We're All Doomed: Dialing Up Our Evolution On the Brain Party Line

In his weekly column, amateur futurist (read: paranoid alarmist with access to Wikipedia) Ryan Broderick will be dissecting the news of the week in an effort to prove that the world is probably going to end very soon and we’re all doomed.

Whenever there's an article about transhumanism on the internet, which I assure you, if you haven't looked yet, there are many, it usually consists of a lot of huge predictions from a bunch of overly-optimistic men with degrees in "wearing a sweater and talking about putting touchscreens on the moon" with a specialization in "new media is changing old media by making newer media out of old medias, media media media blah blah twitter blah crowdsourcing hacktivist blah blah newspapers."

Now, I am anything but an optimist, and thanks to the movie Videodrome, anytime I hear the word "media," that usually makes me think of sado-masochistic sex with James Woods. Thusly, I feel qualified to talk about transhumanism.

Specifically, let's talk about how smartphones are the biggest thing to happen to hominid evolutionary politics since Neanderthals shared their love of playing the flute with Homo Sapiens, and Homo Sapiens, in return, shared their love of killing all of them and raping their women.

And sure there was some assimilation, but for the most part, Neanderthals were killed off in one way or another, unless you live on Long Island, where they seemed to have dodged the human invasion entirely.

As smartphones become more ubiquitous, the world that they give you access to is going to be more important. Chances are, already, having the ability to use GPS, email, or Google on the go is as crucial as having your wallet. Now imagine the political implications of that. If you were a developing nation, you'd be pretty upset if you couldn't get through the digital gate that all the other nations have access to.

If you've ever seen the Cronenberg film Scanners in it, you may remember the scene in which someone walks into a room full of telepaths sitting in a circle thinking to each other, and ends up completely missing out on the brain party they're all having. Ever sat in a coffee shop without a smartphone? It's not really science fiction anymore is it? Some say that by 2016, annual smartphone sales will reach a billion devices. That’s a lot of brain parties.

That telepathic smartphone bubble is going to get a lot bigger and the people who aren't in it are going to be a lot more agitated. Information wars are already a pretty common occurrance, and if you remember, smartphone access was a key weapon in the Middle Eastern Spring.

On a smaller level, have you ever gotten drunk and lost your phone? Everyone's been there. I remember a few years ago, I woke up the morning after the Superbowl and discovered my phone floating in a bucket of water. To this day, I'm not sure where the bucket or the water came from.

But after I discovered I had drunkenly turned my phone into a buoy, I had to wait a few weeks before I could get another one. At the time I was using an EnV2, which was one of the first phones to have a keyboard. It wasn't a smartphone, per se, but it wasn't a dumbphone either. It was more of a C+ student-who-does-a-lot-of-extracurriculars phone. Either way, not having it was a bit of a nuisance.

Six months ago, a similar situation took place. Only it involved me jumping up and down, pounding Mad Dog 20/20 while screaming Kanye West's "Monster" at a house party and it ended with me watching my Google Droid fall out of my pants pocket and on to the floor, landing underneath the shoe of the person next to me. As you can imagine, it didn't work quite right, or at all, after that incident. And once again, I had to wait a few weeks before I could get a new one.

The difference between the time I lost my C+ student phone and the time I lost my smartphone was staggering. With my smartphone I was online constantly. I was on my email all day, along with Facebook and Twitter. Even beyond the 24/7 socializing, I had the ability to look up anything – Wikipedia, IMDB, Google, the weather – all at my immediate fingertips. I had GPS-powered maps, which you should never get jaded about because that’s an amazing thing to have in your pocket. Do you know how long it takes to get a full map in Pokemon? Talk about aggravating.

Smartphones and their constant access to the internet is an unbelievable form of transhumanism that is usually completely ignored in futurism conversations. Typically overshadowed by some Serbian guy that embeds magnets in his fingers or something. Which, let's face it, is really cool, but pretty God damn useless. But the phone thing, that's the real deal.

A scientist finds a mineral that turns out to be much more efficient and far cheaper of a way to make cellphones, making a low level, sturdy smartphone cost less than a hundred dollars. The UN is infused with a tremendously large grant of money that gives them the ability to create an open, global 3G network, that while weak, can give anyone a minimal, but effective level of internet access. Humans stop fighting over internet access and instead go back to fighting over everything else for the time being.

The developed world pours money into their internet infrastructure, creating incredibly advanced online networks that only the wealthiest minority in the world can afford to use. Smartphones become more expensive as they become smaller, and flexible. Developing nations are forced to fight for the ability to have constant internet access and lash out at larger nations through grass-roots insurgent attacks, both online and in the real world. The smartphone-less think it’ll be a cinch because they can run to the library and track Foursquare checkins. But they forget smartphone armies have Google Earth. Bloody battles ensue across the world in developing nations, but the average person doesn’t really pay much attention because the third winter level in Angry Birds: Seasons is impossible to beat. Like seriously, how do you break ice and wood with just the yellow birds? Anyways, what I’m getting at here is that most of that is already happening. Whoops.

• Unboxing the State Department’s Internet in a Suitcase
• A Reality of Our Own Construction: Rapture, Ecstasy and Technology