The Creepy, Creepy Future of Marketing: "FREE Implant surgery with purchase!"

The iphone is being advertised an awful lot.

I don't own a cellphone because I don't like them. The iphone freaks me out.

My stance on cell phones is this: you pay money so that you have no solitude. You're never alone when you have a cell phone, which I'm sure is a comfort to some but not to me, since I don't substitute comm-tech for actual human interaction.

Cybernetics, as you can guess from previous posts, freak me out. The concept freaks me out. I'm not entirely comfortable relying on a car for transport, but I deal with it.

The iphone, by design, appears to demand human manipulation to a greater extent than any other device of its kind.

Now, I made a post before about the marketing of products and how most advertising's only real point is to make want things you don't need.

As electronics become more and more personalized to their user, and these devices become more and more complex (the iphone knows how you are holding it) how long do you think it's really going to be before people are comfortable with implanted devices and when that market is in infancy, how soon do you think people will be willing to produce product for that market?

Cell phones embedded in ear drums with key pads woven and tattooed into the back of your hand.

Cameras and lasers that display the time, date and temperature in the lower left of your field vision.

Extra sensitive nerve endings and tiny pressure valves embedded in genitals for enhanced sexual pleasure and performance.

In one way it's very possible that such body modification may obliterate out-moded concepts of gender; but in another more precise way it might make being human obsolete.

Naturally, these sound like ravings but let's look again at advertising.

"You need our product to he happy in life, you need our product to be masculine/feminine, you need our product to be cool."

It's well within the realm of possibility that eventually those products will actually alter the physical properties of the consumer.

This isn't as outlandish as it sounds and here's why: cars.

In order to drive a car you must learn how. Now, learning in general doesn't make you great driver. A great driver drives a lot. There's a whole skill set there that didn't exist in the general population 100 years ago. Now, consider how much driving alters your way of perceiving the world. Now instead of thinking in footsteps, you think in miles. You consider gas mileage and acceleration at the very least. There's a new wrinkle in your brain for driving things.

We already have artificial hearts and robotic limbs hooked directly to the human nervous system. These were added on so the recipients could lead a normal life.

How long before leading a normal life means getting your body altered by science?

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