Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

I think therefore I think I am

The Internet, then, as prosthetic consciousness. J. G. Ballard urges us to ponder such extrusions. The twentieth century, he said, gave "birth to a vast range of machines--computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons--where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous even to the skilled investigator." [1]   It is no simple act, uploading Romanticism to this prosthetic consciousness, the Internet. The machines that make it possible are beyond the ken of traditional scholarship. We must think like machines. [2]   Increasingly, they do our thinking for us. Dig it? Digit!

Notes

1. J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (San Fransisco: RE/Search, 1991), 99.

2. Please read Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, or the Control and Communication in Animal and the Machine, 2nd ed. (Boston: MIT, 1965).

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