Tuesday, July 9, 2013

What it's like to be a human lab rat

What is it like to be a human lab rat? Let’s say, for the sake of illustration, it’s the future. Privacy is an antiquated concept, an artifact of an age in which secrets were possible. In this future world, your selfhood is quantified. Every nanosecond of your day-to-day life is automatically recorded, tracked, measured: your heartbeats per minute, the cornflakes you ate for breakfast, the number of times you’ve cheated on your wife, the 2.33 minutes you spent gazing distractedly out the window of your corner office at the rapidly-changing skyline, the weight of this morning’s post-latte bowel movement, those dreams you have but do not recall upon waking. The great data archive of your life is created at the very moment you move through it. Without questioning or thinking, you understand on a deep, visceral level that within the brave new hive mind, "the unrecorded life is not worth living."
["What It's Like to Be a Human Lab Rat"]