How Technology Got Under Our Skin

Two arms, two legs, a head, a heart, and a smartphone = Human?

So this is mankind at the turn of the anthropocene, much the same as we have ever been: two arms, two legs, a head, and a heart. Like the circle-bound symmetry of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the meat and bones of the human race are the same in 2018 as they were in 1490. Some of us have gotten taller, some of us have gotten fatter, and there may be a lot more of us, but strip us down to our bare essentials and the same proportions are there.

And yet, we are different. The world around us has been reconfigured by the black rectangle of the smartphone in our hands. The way we think about ourselves is different from that Renaissance figure—our minds and our bodies, our connections and limitations. We can communicate at near-instantaneous speeds across the globe; we have access to an unimaginable repository of information within a few swipes; we are mapped, profiled, and indexed at scales never before possible by nebulous social networks and by the sensors in our pockets, on our wrists, in our kitchens, cars, bedrooms.

All of these things ripple into our way of thinking about the world. There’s been increasing attention to how the power structures of the internet are redrawing social order, but the roots of these questions run…