing me the discomforts associated with the symptoms of illness. If I had a robot body, for example, then a malfunctioning part could simply be replaced using a few spanners and a bit of solder. It would be a routine occurrence, perhaps as part of an annual service one could do oneself, rather than some major, potentially life-threatening undertaking requiring specialist skills.

The experience of some form of dysembodiment, as we might term a persistent desire to inhabit a different body, is prevalent in contemporary society, and causes significant psychological discomfort, and in the worst cases, severe mental illness. The concept of dysembodiment cannot distinguish among the sources of the problem: be they in the mind, the body, the environment, or some combination of these. For example, a long-term medical problem that might make one wish one had a different body could be caused by an inherited condition, stress, social norms about what people’s bodies should look like, and/or pollution. Whatever the cause, the issue would be addressed by living in a different body. Though I could hardly say I suffer much from dysembodiment, when I do find myself whimsically wishing I had a different body because of some inconvenience or another, I tend to imagine it being a machine rather than flesh. Why replace my body parts with some other randomly emergent meat, as opposed to carefully designed, precision engineered, and, critically, replacable and perhaps even upgradable machined parts?

Another alternative could be to do away with embodiment altogether. However, if we imagine brains as information processing machines, ‘pure mind’ is computation with no physical engine making it happen — I cannot conceive of a means by which such a thing would be possible. If this isn’t just my limited imagination, but a fundamental law of the universe, then one way or another, embodiment is something minds must accept in order to be minds at all. Then, if nothing else, increasing entropy means that the body will decay. Bodies allow minds to exist, but they also malfunction and need maintenance, which irritates minds and makes them wish they didn’t have bodies.

Time Travel

Einsteinian physics apparently tells us to conceive spacetime as a single concept rather than space and time as distinct. Even so, it seems to be the case that we can choose to travel in space in a way that we cannot do in time. The human sensory experience of spacetime is, at first glance, one in which there are at least practical differences between space and time as concepts.

Storm Arwen, which swept down the UK from the north on Friday 26 November 2021 gave me an opportunity to look again at the experience of space and time. Winds gusting at 150km/h and more from an atyical direction (gales usually come from the southwest) blew trees down near powerlines, and hundreds of thousands of people, including me, lost electricity for several days. The trees’ suicidal protest against the ecocyborg saw them entangling themselves in wires, posts and transformers throughout Scotland, but especially in the northeast.

The loss of electricity meant different things for different people, but for me: no lighting, heating, hot water, cooker, internet, television, or mobile phone signal. Burning wood in the open fireplace provided a little heat, and we could toast crumpets on the fire. Candles provided a little light in the long nights of the late Scottish autumn. The Storm had taken us back in time over a hundred years, to when houses had no electricity.

While the ecocyborg frantically repairs itself to restore what we might laughably (given its unrecognizability to our ancestors) call ‘normality’, it doesn’t need to take a storm to travel back (and hence also forward) in time in similar ways. Mobile phone signal coverage on various bands means you can travel in space and go back to a time when you couldn’t stream films on a mobile phone, further back to when you could barely use the internet, or further still to when communication of any kind with a mobile phone was not possible.

Travel further in space, and you can reach times when households in the UK typically had no electricity. For millions of people, mainly in the Global South, life without electricity is just life. Access to safe drinking water is also a daily reality for one in three people globally, while two thirds of children aged 3-17 have no internet access at home. Hence, from a sensory experience perspective as humans, we can travel to the future and to the past simply by moving in space over the surface of the planet.

Clearly, people have lived, and do live, their whole lives without facilities that I take for granted, and find myself struggling when they are taken away. The technology permeating our everyday environments changes who we are, what we do, and what we expect. It shifts our skillset and adjusts our thinking. We are physically and mentally different as a result of technology in comparison with a counterfactual world where that technology is absent. Technology, through supposedly empowering us, also changes us: it is not, then, our pre-technology selves that are empowered; that self ‘dies’. Rather, it is our post-technology selves that are empowered – who that self is, is a function not only of the pre-technology self, but also of the technology itself, and in ways we do not control.

At some point, we may find ourselves in a position whereby the pre-technology self cannot be rediscovered. For example, if we did not have a fireplace in our house, or anywhere outside where a fire could be lit, or indeed anything to burn, or if lighting fires were illegal, then we could not ‘rediscover’ selves that used fire rather than electricity to keep warm and cook food; the skills and knowledge would eventually be lost. This critical threshold is the transition to cyborghood, and we become entirely dependent on the ecocyborg to maintain us. We are simulacra, being simulated on the ecocyborg.

The Real World

One memorable encounter I had with the term ‘the real world’ was at a conference of the trades union I’m a member of, which represents a mix of workers in the public and private sectors. In an obvious dig at the public sector workers present, a motion was presented to conference with the phrase “the real world of profit and loss”. In a similar vein, the Oxford English dictionary offers “we live in the real world of limited financial resources” as an example of a sentence containing “real world”. The kinds of people who don’t live in the real world include academics, actors, artists, celebrities (unless they’ve come from Humble Beginnings), dreamers, environmentalists, intellectuals, politicians, teachers, vegetarians, vicars, and young people. The question of what is real has occupied philosophers for millennia, which is ironic, because those fond of using “the real world” in the manner indicated would probably assert that philosophers don’t live there.

What’s odd is that I’ve never heard people talking about hunter-gatherer societies living in the real world, yet arguably they are better placed to survive in the landscape than I am. (As I said earlier, I live on the landscape, not in it…) Nor indeed have I heard of hunter-gatherers telling others to live in the real world. (But then again, I don’t hang out with them much…) I think it’s fair to say that “the real world” is about money (with overtones of there not being enough of it for the silly thing you want to spend it on). But money is the one thing we can be absolutely sure is not real. If there’s any reality that’s socially constructed rather than empirical, it’s money.

The ecocyborg, however, is not for hunter-gatherers, but for technically augmented post-humans to sustain their existence in. Like it or not, the “real world” will become what we construct: the boundary between social construction and empiricism will thereby be blurred. For those with the power to make it so, reality will be what they want it to be, and they might even be able to alter themselves in ways that will make the reality they want work somehow. Is this world a place finally fit for dreamers, idealists and the various pariahs listed earlier to live in? Or will it be one that more severely reinforces the exhortations to “live in the real world”?

In computer games, the laws of physics do not need to apply. We can fly, cast spells, shoot laser beams at aliens, and cross interstellar and intergalactic space in seconds. A purely digital existence, then, sounds like one that truly allows us to create the realities we want and inhabit them. But the memory and CPU cycles needed to store and process our consciousness will surely be no less a limitation on a digital existence than sunlight, fresh water, and edible plants are on our physical existence. Our virtual selves would then compete for RAM and clock ticks, and end up divising some sort of system to distribute them in a way that is somehow agreed to be fair. (Or have a system imposed oppressively by those with more power and privilege.)

Whether the ecocyborg is physical or virtual, then, we can expect there to exist a scarcity of one resource or another, and social norms to emerge (or be carried in from earlier cultures) to help decide how those resources should be distributed. Maybe that’s what’s real about the real world.

Habitats for Humans

Animal welfare campaign organizations articulate their case around ‘five freedoms‘ that animals under human control should have: freedom from hunger or thirst, freedom from discomfort, freedom from pain and disease, freedom to express normal behaviour, and freedom from fear and distress. Perhaps because we don’t like to see ourselves as being free rather than ‘under control’, nor indeed do we like to see ourselves as animals, it’s not clear to me that we seek to grant ourselves the same freedoms in the habitats we create for humans. There are parallels between the five freedoms and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The second and sixth of these are ‘zero hunger‘ and ‘clean water and sanitation‘ for example, while the third is ‘good health and well-being‘. But discomfort, expression of normal behaviour, and fear and distress are more tangential.

In the UK, planning legislation has been relaxed allowing the conversion of unused office accommodation into flats, some with floor areas as little as 13m². Though this might seem a pragmatic approach to resolving the country’s housing crisis, ‘zoning‘ in city planning can mean offices are built in places that do not provide convenient access to services that residents need. With accommodation such as this being chiefly aimed at the poor, this ‘inconvenience’ means exacerbating hardship.

The trend, however, as been more generally towards smaller room sizes in new build British homes, as developers seek to maximize returns on investment. While an article in the Journal of Happiness Studies finds little evidence of larger living space leading to greater subjective well-being, another article in Building Research & Information reviews various health issues that can be caused by being short of internal space in homes. The main basis for the health issues is argued on needs for privacy and space for socializing, and the article concludes by saying that one fifth of English households have insufficient internal space. Insofar as socializing and needing privacy are normal behaviours, these changes deny humans a basic freedom.

The question of what is ‘normal’ behaviour for humans is an interesting one. Our day-to-day lives are very different from those of people 100 years ago. As for our genes, evidently ‘native’ Europeans with lactose intolerance haven’t even caught up with the invention of agriculture. (To the extent that right-wing extremists drink milk to prove their ‘supremacy’ — don’t tell them about lactase persistence among African pastoralist communities.) Normality is heavily culturally determined, of course, and culture can change more quickly than genes, but still, it’s possible some cultures are out of step with what human bodies and brains have been programmed to expect. Is patriarchy ‘normal’? Or sitting in a chair all day staring at a screen? Or commuting? Or microwaving a TV dinner? Is there any part of our daily lives that really allows us to express normal behaviour for humans?

Freedom from fear and distress is interesting too. The film ‘The Matrix’ posits that the first ‘paradise matrix‘ was rejected by human brains — they kept trying to wake up from it. Indeed, in popular psychology ‘paradise syndrome‘ is described as a feeling of dissatisfaction despite having achieved a great deal.

That is a dark assessment of the human psyche: a belief that happiness is impossible or unbelievable. Normatively speaking it could almost be seen as a tool of mass-manipulation, encouraging people to accept unhappiness as a way of life. For the architects of the ecocyborg, it poses a difficult question. If we really believe the world needs a little fear and danger in order to keep us happy, the ecocyborg cannot be a 100% safe place. We may even already be seeing a reaction to this among those who pursue ‘adventure sports‘. What are the designers to do, then? Deliberately create places with the potential for harm?

The five freedoms are articulated around moral responsibility towards captive animals. We may not think of ourselves as animals or as captives, but clearly the more a society imposes constraints on its citizens, the greater the responsibility it should take for their welfare. If we cannot live anywhere we want, but only in built environments we can afford; if we cannot do whatever we want to enhance our lives, then to some extent we are confined. I contrasted urban and rural environments for the very different attitudes we have towards freedom in them in an earlier post. When the ecocyborg takes over, there will be no rural environment, no nature and no wilderness. Captivity will become the norm, and we owe it to ourselves to think about how we can enrich habitats for humans to maximize welfare.