“An Illegal Thought”

“In the beginning there was the home computer, the PC and the internet and people were thrilled by the ability to type things into a search engine and find out anything they wanted with just the click of a mouse button.

But over time the computers got smaller and smaller and the mouse button and keyboards, in fact the need for any physical effort at all in searching the net, disappeared.

People only had to ask the internet a question and the internet would answer it for them.

And before long even that was replaced by people just thinking a question and the internet answering it.

And before long, that asking and questioning process started to feel like a thought process (what Andy Clark and David Chalmers called an extended mind) and people felt very smart because they seemed to know the answer to everything even though the computer was doing their thinking and remembering for them.

Yet many argued, “Well human beings aren’t just passively consuming the internet they’re contributing to it”.

Unfortunately, though they did APPEAR to be contributing to it, they were contributing to it with minds and memories that were now half computer and so in fact the internet really was contributing to itself.

Furthermore, the more that human beings became mentally fused to the internet, the easier it was to control them by controlling the information on the internet; what had at first seemed like a haven for free speech and the free exchange of ideas slowly became a method of mass control.

Something like this had happened before, in the dim and distant days when people had sat glued to their television screens rather than reading books, learning and remembering; back then they used to call the TV the idiot box or the boob tube but at least, back then, they had always had the option of switching it off and picking up a book but because of their reliance upon computers to answer everything for them they had forgotten how to think for themselves; thinking had been a chore and the computer had become the labour saving device for doing that chore and so when they did try to free themselves from the dominance of their computer brain they found that they were now mentally crippled without it.

Of course not everyone had suffered this mental degeneration; the people who were controlling the content of the internet and thus controlling the human population, just as any smart drug pusher takes care to avoid getting hooked upon his own drug, had not become dependent upon machines to do their thinking.

“But the human race is smarter now, not dumber”, they protested, “Look they have a library in their heads now and can quote vast chunks of text and analyse them; they’re all as smart as college graduates”.

“But THEY are not doing those things”, came the countercry, “The computers are doing those things while their own brains and memories have withered away”.

And peoples individuality had faded away too because sharing the collective computer consciousness of the internet had made them all grow more and more alike.

Lovers of freedom still said, like a tired, old and empty platitude, “Think for yourself”, the only problem was, they didn’t think for themselves anymore, a computer now did that for them”.

“Moderator”, the i-Susan asked the half of her brain that was the internet, “Should I report this content? It seems like the hate speech of a luddite or a technophobe”.

“Yes”, said the artificially intelligent moderator, its huge emoticon face smiling in her mind, “Its illegal content; an illegal thought”.