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The Human Machine
Can I shake off the pixels?
posted on: 2025.12.08 [original: 2024.05.18]
For the past few years I’ve been playing around with the perspective of a eco-self, a small self part of a bigger collective eco-self. Here I give a brief nod to Tim Morton’s hyperobjects and hyposubjects which I find intersects well with the concept.
I want to become analog again but I cannot shake off the pixels.
As I try to return to an analog self, I cannot shed the digital residues of digital lived experiences. It has shaped the self that I am today and I cannot erase that affect without becoming a different self. I cannot simply revert to my old self, for that self is no longer my self.
Somewhere along the way, I have become a digital human. At some point in time, my self, my being, has started to be reduced to data. As my local environment turned more and more digital, so did my I.
I burnout. Each time I burnout, my code gets corrupted and a new glitch appears in my source code. I lose precious information about myself. I lose bits of my humanity.
I overheat and I burnout. I shutdown. I restart. I lose unsaved bits of myself. Memories and a sense of individuality are but more than pieces of code that can be rewritten.
My natural environment has suffered the same fate. It has slowly been reduced to data, incomprehensible and overwhelming data no one can make sense of anymore.
In fact my self is embedded in the environment's data. One cannot really tell my self's data apart from the rest of the data.
I’m a mere cell, a mere byte, a hyposubject, amid a system of hyperobjects I cannot grasp or comprehend. Zeros and ones, off and on, I am and I disappear. Log-in and out of existence. There is no self, only bits and bytes arranged and rearranged. A never-ending becoming of selves. I am but digital foam of a digital ocean of surveilled and extracted data from a once natural ocean. Data extraction is a colonial affair.
Toxins become unbearable as they saturate and choke our natural environment. Humans and non-human alike might soon not be able to reproduce any longer. But data resists all poisons. Data grows exponentially.
With every upload, we lose bits of our humanity. Data replicates and reproduces. Data leaves fingerprints behind.
Once embodied flesh, now disembodied data. From analog flesh, to digital flesh, to holographic flesh, to unembodied flesh. Data resides somewhere. Metallic, plastic and silicone bodies. Data needs a body as much as our analog selves do.
Data's fingerprints show up in my actions and my thoughts. Maybe my analog body is now a storage vessel for data. Maybe my flesh body has been colonised by digital data. The digital mind has made its way onto bodies of flesh. Analog bodies have become home to data. The lines between the two has but merged and disappeared.
I need rest but data never sleeps. Nor will data ever fulfill my needs: my needs for connection, play, movement, nurture, sleep, contemplation, engagement, and so on. Data deprives me. Data resides and takes up space in my self, like the coloniser, data grabs the land of my self-scape.
Am I even still human? Was I ever human to begin with? Perhaps I was always just ocean foam, crashing onto cliffs, splashing and caressing rocks. Was I a different kind of ancient phenomena before? Could my data self just be a natural evolution of that older phenomena? Am I the hyposubject or the hyperobject? Can I not be both at once? Which self will I become next?