The Cyber Collapse: B. A theoretical point in time when technology and the cyberworld completely merge to society, such that the digital, technological and physical world are no longer separable.
Section 1: Current Status
In the year 2000, the International Telecommunication Union estimated that there were 738 million users on the internet, in 2015, there were well over 3 billion users on the internet. This number of users will continue to increase with time as more devices become internet-enabled and the cyber world finds its place in people’s daily lives. Already, it has become “normal” to check your phone first thing in the morning (even before getting out of bed) and before you sleep, and in the bathroom, and while walking, or talking or virtually doing anything; you could spend your entire day on the internet and most people would tell you that it’s fine, they’ve done the same.
Too much of anything is harmful to the body and there’s no reason to believe that the internet is an exception. In this aspect however, perhaps the effect is more mental. Slowly our idle mind is being pushed into cyberspace where we can spend our time doing other things as we wait for things to happen in the physical world (checking your phone or surfing the web while you wait for a coffee or waiting in a line). Habits form quickly and soon we find ourselves unable to live without that convenient connection to entertainment and social media or other digital platforms.
The internet is a thing of things, that is, it can find its way into anything; it can be applied to anything. Not only are there websites dedicated to every kind of topic, the internet’s influence on these topics can transform things completely. The reason Saudi women were given the right to drive is in part due to the social pressures exerted by social platforms online. The Arab spring started from a similar force as well. Politics aside, one cannot deny the fact that the internet’s presence in our physical world continues to pick up relevance. Eventually, there will come a time when the internet is as real as the physical world, a time where the internet in a way, IS the real world and our earth becomes a place where we carry out the biological functions required for life (eating, sleeping, etc) in between our time walking around the internet in virtual reality or plugging our nervous system into some sort of a network for new experiences.
It’s theoretical, but we also can’t deny the potential of technology, nor can we deny that technology (unrelated to the internet) hasn’t entered many facets of our lives and become just as normal at the cyberworld. People use cars, escalators, elevators, Tv, radio, fridges, microwaves like they’ve been around for 1,000 years.
Despite smartphones being as successful as they are, we are still ways away from what I would consider “The cyber collapse”. Cryptocurrencies are striving to create a new type of value that would rival fiat or gold, and this hasn’t been adopted around the world yet. Virtual reality has had leaps in advancement but is still not at its peak. 3D printing is also advancing tremendously but hasn’t found its way into many households. At the time of the cyber collapse, technology would have surpassed nanomachines, machine sentience (machines becoming self-aware), automated cars and so forth. There might be hover boards and smart contact lenses that can carry out facial recognition, perhaps electrodes or helmets we put on our heads to be able to feel things through the internet… it would be what we might still consider science fiction.
Section 2: Inevitability of the Collapse
Intrinsically, I think mankind is drawn to machines because we are, in a way, machines ourselves. Our bodies are engines and our brains are computers. The human body runs on combustion after all, converting chemical energy into kinetic energy by utilizing oxygen. Our cells are programmed in DNA and our neurons firing are much like the logic gates of a computer; either a 0 (the neuron hasn’t fired) or a 1 (the neuron has fired) with nothing in between those two. Many terms that apply to computers also apply to human beings. We can think of the bandwidth of a brain (what’s the volume of information you can process at a given time), it’s RAM (how fast can your brain make associations and pass information around?) it’s storage space (how much can you remember?), fragmentation (false memories or remembering small snippets of a single event) and so on.
Use of the internet feels like a very natural thing, and the faster it becomes, the more natural it is to use it. If it takes you a minute to look up a word, your brain might be inclined to storing the answer on the local hard drive (your brain) because the data takes a while to retrieve; it becomes faster to just memorize the answer for the next time you need to remember it. Consequently, when it takes a shorter amount of time to look up a word, you can stream the answer (look it up quickly on your phone and forget it once it leaves your cache (short term memory)); this effect becomes exaggerated when we consider a person going to a library to look up an answer from a book vs googling the question and hitting the first result that comes out. One cannot have depth and speed simultaneously, so if we look up information quickly, it is unlikely to reside deep in our brains; however, when we have the option to look up an answer in such a short time, why wouldn’t we?
What’s important to me though, is inquiring about what the smartphone has become in relation to our body in this context, and then expanding that relationship to what future technologies might become to us.
I see Smartphones as external organs. They sort-of plug into our brains (or perhaps, we plug our brains into them) and they fulfill much of the same functions our brain might handle. We don’t need to remember things, we have our phones and our cloud synchronization to do that for us. We don’t remember definitions of words, and we’re not required to think critically or analytically about things because most of the time we have forums on the internet that will answer our questions. The result is that our ability to guess, or rather, our interest in guessing, diminishes as our ability to search for an answer takes us less time, and without having that desire to wonder, our mental gears gathers metaphorical rust.
Of course, it’s much better to not rely solely on our devices and technology, and surely enough, it’s not like everybody does it, but I’m certain that a great many people know at least one person who does overly rely on technology and like the number of people on the internet is steadily increasing, I believe that the number of people who will overly rely on technology will increase as well. Granted it’s difficult to pinpoint what the threshold separating “too much” and “just enough” technology use is, we can imagine that as the hours spent on computers increase, as relying on technology becomes regular at a younger age, we will inevitably go beyond the point of appropriate use, wherever that point exists.
The reality is, it’s easier to look up answers than it is to remember them, and most people go down the path of least resistance, because it’s the natural thing to do.
As the cyber collapse approaches, we won’t have to look things up by typing any sort of query, because we’d have perfect voice recognition or perhaps even thought translation. You wouldn’t even need to remember how to write your questions, just speak or think and get the answers. As services pile on top of services, technology will slowly integrate into all aspects of our lives. People who always use google maps won’t remember how to get to places or where they are relative to each other without the aid of their phone or navigational device, especially if they come to rely on the technology at a younger age.
We could have a contact lens that aids in cooking; it’d give you a notification when the color of the meat is cooked just right, maybe an infrared laser that tells you when something is the right temperature, give you guidelines for how the incisions of the knife should cut up the vegetables for your selected recipe… the possibilities are endless but ultimately, there’s a part of the human that gets lost to the assistance of the technology. Whereas technology should help us achieve what we seek, we should be able to fair well without it. A person who would use this contact lens to cook should also be learning how to cook as they do it, just as a person using google maps to navigate should be paying attention to the roads they’re using, rather than blindly following the roads to and from their destinations.
People who use a FitBit or fitness pal to track their caloric intake should be able to estimate how many calories they’re eating without the aid of fitness pal or a FiBit after a month or two, unless they’re simply plugging in stuff and not thinking about what numbers they’re seeing from what food item. If you’re using an app to help you tune a violin, you should still be working on developing a sense for what sounds like a G or a G#. Just because technology is making our lives easier, we can’t rely on it solely to do what we want to do; or at least I think we shouldn’t.
Even smaller interactions with technology that seem negligible can add up over time.
Prior to elevators and escalators, people would walk up flights of stairs and in it, move their legs and utilize more of their muscles. While it doesn’t seem like it would have a significant effect on people. Humans walk around a lot, and with time, even these few minutes of being on stairs a day add up to a significant chunk of time throughout the year; it keeps the body in an active state where people are more prepared to move, as opposed to the “Desk-job-to-Home-couch” life style some people lead.
Another small interaction with technology that highlighted MY reliance was after driving a car that had a rear-facing camera for a couple of years, I found it bizarre driving a spare car that didn’t have a rear-facing camera. Moving in reverse was weird and I wasn’t as comfortable gauging the distance behind me. I suppose neither knowing locations nor knowing how to drive will matter if we have automated cars, but until then, I want to hold on to these skill that I’ve developed over the years rather than handing them over to the assistance of a machine.
More people will rely on the emerging technologies of their time rather than utilizing older technologies (it’s much easier to use google maps than an Atlas). This wave of new technologies is going to keep changing the way humans do things until eventually, it becomes normal for a person to just use the technologies provided to them for a given deed. This is synonymous with people who might use ready-made functions in a program to do statistical analysis without knowing what the test is doing or how it’s operating. Resulting in a dependence on technology and a departure of knowledge without necessarily the loss of efficacy.
The system will continue to operate at full capacity despite the individual becoming less knowledgeable than before.
Section 3: Loss of Momentum
Ultimately, we need to be conscious users of technology, otherwise humans become outdated; It’s expected that some 60%+ of people will have lost their job due to automation in the future. The people currently in Elementary are expected to work jobs that nobody has worked yet in fields like 3D printing, Nanotechnology and all these other developing fields by the time they graduate.
It’s crucial that while we continue to use these developing technologies, we don’t forget about training the skill sets and refreshing the knowledge that we carry within ourselves. Brush up on what you learned in high-school or college and read up about new topics in each field/ places of interest to stay ahead of the curve. As humans, we have a lot of room for expansion, but this push towards expanding our knowledge base and acquiring skills is harder to maintain than it is to neglect; provided a person has a hobby, or drive in the first place.
I’m glad that my parents raised me to cherish my free time. I’ve spent several years practicing Violin, photography and digital artwork among other hobbies I’ve had throughout my life. Both my brothers have also had music as their hobby for well over ten years now.
A hobby, at the end of the day, is a critical part to a person’s life as it provides their mind with a method to release tension and a channel to focus their mental aptitude. It helps develop your attention span and keeps you motivated and driven in your life.
Because there’s so much media out there for us to digest, TV shows are released in bundles and now have the budgets of AAA movies; most people, have this media as a regular part of their diet, they lose sight of the significance of having a hobby. Most of our parents worked throughout their lives on the things that they felt passionate about, essentially distraction free because there wasn’t any internet to divert their attention from what they wanted in their lives. They might’ve had TV that perhaps they would use to watch the news or maybe a show or two, but it would’ve been difficult for them to binge watch TV shows for 10 hours. Our generation however, suffers from too much distraction; frequently, we see people on their phone as they’re studying, or working out, or watching a movie (in Kuwait, people even drive with their phones in their hands, and you see them taking snaps or giving likes as they’re driving). This leads to a type of disconnect in which they’re never truly engaged in things as the internet is always taken along for the trip; and the internet doesn’t sleep.
As we assign value to the notifications that our phones push to us, it becomes increasingly hard to break away from the cyber world. If we were to check our phone every 20 minutes or so “Just to see if I have a notification” we keep breaking out of the zone of focus we reach and then need to re-engage with what we’re doing; this is akin to pausing as we’re reading or practicing music or exercising. This leaves us half engaged in whatever it is we’re doing because the phone, or notifications, are always in the back of our head, stopping us from focusing on something for an extended period; I believe that this constant tug at the back of our head to check our phones obfuscates our mind with time.
Because social media holds interactions between us and our friends, it’s difficult to not care about the interactions that are occurring on it; after all, they’re our friends, right? Secondly, engaging our phones is much faster than engaging other things such as a piano or a canvas. Once we unlock our phone, it’s easy to swipe and launch applications and the feedback we get is essentially instant, lending to the addictive properties of using a smartphone or a computer. It’s like unlocking a chest of sensory input, and since the energy required to be on your phone is so low, we begin to spend more time on our phones and lose our desire to maintain a hobby. Additionally, the entire process of digesting media on our phones or on a TV is considered passive (requires no, or little energy) even though that might not necessarily be the case.
Prior to the internet, people might have relaxed by having coffee or water and sitting in silence. Maybe reading a book or going out for a walk or thinking about one thing or the other.
Now, when people relax they tend to sit and fiddle on their phones, computers or play video games. At least, more so than our parents were likely to.
Sometimes I feel like screen relaxation tires the mind, it holds it in some kind of a stasis in which the brain doesn’t regain much energy from the idleness. After spending two hours going through social media feeds and watching videos on Snap chat, Instagram and all these other platforms, maybe browsing YouTube or playing video games for a while, it can feel like the brain needs to rest, even though we don’t see going through these feeds or playing these video games as a tiring endeavor.
Try to take note if you spend a significant amount of time on your phone or on any other screen while relaxing and compare it to how you would feel if you were to relax by some other method that doesn’t include a screen (doing stretches, organizing the house, showering, reading, etc).
During my master’s program, I practiced a ritual I called “Maintenance” in which I switched off the lights in my apartment for the hour before sunset. I allowed myself background music if I were stretching or doing exercises, but I wouldn’t interact with my laptop, or phone or any device that had a screen. I’d light up candles (or rely on the light of the setting sun) and have a mug of water as well as coffee. The idea in my head was that this was time for me to unplug and truly relax my mind. Sometimes I’d spend my maintenance hour in the creeping darkness of the night and focus on my breathing and thoughts. The result was phenomenal and quickly became one of my favorite parts of the day. After the hour was done and I’d switch the lights back on, I’d feel like I was very refreshed and ready to do whatever I chose to do, whether it was work or play.
As technology advances, we will be more inclined to using it and relying on it. As we utilize it more in our day to day lives, we need to remember that there should be a time allotted for living without it. Again, too much of anything is harmful. If human beings use technology while working AND relaxing, they surrender themselves to that force that keeps them engaged in the cyber world day and night, and that constant interaction prevents them from engaging in the things they attempt in the physical world. They lose their memory and skill sets with time as well; even sleep gets disturbed with extended use of screens and doesn’t seem to trigger a red flag to people. In some cases, sleep even becomes secondary to surfing the web as people stay up half awake in their beds scrolling through the infinite feeds in their various subscriptions.
Therefore, I ask that people consider how they’re interacting with technology and how technology is interacting with them; could you spend a day without using the internet? Do you get withdrawal symptoms when the Wi-fi is switched off?
I further advise to not let the technology that helps you, do all the heavy lifting; try to use it while simultaneously learning how to not need it. Try to remember things you look up and read; ponder your own philosophy/hypothesis before asking the internet for its answer.
Don’t let the internet sustain your happiness and drive, learn to smile and stay motivated without it. Find yourself a hobby that doesn’t require you to look at a screen so that you can spend a bit of time offline and with your own thoughts.
Consider looking at yourself in the mirror instead of taking a selfie,
while both reveal your beauty, only your reflection will capture who you truly are.
Metacognition 
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