We’re Already There, I Tell You

We’re Already There, I Tell You

Here in the Panopticon, prisoners are held in clear view of the system of disembodied technologies standing guard over them, and the resulting self-consciousness is hard to take. That endless electrical pulse gets inside you. My heartbeat and breathing bounce off the very walls of the room, echoing back at me. The Cyclops eyes of the machines with their eight dangling arms–systems designed to keep the vital organs of the facility in working order, and it’s puny inhabitants alive–beam straight through me. You haven’t lived until you’ve had to shit and urinate for an all-seeing, nonhuman audience…

In their presence, I only ever feel biosynthetic. Maybe there never has been a time when we were human apart from this. Maybe we were always meant to come to this part of our own story, where the things we thought we created were revealed to have been with us all along, our brains simply waiting for us to recognize the corresponding forms of space and technology “out there” that we dumbly misread as distinctly human organs.

Lydia Yuknavitch, The Book of Joan