We personally make thousands of APIs calls each day. Our day is shaped by APIs, and it is dangerous to think otherwise. Despite Shannon’s original vision of communication being the same across all channels—in our view every API transaction has different emotional connections and societal value.
Skinner believed that we couldn’t see into the mind and all that we could measure was behavior. The intersection where emotion, motion, behavior, and APIs powering mobile and device applications is where the cybernetic gears produce the most heat. The message to that new love interest, notification your paycheck went into your bank account, and politically charged news update you just saw at the top of your feed—these are cybernetic gears at work.
Your cybernetic gears spin around 20K a day, ranging in emotion and important as you make your way through your day. Early concerns of the danger of computers in the early cybernetic conferences and discussions were on the mark, they just didn’t realize that motion was key ingredients. Compute needed to follow us around each day, and shift to leading us around each day, before the real motion, fusion, and heat of our cybernetic gears would become a problem.
You can feel the heat and friction of your cybernetic gears after a long 10 hour day on the computer. The way your brain sizzles, and you feel emotionally drained. However, it was when this followed and led us around in our day where it began dangerously taking a hold of our physical and digital selves. Every API call we find ourselves on the treadmill, but with mobile devices in our hands, we are the treadmill, and each API call begins to cybernetically fuse ourselves to the platforms we depend upon each day.
The point at which our cybernetic gears become a problem is when they generate enough sustained heat through motion and emotion that they begin to fuse with who we are, or at worst begin to define and shape who we are. Some call this cyber addiction, but it is more permanent than that. There is no turning back from sustained cybernetic gear velocity—once you have picked up enough speed, it becomes impossible to slow them back down.
While an addiction to drugs can change the way receptors work in your body, cybernetic gears become fused with your emotions, memories, and behavior. Cybernetic gears literally reprogram who you are over time, and with the right amount of momentum and sustained levels of heat, this can become irreversible. On a daily basis this can become physically debilitating, but over time you simply forget who you were.
