/ARTS WEEKLY/CULTURE: ‘Cyborg’ Professor Predicts Future without Identity

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Mark Bourrie

OTTAWA, Jan 20 2003 (IPS) - Steve Mann has been a part of technology – and technology has been a part of him – for so long that he cannot remember when he did not have some kind of electric device attached to his body.

Mann, a Toronto author, visual artist and university professor of engineering, is a self-made cyborg – part human, part machine. He has electronic implants and monitors installed on his body and sees the world through computerised eyeglasses that can broadcast on the Internet.

The right lens of those glasses also operates as a tiny computer screen, with the ability to do simple commands such as surf the Web, check e-mail and write small programmes (in Linux). A customised hand-clicker, about the size of a mouse, operates the entire system.

The glasses give Mann dual perception. With his left eye, he sees the world like the rest of us.

When he was young, mothers would not let their children play with him. As a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1990s, he used his eyepiece to web-cast his life on an Internet site that got 30,000 hits a day. Other students tried to shut him down.

Mann received his doctorate in humanistic intelligence at MIT’s Media Lab in 1997. Since then, he has produced numerous exhibitions that incorporate photographs and video work created using wearable imaging systems. In 2000, his work was featured at the Olga Korper Gallery in Toronto.

Now, he teaches some of the most popular courses at the University of Toronto and a film about him, ‘Cyberman’, has been making the rounds of the world’s film festivals. Two years ago, he co-wrote a book, ‘Cyborg’, (with playwright Hal Niedviecki).

Mann says he has allowed technology – his wearable computer – to strip away much of his privacy.

"In cyberspace there are no borders. What I do is allow people to get inside my head and put themselves in my shoes and see the world from my perspective.”

"There is an idea that the eye is a camera,” says Mann. ”The idea (with his cyborg technology) is that you can come inside my head and see my world."

Mann does not believe tools should replace man. Instead, he believes his cyborg technology is a refined tool that heightens peoples’ senses, giving them greater power over their lives.

That power is needed at a time when individual freedom is threatened by authorities who understand the power of removing individuals’ choices over their cyborg technology, says Mann. Relieve someone of their wallets, watches, clothes; put them through a shower and into a uniform without pockets, and you control their life.

Some cultures can handle the change. Most people in ours cannot, he says.

"There’s a rite of passage in many tribes of taking off all your clothes and going off into the woods to survive with your bare hands. A lot of people say ‘I don’t want to be a tool of society, I don’t want to be a cyborg’, but they wear glasses, they drive cars, they eat food out of boxes."

In the province of Newfoundland, people wear clothes and eat food out of boxes. They – at least airport security guards in the capital St. John’s – also have little time for people who show up for a flight looking like a character from a science fiction movie.

When Mann tried to board an Air Canada flight in St. John’s last year, he was stopped, arrested, strip-searched, and over three days had some of the electrodes torn from his body. The airline had lost the documents he sent in advance warning them of his special needs.

Now Mann is suing the airline for negligence and damage to his computer system.

"What I experienced in Newfoundland is post-cyborg deconstructionism,” he says without laughing. ”That follows the post-modern cyborg.”

In other ways, the cyborg Mann leads society. Three months before the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States and the subsequent anthrax scares, Mann developed and organised a conference called ‘The Anthrax-ready Mailroom’.

It sounds like a workplace safety seminar. It was, he says, an exercise in tyranny, a view of a world in which the state can strip individuals of their rights and power and convince them it is being done for their own good.

”People say that I see the future. I started the Anthrax-Ready Mailroom in July, 2001, and a few months later we saw the real thing.”

”I’m in collision with the future. I know what it’s going to be like when we have smallpox checkpoints. And it’s going to happen. Too many people in the military, the government and the media want it.”

"With the Anthrax scare, everybody won. With smallpox, the media gets a real plague to report. It sells newspapers. That sells advertising.”

Mann says emergency supply companies are already selling lots of tents with showers built into them. He believes they’ll be used in tent cities, where authorities will strip people of their tools, their identity cards, scrub them and send them off to camps.

And people will not resist because ”they’ll believe it’s for their own good, that they’ll get treatment. And the rest of society won’t object because they will fear these people are contagious.”