A Declaration of the Independence of Mindspace

by Guy Garcia

The minute details of our personal lives – who we know, what we think, where we go and why, have not been stolen from us; we have voluntarily offered them up to opportunistic apps promising convenience and effortless connection to anything or anyone for any reason at any time. We have become slaves, not of an oppressive master-server, but to our own unquenchable desires.

​

Yet more worrisome is the arrival of products and software that use electro-magnetic signals to enter – and alter – the human brain. The benefits of these mind-bending gizmos range from better sleep and relaxation to increased stamina and intensified concentration for games or work. The consumer market for such devices is just getting started, but the science behind them isn’t new. The history of brain-hacking experiments dates to Nicola Tesla, and research into microwave neural enhancement is currently being pursued for both military and commercial applications. Like the Internet itself, new technologies hatched in labs and bunkers have a habit of eventually reaching our offices and bedrooms, and as we all know, once permission and access are granted, it’s hard to get them back. As a society, we haven’t even begun to address the moral and social implications of tech-boosted brain implants, but in our brazen age of politically-motivated cyber-attacks and Fake News samizdat, the mind, well, reels at what could happen if such technology got into the wrong hands.