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Google's New Moonshot Project: the Human Body
Google. Let's pretend you're reading these words, right now, and listen to me. Human beings are DIFFERENT. Is there a general baseline within which we all live--a kind of species-wide butter zone? Of course. That's what makes us a fucking species. But the kind of essentialist language and thinking you're using, here, is utter bullshit, and you need to cut it out.
Your language choices--which DO FUCKING MATTER, because connotative weight alters what people think and in what context, because, y'know, LANGUAGE-- are moving rapidly in a direction of talking about "The Right Kind Of Bodies," and the "Right Kind Of Lifestyle." And if that ISN'T your intention, then you need to take a step back and take a hard look at how you're saying what you're saying.
Because this isn't even to BEGIN discussing the problem of normalized expectations of "health" and "Ability." Trying to give everyone access to what they might consider their "best" selves is a brilliant goal, sure, whatever, but by even forwarding the project, you're colouring an expectation of both what that "best" IS and what you think it "Should" look like.
Some people need more protein, some people need less choline, some people need higher levels of phosphates, some people can echolocate, some can live to be 125, every human population has different intestinal bacterial colonies from every other, and when you add all of these things together, you will not necessarily find that each and every human being has the same molecular and atomic distribution in the same PPM/B ranges, nor that when you mix and match, everyone will get to be the best of everything. I'd love it if we could, but everything we've ever learned about our species says that "healthy human" is a constantly shifting target, not a static one.
I mean JESUS CHRIST, and here tech people still wonder why "the straights" react so viscerally to technological advances, and drives toward a technologically-augmented humanity? When we skirt the line of eugenics language? When we talk about naturally occurring bio-physiological Facts as though they were in any way indicative of value, without our input? When we're still fucking up at ethics, at 100mph, then looking back and going, "Shit. Should've factored that in. Oops."
But let's be clear, here: i'm not a doctor. I'm not a physiologist or a molecular biologist. I could be wrong about how all of these things come together in the human body, and maybe there WILL be something more than a baseline, some set of all species-wide factors which, in the right configuration, say "Healthy Human."
What I am is I'm just a guy with a fairly detailed understanding of how language and perception affect people's acceptance of possibilities, their reaction to new (or hauntingly-familiar-but-repackaged) ideas, and their long-term societal expectations and valuations of normalcy. And I'm saying that Google needs to change how they're talking about a LOT of what they're doing, these days.
I should go to bed.
Google. Let's pretend you're reading these words, right now, and listen to me. Human beings are DIFFERENT. Is there a general baseline within which we all live--a kind of species-wide butter zone? Of course. That's what makes us a fucking species. But the kind of essentialist language and thinking you're using, here, is utter bullshit, and you need to cut it out.
Your language choices--which DO FUCKING MATTER, because connotative weight alters what people think and in what context, because, y'know, LANGUAGE-- are moving rapidly in a direction of talking about "The Right Kind Of Bodies," and the "Right Kind Of Lifestyle." And if that ISN'T your intention, then you need to take a step back and take a hard look at how you're saying what you're saying.
Because this isn't even to BEGIN discussing the problem of normalized expectations of "health" and "Ability." Trying to give everyone access to what they might consider their "best" selves is a brilliant goal, sure, whatever, but by even forwarding the project, you're colouring an expectation of both what that "best" IS and what you think it "Should" look like.
Some people need more protein, some people need less choline, some people need higher levels of phosphates, some people can echolocate, some can live to be 125, every human population has different intestinal bacterial colonies from every other, and when you add all of these things together, you will not necessarily find that each and every human being has the same molecular and atomic distribution in the same PPM/B ranges, nor that when you mix and match, everyone will get to be the best of everything. I'd love it if we could, but everything we've ever learned about our species says that "healthy human" is a constantly shifting target, not a static one.
I mean JESUS CHRIST, and here tech people still wonder why "the straights" react so viscerally to technological advances, and drives toward a technologically-augmented humanity? When we skirt the line of eugenics language? When we talk about naturally occurring bio-physiological Facts as though they were in any way indicative of value, without our input? When we're still fucking up at ethics, at 100mph, then looking back and going, "Shit. Should've factored that in. Oops."
But let's be clear, here: i'm not a doctor. I'm not a physiologist or a molecular biologist. I could be wrong about how all of these things come together in the human body, and maybe there WILL be something more than a baseline, some set of all species-wide factors which, in the right configuration, say "Healthy Human."
What I am is I'm just a guy with a fairly detailed understanding of how language and perception affect people's acceptance of possibilities, their reaction to new (or hauntingly-familiar-but-repackaged) ideas, and their long-term societal expectations and valuations of normalcy. And I'm saying that Google needs to change how they're talking about a LOT of what they're doing, these days.
I should go to bed.
