You are They

by Andrei Codrescu

There’s been some discussion on how many slices can one human be divided into.  As many as you like.  It’s the deli counter: how do you like it sliced?  The slicer is the future and its capital needs. We already have many personalities with desires dictated by the slicing market, 2 new personalities a day, 730 personalities a year. If we live an average of 150 years — which our futurists here are modestly estimating — we will have 266,450 personalities when we are done. Let’s be charitable and deduct the first 5 years because we are too young from 0 to 5 to have a fully developed consumer personality — our parents buy shit for us — but even so, in the first 30 years we will possess 105,850 personalities that will each require 10 gadgets a day to get around, or one App called I / O R, the Inner / Outer Robot. The I / O R will be handling 3,175,500 lifetime prostheses catering to our particular personalities. Will this be any different in this assemblage we now call “us,” or will “human” just be a new thing in the future, a thing that takes itself for granted just like it does now. So those seemingly big numbers are meaningless: we are already an assemblage of billions of genes, molecules, cells, and viruses —many billions of micro-organisms that we can also call “machines,” bio-machines. The App that manages these bio-machines is what we call “human.” “I” am the App that insures the cooperation of billions of bio-machines. Still, the discovery and classification of bio-machines has now visibly deconstructed the human cooperative to the point where it has started to initiate a production-line of personalities with mechanical needs. How and when did this happen, and why? Or is it always happening, simultaneously and without stopping, and I (and you) just noticed? Does it just stop for a second when we switch tracks, like a superfast train? We must be in one of those gear-changing moments when the machinery becomes visible, and we think that the longer we prolong humans the more we destroy this planet and, eventually, the universe. We are right and we are wrong. Eco-systems are harmonious only when they are untranslated.  The   second   we   understand   them   enough  to translate them, they begin self-destroying and requiring the building of a different ecosystem to rebalance. This is that second in a long line of seconds. Life is not possible without catastrophic deconstruction and miraculous reconstruction. We are right that it’s all over but it’s just beginning.