Is Google Turning Us Into Cyborgs

 

[Latest search on Google that took someone to my blog: "free children.sex.com"]

I’m missing something from my life. My life feels empty. If I only had..If I could only get…If I only knew…and if I can’t get it all then…

The human body and mind are insufficient, are too small, to satisfy that incompleteness. So we created a bigger brain, and we spread it throughout the world.  Now it’s too big so we need to create a memory to retrieve neurons buried under trillions of “pages” so we call our new mechanical memory, “GOOGLE”.

We only search when we are unsatisfied, incomplete, missing. We need one more piece of information, we need one more picture, one more fact that can fulfill us and make us more complete, smarter, better, ultra-human, cyber-human

(Google and the Internet brings us one step towards being like the above Cylons from Battlestar Galactica)

I watch my stats for my blog religiously in realtime. I see what people search. In general, people are not happy. They want those missing holes filled. They want to be happy but they can only be if….

Just now, someone from Mountain View (ironically, home of Google, Inc.) using a Nokia phone, searched “free children.sex.com”. Why was he searching that at 6am, maybe stuck in traffic in the criss-crossing Silicon Valley freeways, on the way perhaps…to Google HQ?

He ended up at this post:  Perhaps the photo of a young Mitt Romney is enough to make the leap into the category searched. Or the fact that I recommend sex every day to newlyweds. But the cobwebs in our cyber memory twist it briefly into the wrong purpose. The visitor waited three seconds before he clicked away.

(the original name of “Google” was “Backrub”. See also, “10 Unusual Things I Didn’t Know About Google”)

What else is missing in our lives? What else do we need to search for until life is complete?  I will tell you because I’m watching the searches right now.  It’s like watching an ongoing diary of the unfulfilled, the sad, the need to feel justified. The ongoing diary of what society needs this very second.

The next search I got:

 “Top ten reasons Not to apply to Harvard” , which took our friend to this post:  10 Reasons Parents Should Not Send Their Kids to College.

Let’s guess: his parents want him to apply to Harvard. But maybe he doesn’t want to go. Or he’s afraid he won’t get in. Or his girlfriend is going to Ohio State and he wants to go there with her. Or he doesn’t want to be a student at all. He wants to be an artist. The pressures of society weigh hard on the head of a 17 year old and he needs the help of the societal Borg consciousness of the Internet to help him justify not applying to Harvard (not just any school, but HARVARD).

The very next search, one minute later:

“Will the shareholders of Facebook make money?”  which took another reader to this post:

Jealousy perhaps? Please god, I’ve worked hard all my life and now some janitor at Facebook will make $200 million and will never have to work again, will find the monetary equivalent of enlightenment and freedom.  I need to know, he searches, how much money they will make. What I am missing? What have I missed out on? More justifications for proving my life is unfulfilled and now where I wanted it to be. Google will help!

Next search:

“Porn Art” which takes the searcher to this post I wrote where I interviewed the porn star-turned-painter, Ben Banks.

A few months ago Ben had to ask me to take the post down for awhile as it confused the potential buyers of his art but more recently he said I could return it to “Visible” status.  Power to him. And power to someone who decided to breed “porn” and “art” in a search because art is often about the fulfillment of desire. And who wouldn’t want to watch the beautiful motion of two bodies having sex under the intellectual umbrella of “art”?

Next search:

“i didnt go to college. am i stupid”

Which also took him to the same post as the Harvard search above.

My baby, I wish I could reach through my blog and talk to you even more directly. No no no NO! You are not stupid.

A)     You got a 5 year head start on all of your ivory peers.

B)      You are not in debt. In the NY Times this weekend one woman who dropped out of Bowling Green College said she was $70,000 in debt and that “it will take the rest of her life to pay that back”.  Our 22 year olds have gone from inventors and creators to indentured slaves, paying back (who else?) the US government because the government needs to leech off and hypnotize whoever it can to keep on spending to “protect our way of life”.

C)      Many of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs, writers, creators did not go to college. Please don’t think you are stupid. You are perhaps the smartest of all. I only feel bad you had to reach into our collective cyber-consciousness to find that out, my beautiful friend. That nobody was around you to let you know that you are not stupid, that you are perhaps the bravest and most human of all.

And of course, I get this search 30-50 times a day including one minute ago: “I Want to Die” .

Because life is never a straight line upwards like we were taught to believe. Our child brains are told: school, job, marriage, success, retirement, relax, in that order and unless you are “screwed up” your life will just be leaps from success to success.

But it NEVER turns out that way and there’s always that moment when you miss the next mountain top and you start to fall and you pick up speed and it only looks like a dark abyss below and it will hurt bad so the thought occurs to you but nobody ever taught you how and nobody ever taught you the consequences or the bodies and hearts you would leave behind so you want help help HELP and you type, “I Want to Die” looking for the last answers you might ever get. Or making the last scream of PLEASE, and you end up at this post.

If only we had a search engine for our deeper consciousness. A search engine that takes us inside instead of outside, a search engine that goes below the constant seething of thoughts, angers, anxieties, worries, feeling, failures, into a deeper level where everything is still and back to a period before our childlike minds started to grasp onto the concepts of what society would call failure, success, desire, depravity, despair.

Long before Search. Before I could even read. My dad and I filled up one of those rockets powered by water. The neighborhood kids came over. We launched it into the sky. I looked and it must’ve gone 100 feet up but it felt like 10,000 feet up, and in my imagination it went into space, it went into worlds that would only exist in my dreams, and I was happy and my friends were happy and my dad was happy. In that single moment I never needed anything else ever again. Everything was complete and, for perhaps the last time, I was fully satisfied.