Cyborg. Thinking.

When I think of cyborgs, I think of metal men, bodies run through with hardware and silicon. Sometimes, if I'm feeling expansive, I think of it in terms of "the web + search" or of "the cloud." These make the hardware metaphorical: the silicon is elsewhere, I access it from a distance, and so my body – my cyborg me – is now the biological-technical information system as a whole.

In both versions of the cyborg, the interface between self and hardware is embodied rather than mental. This is more overt in the image of the metal man but is just as real in the information system cyborg. There the mind remains intact, biological, while memory–envisioned as storage distinct from and accessed by the mind–becomes technological.

After nearly a year away from macOS, I've now returned, and in doing so, I realize that I've never imagined the cyborg that I've become because it is precisely my mind, my manner of thought that has been run through and transformed and by software rather than hardware.

I'm talking about Tinderbox. It is a tool, but after habituating myself to the slog and resistance of other tools these past 10 months, I'm especially sensitive to how my mind works differently when that resistance isn't there. I now see that I know and understand more – and as a result am able to think better and to greater effect – when I arrange my projects in Tinderbox's hypertextual world. I struggle and hit roadblocks, yes, and these arise from hitting both the limits of my control of the tool and the limits of my thought's development, but these roadblocks sit further out then I can easily go without Tinderbox.

This last is what I find most striking after a few days back on macOS: my mind, my thought, my very act of thinking has been run though, enhanced and even transformed by software. This is cyborg-ism that matters and suggests that my early analogy between Tinderbox and a pencil is too timid. Tinderbox is writing.