The Uploaded Man

by Carl Gustav and Maria Odete Madeira

Man

“(…) has ceased to measure the world by his own scale (in feet, inches, ‘paces’, power). In all senses of the term, man is no longer the yardstick of the world, or, as we used to say, he is no longer the measure of all things.” Virilio, The Information Bomb
Self-mutilations, mutilations-of-self, mutilations-of-selfhood.
“(…) it is the same with our technological autonomy with those reflex self-mutilations (…)” Virilio, The Information Bomb.
The uploaded man has ceased to be a measure of himself.
Gradually deprived of the use of his natural receptor organs, deprived of the senses, the uploaded man is like the invalid, by a comical lack of proper (self-deprived) measure, striving to find his/its bearings in a pursuit of different worlds and modes in which the old animal body would be out of place, achieving the total symbiosis between technology and the human.
Scanner eyes, burnt eyelashes, nose spasms, self-spasms (residual), wandering tongues, techno-branchiae, cyber ears, organs without secretions and other organs without bodies (Virilio).
The uploaded man becomes the simulacrum of the man, an imposture attempting to evade the certainty of death. Behaviour equivalent to suicide attempts, such as anorexia, mutism, drug abuse and many risk seeking idiocies, he is but an example of a long held belief in the ability to overcome one’s own impotence.
As the negation of the human ability to surpass himself through an heroic effort, the uploaded man becomes a mere example of the coward that strived to attain the invalid’s impotency in order to escape the flaws and hardships of the flesh, and a mere example of the fear of the trial that entails a surpassing effort of humanity.