Technopolyps/technopalypse
When one considers the religious/existential implications of interfacing with a device that has processing power enough to addict oneself, keep oneself coming back, and to enforce an identification regime, we've reached the status of technopolyps/technopalypse.
What this means.
The term describes the time/space/attention commitments that people have to interactive devices, content delivery devices, attention consuming devices that, to the extent that they have sway, erode people's commitments to a society and make them into users, not citizens. Imagine one day when the streets are empty (a foregone conclusion resting upon its predecessor) and the only people engaging with the world are those indigent, homeless, and drug abused, shuffling like a zombie horde about the homes, nee cages, of the 'residents' all of whom are quietly alone before a screen. Here I stand, before a screen myself, scrawling upon the walls of my 'gilded-information-age cage' a cry for revolution resounding to all, alone, as a singular cry for help.
To become a technopolyp is the preceding condition to becoming the soft-pot upon the chassis of ascendant technology. In becoming a technopolyp, one establishes boundaries around one's identity that exclude others and include only those engaged with a specific game, streaming show, news outlet. And only to the extent that others engage together they form a community, and in doing so exclusively of others they form an army against outsiders. Without guns, without enmity, this army fights a quiet war to secede, like a Texas, from a larger community entirely and only on the basis of its time and attention investments in a given interactive medium.
But having a community apart from others solely upon one's interactive media choices still establishes a power-based conflict. To reduce that to it's basic unit, to cellularize it, is to use computing power to tailor media specific to each and every user. Thus rendered from others, and over time to a shared language and world, the mind becomes severed without surgery from its physical environment and its body in such a way that face-to-face interaction becomes a disease whose symptom is pathological isolation.
Yet here I stand, before my screen as if before the altar to a domestic god 2000+ years ago, hearing the admonitory voices from afar or apast, heeding their call to some place outside of one's immediate space and time. Completely untethered from the day-to-day needs of a community, severed from self, awash in a sea of 1s and 0s and soon to become qubits engaged in a keyboard, gestural, voice activated ceremony to a self-reflective God standing amidst an army of none.
