I'm most of the way through an article in the April 27 issue of the New Yorker (yes I do read each and every issue, get over it) about neuroenhancers (drugs that help you think or focus better), and I'm having two thoughts: 1) The New Yorker (read: mainstream, elite media) has finally caught up to what Warren Ellis was saying ten years ago, and 2) It scares the hell out of me that the New Yorker is reporting on the sort of stuff Warren Ellis was saying ten years ago.
More specifically, the idea that the use of such drugs might become standard issue - the next step now that plastic surgery is becoming more and more the norm (and isn't that frightening as well?). To quote:
"Using neuroenhancers, he said, 'is like customizing yourself—customizing your brain.'"
This in reference to a self-proclaimed transhumanist (another word I'm not so comfortable with the New Yorker knowing about). And many large medical groups are apparently seeing these things as a new affirmative action like thing, based on research which suggests that they help less intellectually capable people more; they suggest a future where people who don't have access to the same level of education (private schools, SAT prep courses, etc) can take cheap enhancers to "level the playing field", as it were.
I think of that scene in the Invisibles where they hang out in SF and have "smart drinks" in a club. I think of Transmet and a lot of Ellis' one-shot visions of the future, people having machine implants and doing crazy drugs and even altering their DNA. To get off the comic book theme, I think of Richard Morgan's "Altered Carbon", where bodies are exchangeable and often artificially produced and enhanced, or, well, any number of other sci-fi writers.
It's like that day in performance studies class where we discussed St. Orlan ("Darling, I love your spleen...") and some group that jumped into a river in LA to end their act (don't actually remember much more about them), and their claims of the increasing plasticity and changeable-ness of our own bodies, and having read all these comic books I suddenly felt I shared a vision of the future that these artists had and the rest of my class didn't. I think of realizing how all the janitors at Berkeley Rep wear bluetooth headsets in their ears all day long, which still seems to me like step 1 of a long slippery slope to becoming part machine. Or a recent conversation about how many pixels you could get eye-implants to display. Or my personal addiction to my iPod Touch.
It's a long article, but there's a lot I've left out and if you're interested it's at:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/04/27/090427fa_fact_talbot
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