You’re going to be a cyborg.

For some a “cyborg” conjures the image of a future human-like creature—complete with chrome and steel body parts, perhaps their iris glows red, or their voice has the quality of a 1998 Logitech desktop speaker. But this is just one way of understanding the word, and a particularly narrow one. The “human condition” is far more ephemereal than our enamel, and there’s an argument to be made that we are already cyborgs: offloaded cognition. We used to have to remember lots of details (names, images, relational structures) to navigate the physical world and society. Now, we offload not just the cognitive effort but in some cases the entirety of the cognition. Your phone contact list will put a face to a name to a number to a calendar event to a memory for you.

This, not reduced effort, but total reshaping of how we think is a species level, an actual biological level, change in how we survive. An evolution of human, resting on the idea that part of what makes humans what they are is how humans think about the world.

This view that to be human is in part, if not definitively, what we feel & think—our cognitive tasks, our feelings about the sensations and sounds when someone interacts with us, our memories, the liminal between our body and our proverbial soul—means we all are at this point, if not soon to be, cyborgs.

If one lives in a semi or thoroughly developed region of the world it is near impossible to exist for a day without technology and digital services. What was simply our nature, thousands of years of evolution—to wake with the sun, interact with our community, eat, drink, work, play, and rest—is now an aspirational goal that one must attempt to achieve (and very likely boast on Instagram about after). Just to see your friend or neighbour you, most likely, must text or message them first. In a sense this “basic” technology has become so pervasive that it not only is a power one can choose to wield, for good or evil, but also a tablestakes evolution of the human experience.

If each tool was distinct, isolated, and intentional about a single domain then en masse, through compounding individual choices, a complete mesh of physical and digital life would not be guaranteed. But when the thing in everyone’s pocket that gives our physical bodies phantom vibrations is an always-on gateway to cloud delivered compute and services that (a) mediate and manage community knowledge and organization (b) complete nearly all monetary transactions (c) govern public emergency response protocols (d) provides you immediate access to the most powerful search & summarization of all global history, and (e) plays "host" to daily communication volume greater than our own in-person interactions; then, it is incredibly difficult not to see 2 consequences.

It will be incredibly lucrative for some being to ensure that you mediate your existence through a network of services they control.

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I don’t write this essay to encourage you not to engage in digital life, nor do I write this essay to cast judgment on what would be right or wrong for us to do as a species with this evolution. I write this essay to invite the reader to see that matters of technology, the politics, actors, money, and advancements which shape digital life, are at this point one and the same with matters of their physical being. We have crossed the boundary point where technology is an “add-on” to the human experience.

Put plainly: our digital life is on a continuous spectrum with our “natural” life. If you are not opinionated about how your digital life works, someone else will be on your behalf. This is not just how much you pay on your phone bill, or now maybe token bill, each month; this is how we imagine, name, and navigate our world.

The shift happened well before A.I.; however, A.I. is poised to so quickly, aggressively and boldly reshape the concepts of our digital life that this moment, before an agent can interact with the entire ecosystem, the entire layer of behaviour, is a critical moment for you to choose how you want to see the layer shaped.

Humans use technology, and technology uses humans. Choose how you want your relationship to work.

Not everyone should be a developer, an engineer, the proud owner/founder of a digital product line; but everyone should understand what sort of species they are. You are the fish with a parasitic organism causing bioluminescence in their eyes; see how your mind works, and by extension, your body.

The knowledge moat to software is gone, and software is not just the apps you install. How do you want to use your computer? Do you want to speak to it? How do you want to play music in your house? How do you want to find out about your spending habits? Where do you want to see photos of your children? How do you want to feel when you get a notification? We have ceded complete control of the experience of being human for so many years to a small group with knowledge of software, time, and motive.

But you are the only one who understands your own motives, feelings and goals. Don’t you want your personal digital life to reflect you? Don’t you want a say in the ecological forces that govern your self?