The Feed Is Coming

I thought I'd blogged about the novel Feed before, but I can't find it in my archives, so forgive me if this is redundant.  But since Amy Welborn and Thomas have blogged on the VeriChip implant, I thought I'd throw in my two cents as well.  I didn't take a class called Theology, Technology and Technoculture for nothing.

It's astounding to me that conservative/orthodox Catholics on Amy's blog would argue for the use of a technology based on the good it might accomplish.  Hey, as long it can prevent or eliminate suffering, let's do it!  Sounds like a familiar argument for something else...  One of the commentators said:

"I'm with Sandra and jerry; as long as it's voluntary (for an adult, anyway), I have no problem. I have little or nothing to hide; if I did, there are ways to limit your contact with unseen electronic eyes (pay cash, for one). If, however, I could get a chip with GPS monitoring for my child, I'd do it tomorrow (anyone?). She can have it removed on her 21st birthday. Think of the potential to deter child crime, if the criminal knew that the child could be monitored anywhere, anytime. (Chilling, I know, for some of you, but not for me, Irene's mom)."

But as another of her commentators pointed out, these voluntary technologies have a way of becoming unofficially mandatory so that they are required to function in society.  Moreover, they change society, and we change our practices to adapt to them.  (Remember this post on cell phones?)  They change the kind of people we are.

Through the eyes of a teenaged boy, Feed looks at how implants that continuously stream information directly to our minds change society and humanity.  It's like having the Internet in your head, 24/7, pop-up ads and all.  It cannot be shut off, and if it malfunctions, the consequences can be deadly.  The author says he wrote it "as a novel that uses images from an imagined future in an almost allegorical way to discuss things we're dealing with now.  I think we all have, at this point, a direct connection to the media in our brains.  It's impossible for us ot think of our life without conceiving of it in images that are taken from movies, from songs, from ads, all of which are challenging us to be better consumers rather than better people."

There is a difference between using a credit card and becoming a living credit card. 

Here's a brilliant description of the ads the boy is experiencing. 

"I could feel all of my family asleep in their own way around me, in the empty house, in our bubble, where we could turn on and off the stars and the sun, and the feed spoke to me real quiet about new trends, about pants that should be shorter or longer, and bands I should know, and games with new levels and stalactites and fields of diamonds, and friends of many colors were all drinking Coke, and beer was washing through mountain passes...The sun was rising over foreign countries, and underwear was cheap, and there were new techniques to reconfigure pecs, abs and nipples, and the President of the United States was sure of the future, and at Weatherbee & Crotch there was a sale banner and nice rugby shirts and there were pictures of freckle-faced prep-school boys and girls in chinos playing on the beach and dry humping in the eel grass, and as I fell asleep, the feed murmured to me again and again: All shall be well...and all shall be well...and all manner of things shall be well....

Diabolical!