The Indispensable

A seductive black mirror spawns a lonely dystopia of soulless software and silicon sex.

Photo Credit: Drew Douglas.

Part One: Machineries of Slavery

'On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.’

Oscar Wilde,
The Soul of Man Under Socialism.

In 1889, the American science fiction author Edward Bellamy penned an article for Harper's Magazine entitled 'With the Eyes Shut'. In it, he envisioned a hypothetical media device he called an 'indispensable', designed to store and replay, in audio form, a selection of newspapers, magazines, and books. Today, almost everyone carries an indispensable in their pocket or purse—a smartphone, infinitely more effective and efficient at serving media, insidious in its ability to hijack the contents of consciousness. Permanently networked and chronically overstimulated, we routinely experience a paradoxical sense of detachment and anhedonia. As Roisin Kiberd puts it in The Disconnect, 'nothing is ever real enough to grant full satisfaction'. Starved of meaning despite the glut of content, obesely overfed …