I grew up with a screen for a face and a keyboard for hands. And a touchpad for fingers. And wires for veins.
I once scrolled somebody’s tumblr to the end. The right arrow just disappeared. There were no more pages to see. My computer was so hot it grew a charger tail. She couldn’t go anywhere without it.
Sometimes I want to stop, scrap the metal entirely. From the minute we are born, we are synced with a machine. Three devices a head. Family iPad. Nintendo Switch. Children cry until they get a phone in their hand. They sing TikTok. Even a baby’s face is part of the ImageNet. Everyone is data.
Did you know some young girls are turning themselves into an avatar? It’s true. You can make one yourself. They are turning themselves into Miis. They are turning themselves into Metaverse. They are turning themselves into VR chat. They are turning themselves into bats and birds and flying away. They are turning themselves into things.
Everything we are, it is data.
Our images. Thousands of collective hours funnelled into excruciating pain, precision, passion, pleasure. A party. An angle. A late shift. A mirror. A gift. A cake. Nothing but grids, pixels, activation maps, weights, data.
Our faces. My mother and her mother and her mother. Lifetimes, the universe, magical chromosomes. Flesh and bone. Sticky veins. Tissue. Blood. It means nothing. It is generated. Everything I’ve ever said. It can’t be erased. It can’t be taken off the internet. They have my family tree. They have my genome.
Our voices. Nothing but a soundwave, a pitch, a frequency, a rise and fall. What you are hearing is not me. My voice, rising from my warm, pink, bloody throat, up and out of me, microwaved, emptied out through a microphone, little machines that chew and spit. It’s not me. Now they have me. They can make me say anything. They can make me do anything.
I told you I love you. A machine can do that too.
Once, I wanted to be part of the machine. They are teaching kids how to type with their eyes closed. They are recording people without their consent. I didn’t even need to try.