I was going to go outside for a walk

A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world.

-Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

I was going to go outside for a walk, but then an idea occurred to me. And when an idea occurs to me, I have to stop everything and write it down. If I wait, if I procrastinate, if I turn it over in my mind like a hotcake, I get lazy. There’s no need to record it anymore. 

With all this social distancing, we will become that much more reliant on technology — the social media, apps that deliver items, video conferencing, messaging tools — to remain in communication with one other. Duh. Everyone’s going through this. As that happens, we’ll start to think of our coworkers as ghosts behind computers. They appear onscreen, online, with a little green button. And other times, the button goes blank, just an outline of a circle, and we know they’ve gone — where? Where could they be but in front of their computers? Their torsos and legs disappear, all shoulders and head. We know them by a strange angle — the angle at which they look down at their computer. Their chins a little bigger than normal.

We’ll also start to feel that way about ourselves, as our lives depend less on the physical movement of our bodies and more on the ability of our minds to extend, in space, to other places: to conference rooms, to our parents’ homes, to checking in on our friends. Right now I lay supine on my bed, and what’s necessary of my body is my fingers, and my brain, and my computer. We’ll get fat, like those humans in the spaceship in Wall E.

We joke we’ll all go crazy. We joke about cabin fever, and some of us become actually depressed. I wonder, and this is my real thought in this blog, whether some of us will become schizophrenic. By schizophrenic I mean the boundary we maintain between the self and the rest of the world breaks down, becomes more permeable.

This is a schizophrenic culture we’re developing, in which we are no longer contained within our bodies but can extend our minds anywhere in the world. In the olden times, our minds helped our bodies stay alive; now, our bodies become machines to keep our minds running, rather than the other way around. Some of us will become paranoid about the information we receive in our atomized cells. There is some theoretical work on schizophrenia/psychosis occurring at a higher incidence as technology gets more and more sophisticated. Like, I think I remember reading that schizophrenia started occurring at a much more frequent rate after the invention of the radio?

Jeffrey Sconce, in the book The Technical Delusion, talks about technology as a kind of prosthesis: a technology that allows our bodies to do things they wouldn't normally be abble to. From a Bookforum excerpt last year:

Freud likened the prosthetic impulse to the fantasy life of children, and for good reason: disempowered and dissatisfied, the child imagines a day when it, too, like parents and gods, will somehow enjoy greater, perhaps even absolute, power over space, time, and meaning. Various technologies continue to dangle this digital carrot, whether it is an Internet of Things that promises a seamless consumer utopia or a billionaire’s bunkered mainframe that will one day archive his brain. Yet such prosthetics present a paradoxical horizon for the modern ego as we currently know and live it. In its classical form, the ego is a compromise, a zone for mediating internal and external conditions. If this ego were suddenly to become “omniscient” and “omnipresent,” then it would no longer have anything to mediate. It would cease to exist, as would the wisdom, pleasure, and mastery the modern ego once imagined would accompany knowing all and seeing all. An ego that had continuous access to all possible information and endless positionalities of meaning (perhaps with digital “immortality” offered as a bonus affordance) might come to resemble a functional computer or a cut-rate god.

And he goes on, quoting Ellen McGee:

The boundaries between real and virtual world will blur, and a self constantly wired to the collective will be transformed. The emergence of a Borg type collectivity or hive mind, where personal identity is lost and assimilation is the preeminent value is a real possibility. Selves will have relationships and interact in highly realistic virtual reality environments, transforming the sense of both the individual and reality. Whether this will be a benefit or burden is unclear.

Time for this schizophrenic to go for a walk!