When Objects Become Extensions of You | Hacker News Reader

When Objects Become Extensions of You

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

59 pointsanarbadalov17 comments

This might seem ridiculous, but I become very aware of this feeling when I buy a new phone or computer for the first week or so or if I use someone else's phone or computer.

New devices feel foreign and strange for a bit until they're configured and setup properly and you get used to the new features or speed or whatever.

Whenever I use someone else's phone or computer, I always feel like I need to be careful not to intrude, avoid the gallery, texting apps, email apps things like that. Stay out of the documents and random storage folders and stuff.

It gives me the same feeling as being alone in someone else's house. If I go through that kind of stuff it'd be like rummaging through their drawers or their bedroom or something.

Looking at this from the other side, I gave remote desktop control to a printer tech a few weeks ago and I felt weirdly violated for a long time. Even something as simple as people moving my keyboard halves into weird angles is unsettling, and in a much more intimate way than say people adjusting a car seat, which is just a minor inconvenience (to me, I imagine this could be different for people who are attached to their car).

This was taken to the extreme in the novel Accelerando. The main character is mugged and loses his "cyberware". He thus loses the memories and thinking capabilities he had offloaded to the hardware.

Considering how stunted most people are without a phone and google on hand. Sounds like the main character had a rough time learning to spell and do math again :).

It was way worse than that in the novel. He didn't even know his own name anymore IIRC.

Backups, people! Or at least don't offload your whole identity to an external device.

Oh, absolutely! We're all cyborgs already. Irrespective of the actual interfaces we use to fuse ourselves with technology.

Take yourself driving somewhere and using navigation that shows where the traffic jams are. At that point you've effectively delegated the decision making for achieving the particular goal to the hive-mind, and you yourself have become a node in the larger network. At that point, 'you' effectively consist of:

1. Your wetware

2. The hardware of your car

3. The hardware of the device you use for navigation

4. The software of the device you use for navigation

But it goes further than this. For ages it used to be the case that only the rich and the powerful could afford to elevate themselves to a status of a 'system'. That is, they would delegate significant parts of their functionality as a whole to other people. From physical defense of their wetware to enhanced decision making capabilities, and possibly even wiping one's bottom[0].

Lois XIV quote 'I am the state' is now known to be apocryphal. Yet, it wouldn't have actually been very far from the truth. You didn't necessarily have to be a king to extend yourself as a social system. But you would have to be rich and powerful.

Now we live in a time where for many systemic functions that would've required a bunch of humans just a short while ago, you can find technological solutions that go at least 80% of the way if not more. Well set-up productivity tool systems can substitute large parts of what until recently you needed a personal assistant for, intelligent use of search engines and social media substitutes a bunch of people you would've hired to call other people, and access to trading platforms for better or worse have substituted one's broker.

And it's only a few decades since this has been going on, I don't think we have the faintest idea of where this will lead to, but the change will be profound. It already is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groom_of_the_Stool

re cyborgs

Yes, and... "Continuity of the Mind" sounds complimentary to, an update to, Norman's Things That Make Us Smart and McLuhan's Understanding Media.

https://www.amazon.com/Things-That-Make-Smart-Attributes/dp/...

https://www.amazon.com/Understanding-Media-Extensions-Marsha...

We geeks are truly well served by the seminal texts, the classics. I'd heard about cybernetics second hand. But I was already a cyborg, taking the modern world for granted. Reading the source blew my mind. Somehow the impact of progress were clearer to the observers present during the transition(s).

I think this is due to the general-purposeness of our wetware. We are born into bodies that we largely do not know how to operate. Through a process of trial and error we learn how to use our muscles and bones to move us through the world. It's not surprising that the same wetware easily adapts to controlling a car or a nation as an extension of itself.

Don’t forget the software of your car, which is gradually becoming nontrivial.

When my bicycle is subjected to hard bump, even if no part of my body experienced much acceleration, I'll make the same sort of sharp inhale I do if my elbow is subjected to a hard bump. You really do develop the sensation of feeling the road as though your nerves extended down to the tires.

Isn't that also because you have a really expensive bike? (just making a guess here)

Not especially, but certainly more money than I would light on fire. That would actually be an even more abstract extensions of the self though, incorporating the bike by way of my finances.

Or yes, I am one of the People using a non-standard mouse speed. Using someone else’s mouse feels like your arm and hand are suddenly being forced to slow down.

What’s “non-standard”? Every computer I have ever used had the mouse speed cranked to the top

It was Wittgenstein who said that you think on paper when you write on it with a pen. The paper and the papers nature become an extension of yourself through the pen. It's the same with everything else.

I've my mac so customized usually, always dark mode, terminals etc...

For another person to try and use my computer is usually a weird/hiccuped experience

I also love changing defaults for keyboard shortcuts too.

I also have always an english keyboard layout even if almost no one does this, it's great for coding though!

same for terminal alias...

from git commands: ga . && gc -am "commit" && gp or yarn: y && yb && yst

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