Welcome to Simu-Nation

I’m delighted to be joining the T/S community and launching this blog. Let me get started by sharing an observation: building a good life, despite all the choices our technologies have given us, is not as easy as it may seem. In fact, getting lost in life has become rather easy. You may agree, you may not, but the struggles we face trying to build a good life in our emerging culture of simulation is where I start.

We are spending more and more time relating to each other, our selves, and our bodies via one or another technologically-mediated simulation. Obviously we all have much to gain from our new technologies (why else even start a blog!). But we’re also at risk of losing local, fleshy actualities and intimate values we love. Some possible futures may actually be putting at risk the very possibility of love, however it gets expressed.

It is so easy to stay stuck in techno-wonderment and unwitting participation (at least it is for me). But we need  to step back from all these activities and think through who we are, where we’re going, and who we want to be. Only with real good conversation can we find the reflective space to ask basic psychological questions about our emerging technologies:

• do we really want to do this?
• should we do this?
• is this who we want to be?

Let me note that when I say “technologically-mediated simulation” I mean much more than just conversation simulations like Facebook and Twitter or email and cell-phones. I have in mind all those choices where technology extends, replicates, or otherwise transforms some local, fleshy actuality. This includes things like the food we eat, the pills we take (cosmetic neurology), and how we have children.

For example, many woman have used donor gametes (both egg and sperm) to create families. Unambivalently wonderful. But there’s a point at which these technological possibilities crash into aspirational questions of what kind of a people do we want to become?  One such point was hit this past Wednesday with reports of the death of Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara.

In December 2006, when she gave birth to twins aged 66, Maria del Carmen Bousada de Lara was like all the other game old birds who have embraced the wonders of late, hormonally-induced motherhood. She believed that she would live, if not for ever, at least until 101, like her mother. As she showed off little Christian and Pau for the world’s press, she claimed she had never felt healthier. And yet a few months later she was diagnosed with cancer.

via The death of the world’s oldest IVF mother should make others think twice – Telegraph.

What troubles me most about this story is not that she lied to the infertility clinic about her age, though that’s bad enough, it’s that no one in her life was able to say “no” to her. Limits should not just be a professional responsibility. The fact that she really, really wanted to have children at 66, and thought she would live for many more years, was enough for her. But maybe it shouldn’t have been.  Someone should have been able to say that just because something is technologically possible does not mean its a good idea.

Obviously, someone should have stood up for the best interests of the children, and now that they’ve been orphaned I hope someone still will.  But there are other stakeholders as well. How about the woman who had to go through some rather uncomfortable medical procedures to donate a viable egg? Given the lie about age she obviously was not fully informed about the fate of her eggs. What are her interests in this situation, and who will protect them? And what about all of us, struggling to accept our own limitations? Has her decision made our lives just a little bit more difficult?

One point I’ll keep coming back to is that life, a good life, always has loss. No one gets to do everything they want to do.  In fact, coming to grips with the inevitability of loss is an intrinsic part of living a good life. But what do we do about technologies that try to undermine the inevitability of loss, like those that let a 66 year old women give birth? I know it sounds weird, but losing loss feels like a tremendously scary loss. It’s not who I want us to become.

And for now one of the best things I can think of to do is for us to begin talking here about living in Simu-Nation.