Control in the Face of Convenience

Videos of patients with a Neuralink implant playing video games with their thoughts are turning up more and more, and underneath them the comments run to near-worship of Elon Musk.

Neuralink livestreamed a quadriplegic patient playing games with its brain implant, a device it calls Telepathy. Noland Arbaugh, who had the surgery, says he has since been able to move a cursor on screen and play games with it. PC Gamer wrote that it is difficult to argue with this as a potentially beneficial use.

Control comes the same way each time, as a cure for patients or as pure innovation. Inside that frame, whatever an implant does reads as part of a good thing, and a video of a patient playing a game fills the frame better than anything.

Real control does not look like control. It comes dressed as convenience and progress, so anyone who questions it looks irrational. Admiration shuts out doubt before it can start.

Real control does not look like control.

By the time control has settled in, it feels ordinary, and resisting it comes too late.

The second episode of the first series of Black Mirror, Fifteen Million Merits, is set in an enclosed world where most people cycle on exercise bikes to generate electricity and earn a currency called merits. The world people are walking into now is not far from that one.

The strangest part is that people welcome the implant and spend their time and energy on noise, when their attention should go to what is settling in.

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