[token78]

There is one technological invention, completely 'unnatural' and born of human artifice, which each and everybody on Hacker News has internalised so deeply that we take it for granted almost as natural thing.

It extends our capacity for information gathering and exchange, and has extended human memory monumentally. I'm talking about writing.

Yeah, I admit it - I've drunk the Marshall McLuhan Kool-Aid. But think about it. You have ancestors for whom writing was an alien and unfamiliar information technology. And yet you can look at a page and suddenly be drawn into the sensations, ideas and experiences of men and women who died generations and continents away. All thanks to a technology that we have so thoroughly integrated with our experience of being alive and human that it's become second nature.

You're a cyborg already.

EDIT: Wow, I'm a little surprised I'm the first person to mention McLuhan? For those that don't know, he's the bloke that coined the term 'cybernetics'.