Sunday, January 25, 2004

"If you ever get close to a human
And human behaviour
Be ready to get confused."

--Bjork, "Human Behavior"





The Spirit rover is on the mend and Opportunity has landed safely. So why am I in an existential funk?

John Shirley wrote a great little essay the other day about the possibility that household pets are actually Freudian extensions of our psyche, or perhaps symbiotes. If pets are, in essence, glandular extensions of ourselves, then what are quasi-intelligent machines like Mars rovers? Postbiological prosthetic ego? Mechanical offspring?

Robotic astronauts remind us that humans are essentially machine-like. We refuel. We expel waste material. We need down-time. We're constantly performing maintenance on ourselves; I get up, joylessly consume a couple toaster-waffles, chase them with a chug of raspberry lemonade. I shower, scrubbing away disenfranchised skin cells and other microscopic nastiness. I comb my hair, fastidiously clean the interior of my ears with a cotton swab, and subject my teeth to a vigorous session with an ergonomically designed brush. And I do this on a regular basis. Pure mechanical ritual. And that's not taking lunch and dinner into account: more dutiful flexing of jaw muscles, all in the name of combating entropy, inevitable cellular decay, premature senility, the prospect of drooling vegetable-hood.

I'm 28 years-old. I look 20. Biomechanically, I'm not doing too bad. I'm 6'2" and weigh in at 185 lbs, sometimes less. I avoid drugs and seldom drink; I think I consumed all of five or six beers in 2003. I have a seemingly infinite capacity for caffeine, and enjoy the ability to stop drinking coffee at any time without the withdrawal effects bemoaned by others.

My social existence is appropriately machine-like. I did an interview for a news weekly a few weeks ago and the journalist said something like, "From reading your blog, you paint a picture of a smart guy who reads a lot but doesn't have much of a personal life." I suppose it depends on what he meant by "personal." Socially, I'm borderline solipsistic. The majority of males my age would positively cringe at the private time I require. I venture out into the world of smoke-filled restaurant and bars and coffee-shops and take in masses of inebriated 20-somethings with genuine puzzlement. Who are these people? How did they get this way? Is something wrong with me or is it the other way around?

But my personal life, as opposed to my social life (the two terms tend to be applied synonymously) is another matter. It's actually pretty rich, at least when I'm in my groove. I suspect there's more going on in my head than in most others. Then again, this could easily be a defense mechanism. Like the late Stephen Jay Gould, I don't think intelligence is quantifiable; I wince when I read about Mensa gatherings, which seem pathetic and desperately elitist.

It's much more likely that my brain simply works differently than most others, at least for an appreciable portion of my waking life. I suspect there are two basic kinds of introverts: Those who resent their socially geared counterparts and those who are effectively oblivious to them. I probably straddle both categories.

It's a bit like trying to pin down someone's sexual orientation or ethnic background. As Bruce Sterling recently blogged about the latter, it's increasingly difficult -- and correspondingly irrelevant. For whatever it's worth, I'm hetero, "straight," whatever you want to call it. I'm not "proud" of it, any more than I'm "proud" to be an American; I was never presented with a choice. Occasionally, though, someone assumes I'm gay, which never ceases to disappoint and amuse. Jerry Seinfeld chalked this phenomenon up to the "thin, single and neat" stereotype. If you're obviously unattached, neatly dressed and in reasonable good physical shape, some people actually think they can deduce your sexual polarity.

Thirty years ago no one would have made this bizarre deductive leap. But now my fellow machine-humans are sensitized to the point of paranoia. They're out to slot you into preconceived demographic categories -- a task previously left to ad agencies and political campaigns -- before taking you on, before accepting you as fully human.

Yes, the human race has always been self-policing when it comes to all things social. But if turning myself into a scrap of easily digestible code is what it takes to kick with the fray, I'm afraid I'm just not interested. I have neither the time nor the energy. I'm machine-like enough already.

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