No Off Switch

My extended mind.

In 1999, I was the Director of Education and Research at the Arizona Science center. I also began research on what became a PhD in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK. I was living in Arizona, and my family lived near Leicester, so in this way I combined expanding my education and family visits.

In 1999, I read two books that changed my thinking about science centers as well as my my type-1 diabetes. I didn’t quite see the connection at the time. The books, both published in 1999, were Andy Clark’s Natural-born cyborgs: Minds, technologies and the future of human intelligence and B. J. Pine and J. H. Gilmore’s The experience economy: Work is theatre and every business a stage.

Clark was on a book tour. I invited him to give a talk at the science center and sell some books. He inscribed my copy, "Cyborg best, Andy," a message I suspect he used as a paw print, generally. He gave a lively performance in the center’s film theatre, standing at a lectern against a white screen that rose six stories high. He looked tiny and distant at the bottom, as if floating in space, which seemed fitting for the Kubrick moment he conjured. He said humans, all by themselves, were born cyborgs in their unique ability to enter into deep relationships with objects around them. To quote Clark—to form intimate relationships with “non biological constructs, props, and aids.” He was talking about prosthetics and the way the human mind can extend itself through the technologies it invents or picks up in the natural world. It didn’t occur to me back then, as it does now, that my insulin pump was a perfect example of the intimate and necessary relationship he was talking about.

Arizona Science Center.

I had a crucial, inter-dependent relationship not only with my pump but with my eyeglasses, too, when I started to inventory my cyborg extensions. I've worn glasses since I was nine years old. Forget about my movements through space without them. To Andy Clark, the merging of technology and biology was an undeniable, progressive process and ineluctably human—we are born with the technologies of tool-grasping thumbs and brains that make mind.

We are our cell phone for all intents and purposes. They have agency the way humans have agency, in that many activities are impossible without them. Presciently, Clark mentions cell phones in nineteen pages of his book. They were first introduced in 1999! There were then only five companies selling them, and Nokia dominated the field with four models.

Pine and Gilmore’s book became very popular among museum professionals in 1999. At the time, museums had become interested in what visitors felt and not just focused on producing exhibits. My job at the center was to educate and entertain the visiting public and also to evaluate how the center could deepen the visitor experience.

Pine and Gilmore chronicle the history of economic models, surveying economies of commodities, goods, services, and experiences. What I missed in my first reading was the significance of the book’s final chapter—called "The Transformation Economy.” Here, businesses encourage people to change themselves. This sector covers businesses in education, fitness, religion, mental health, medical care (like my insulin pump)—and museums, as far as I’m concerned.

All these economies are rather abstract and can be confusing to differentiate. To illustrate and make the systems easier to grasp, check out the chart below based on Pine and Gilmore’s example—plus me:

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TYPE OF ECONOMY = BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION EXAMPLE

Commodity =. Cake made with flour, eggs, milk, etc,

Product = Use Betty-Crocker cake mix

Service = Go to Baskin-Robins and choose cake style

Experience = Have party in a zoo or go to themed restaurant

Transformation = Train as a clown for party performances

(Based on example in The Experience Economy.)

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By becoming more and more a cyborg—a being reliant on the algorithms of my continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) system, a being that, because of these devices can think better and for longer periods—I’m also a prime example of someone changed all the time in the transformation economy. Clark argued we have always thought through our devices and do so increasingly. Much of what was once brainpower is now processed by our devices, including laptops, phones, cars, medical tech, etc.

We’ve been doing this for much of our evolution. We are, after all, “Homo habilis” able to exploit our built-in opposable thumb and continually adding tools. Heidegger had a thought on this:

“[The] less we stare at the hammer-Thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is—as equipment . . . If we look at Things just ‘theoretically’, we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thing character . . ..”

Maurice Sendak may have said it more simply: “A hole is to dig.” In fact, he wrote it and drew it more than said it. Writing is the greatest human manifestation of the external location of thinking and feeling. But, let’s get back to me. My life as a cyborg is shaped by my growing use of my glucose monitoring pump, attached to me under the skin via a catheter. I can go a whole week without changing it and thus without much thought about diabetes, but it's still on my mind about every twenty minutes. That’s because my pump sends me reminders, alerts, and messages. My phone beeps. The pump beeps annoyingly. The sound is annoying on purpose to claim my attention. The system takes by blood sugar every five minutes and makes some choices itself, but it relies on me to supply the information it needs for its calibrations.

Clark sees this back and forth “conversation” between me and my things as an essential part of joining our thinking with technological “computational apparatus.” This isn’t new. He gives the example of using pen and paper to calculate numbers, say our monthly spending. We might write the numbers down, which involves storing the numbers outside the brain (on paper), then we use our brain to do the simple calculation. The essence of cyborg thinking is to oscillate between external storage and internal processing (my brain). My CGM does most of the calculations about how much insulin to give me, but it still needs me to tell it how many grams of carbohydrates I’ve consumed and how many calories I’m planning to burn in exercise. I don’t have an external pancreas. If I did, I wouldn’t need to intervene as regularly as I do. I find it remarkable that the normal pancreas just gets on with it.

Pine and Gilmore remind me that by becoming a diabetic cyborg, I operate smack inside the transformation economy. Fifty years ago, a steel-and-glass syringe and insulin cost a fraction of today's high-tech system. Mine costs the economy $10,500 a year. The trouble with the more primitive methods was they weren’t effective. The cost of treating complications cost the economy far more. Over the long haul, my current system is very cost effective, and I’ve never felt better, and it’s always there to help.

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This is post number five. I’ve had a good start, it feels, and I’m very grateful to everyone who’s supporting my new Substack, EVERY TWENTY MINUTES. In each post, I will be writing through the experience of chronic illness and type-1 diabetes, although not always directly about these topics. I may be more than one person, but all of them have my condition.

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