Just A Machine You Wear

All that water in the Hudson River
It's just a machine you wear
Oh---oh, machine you wear
Max Goff circa 1980 (the "Band" days)

In the early 1980s I studied computer science at Fordham University (Lincoln Center Campus) in New York. Given my eclectic nature, it wasn't enough to simply go back to school and study Computer Science. I also had to take creative writing courses. And all ready a professional actor, I needed to take acting classes as well. And of course, I needed to start a band. It wasn't enough that I had a huge learning curve with Computer Science, that I loved creative writing and that I was as engaged in acting as I could be, I also had to start a band. At the time, it seemed like the write thing to do.
At the time I wrote the lyric above, the "band" was in its early days. The entire experience lasted a little over a year, providing more of a lesson in unwarranted expectations than anything else. But in retrospect, the unfettered creativity, the license to write, was a very valuable and laudable part of the experience. At the time, it was the body that was the machine. The Police came out with an album entitled, "Ghost in the Machine" just a few months after I wrote the lyrics above, so at least I had a bit of a handle on themes available in the vast collective unconscious where all art lives, regardless of the success of those musical pursuits. Since then, the landscape of that collective has changed considerably.
Today, the body, the human body can be viewed as a machine. In fact, the reductionist approach to understanding has made considerable progress since those days -- science marches on. But we've also witnessed the unfolding of a holistic awareness of the human experience. Chaos Theory, New Age medicines, the Mind/Body Connection; as Erik Davis has said (Techgnosis -- myth, magic + mysticism in the age of information), the internet is not simply a tool, but rather an incredible "psychic amplifier" which will likely serve to further accelerate the rate of change at an order of magnitude we of the 20th Century may not even be able to comprehend.
Consider the work of Prof. Steven Mann of University of Toronto. What began as a literal machine you wear in 1980 has evolved considerably. Steve's "wearable computer" represents the beginning of the Wired Age -- not wired in the literal sense of federating world wide intelligence with copper. But "Wired" in the sense of being intimately and perennially connected with the thing that is greater than the sum of its parts, the great human psychic amplifier, the Collective Consciousness, the flip side to Jung's hidden uber-soul. The Wired Age is the natural next step in the evolution of the Information Economy. All devices, all information, all thinking units, human and otherwise, wired together in a dynamic morass of Collective Consciousness.
Twenty years ago, "the machine you wear" was a metaphor for the body electric, the soul vehicle, the meat machine, as though there was a distinction between spirit and body. Twenty years from now, the machine you wear will sport others, which will bind both body and spirit into the larger machine that beckons and terrifies. But in order to enjoin the global community, you'll wear one. And you won't remember how you ever got along without one.

Contact:
Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Computer Engineering Research Group
University of Toronto
10 Kings College Road, Room 2001
Toronto, CANADA - M5S 3G4
Prof. Steve Mann
http://www.eecg.toronto.edu/~mann
email: mann@eecg.toronto.edu
(416) 946-3387,
fax: (416) 971-2326