Bruce Sterling - Is the Body Obsolete? A Forum

Let's talk about YOUR body- Let's assume you're over twenty-five. If so, you are living right now in a no-kidding "obsolescing body": your flesh is in a slow process of decay. You can see it right now in the mirror, if you go and look. Sooner or later the whole mess will break down irrevocably, and you won't be here anymore. Your organism will no longer be sustainable. You'll be what used to be called "dead."

I hate to get teleogical about this, but it's hard to describe this set-up in any other way than as sleazy "planned obsolescence." The "reason" you're breaking down is so that your imperfect meat will vanish and make room for the next general release of the human DNA-software. (Hopefully, slightly improved DNA, since those of your generation with the most user-complaints were swiftly withdrawn from the marketplace.)

Death, in short, is just Evolution's way of killing you. This Rube Goldberg system has never struck any conscious human being as a fair deal. People have always tended to assume, and loudly proclaim, that the Universe should and must work otherwise. Heav- en. Reincarnation. Whatever. Some kind of ontological safety-net to assure that our miraculous egos are not simply scrapped with the buzzard chow. (Maybe YOU believe this, in which case I must warn you that the rest of this is going to get even more offensive.)

Because we're now approaching the point where we can actually DO something about this situation, Potentially, a lot of things. Some of them, like the notion of downloading one's consciousness into a nice crisp pack of Euclidean microcircuitry, are theoretically possible, but so socially disruptive that they're very unlikely to see any practical application. The ability to scan and download a mere lab rat - or even a skin cell - would bring such a blizzard of medical tech-spinoffs that the structure of everyday life would be altered beyond recognition.

Besides, who the hell, besides some socially autistic techie in an ivory basement, would WANT to give up the human body? And more pragmatically, what kind of sucker would pay to have this done? Where would the GRANT MONEY come from? Real people don't want to transcend the physical plane to live in some juiceless Platonic cyberspace; what they want is to live right here and now and be young and sexy and beautiful. For as long as posthumanly possible.

In the most likely scenario, the years to come will see us gradually learning to "hack" the human body. Imagine it as an attempt to meddle with a massively complex genetic information-processing system. Only this system is not programmed to run very well. It's "deliberately" programmed to crash, in a thousand different ways, and our mission is to stop that from happening (and killing us). Progress is likely to be slow, full of false leads, and very, very expensive.

But society already spends billions on "basic health research," and will spend more. After all, we're talking about matters of life and death here, The prospect of dying renders the rest of your business concerns pretty much moot. If someone comes to you with a tech-fix, you go for it. Even if it costs too much, hurts like hell, and doesn't work worth a damn, like the modem miracle of chemotherapy. What's the alternative?

Your body, after all, is already obsolete. Its natural condition (at least in terms of your personal purposes) is profoundly and innately non-functional. Once you have a true medical alternative, you must learn to think of the body, not as a natural given," but as a very touchy, sensitive, bug-ridden, ultra-high-tech infrastructure.

You therefore plan a development strategy for your body. You buy a series of purported technical up- grades. Instead of waiting fatalistically for your body to Chernobyl, you engage in a frenetic engineering struggle to postpone, avert, and repair the damage.

And because your body is a complex system, radical inputs to the system will have some powerful and unpredictable repercussions: holistic, synergistic side-effccts. Perhaps your teenage acne comes back. Perhaps your skin turns bright blue. Perhaps you come up with a form of senile dementia that has never existed before ... well, these things happen.

The situation is not an engineer's abstraction or a techie power fantasy, it's real life. It's YOU, with your usual baggage of day-to-day squalor and confusion. It's "normality." Only you have to do things like watch the ancient and eldrich President of the United States, with his vast expensive Bethesda medical back-up team, getting a little younger and more vigorous every day....

Chew on that thought for a while, and get the full flavor out of it. Because it's coming; or something that smells a lot like it. Once you finish handwaving in technolatrous glee, and siddown and shuddup and eat, that's the kind of morsel you'll find, on the end of every fork.

Bruce Sterling is one of the leading figures in cyberpunk. a science-fiction form which examines the increasingly intimate relationship of people and technology. His novel, Schismatrix, is about a future where humanity is split into two warring camps: the Mechanists, whose bodies contain surgically implanted technology. and the Shapers. people who can control and modify their genetic structure. -Richard Kadrey

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