FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

'Christory 2014 - Rise of the Inner-Net' Is the Best YouTube Video

We're all just bags of bones and skins that can also think and talk and remember things, and that's pretty cool!

The Best YouTube Video is an occasional series where Motherboard searches for the best YouTube video ever made, usually on Friday afternoons right before the margarita alarm rings. Previously The Best YouTube Video: Wild Donkey Fight On Grand Turk Island.

Take the life out of a human, and all you're really left with is an empty corpse. I don't mean to advocate soul theft or anything like that, it's just a strange metaphysical thing to think about. We're all just bags of bones and skins that, through the convoluted trials of evolution and the mysterious processes of the universe we've found ourselves in, can also think and talk and remember things, and that's pretty cool!

Advertisement

But what happens when you take that shell, that organic framework of cells and ossified tissue, and cram it full of electronics? There's no doubt that it's going to happen. Cyborgs were once limited to the likes of Kevin Warwick and Tim Cannon, but now the concept's on its way to the mainstream.

Just read the opening line of this PR email I literally just received while writing this: "Want to see the next mobile device? Look in the mirror. Edible RFID chips, embedded fingertip readers and other high-tech innovations are blurring the line between flesh and function."

So we meatbags will soon all be jammed full of silicon, and then what? Well, Chris Dancy, the 45-year-old man above, provides a clue. Dancy bills himself as the "most connected man in the world" and "the most quantified human," thanks to hundreds of sensors around his body and home that "measure his pulse, body temperature, caloric intake, quantity and quality of sleep, efficiency at work, and much more," per his website.

So what happens when you create an Internet of Me? "The internet is dead," the Denverite says in the video. "The innernet, the information of you, is the future."

If we're willing to think of our selves, our bodies, as vessels—which is probably a better word than corpse, but oh well—then Dancy is surely the most self-aware human on Earth. He's also the best peek we've got into our own hyperconnected, hyperquantified future—and it appears that by digitizing our bodies and our lives, we're increasingly able to divorce our consciousness from them both.

"People will create an assisted reality, on demand, as you need it," Dancy says. And does it seem that crazy, that our techno-organic bodies will stroll through meatspace as our web-connected minds surf through their own ever-shifting landscape of reality? Hell, we're already there. For proof, just look out at your nearest street: You'll probably see some jackass checking Twitter while jaywalking into traffic.