Sources used in this document:

Although Mann describes himself in the article as someone who has "lived as a cyborg for 30 years" ( Mann 25) what he really means by this is that he has been incorporating computers and information technology -- often in the form of what he calls "in (ter)ventions," his neologism for inventions (gadgets) that also enact an intervention (a form of resistance) in the prevailing culture. But the things that Mann was resisting in 2003 are surely far more salient now than they were then. Although he names "surveillance and monitoring technologies" -- i.e., the nonconsensual recording of information about individuals by large governments or corporations -- as one of the chief subjects of his explorations, the examples given by Mann are along the lines of CCTV camera surveillance and records of credit card swipes. The sort of surveillance that was revealed by Edward Snowden's actions ten years later is so far beyond the level of what Mann was resisting in 2003 demands that we give Mann credit for extraordinary prescience.

Such concern with surveillance, though, is only one of many things in Mann's account that seems so new and salient in 2014 that it is astonishing to see how well he foresaw the direction in which daily life was heading. Mann discusses his "apparatus of computer-mediated reality (e.g. wearing a computer and living in a computer-generated world)" but this is a decade before the much-hyped Google Glass attempted to make a consumer item out of the idea. Indeed Google Glass sounds like it was inspired by Mann's account of his 2000 project involving his "EyeTap system, eyeglasses that cause the eye itself to function as if it were a camera" (Mann 21). Likewise Mann's 2001 project "Ouijagree" is meant to deconstruct copyright restrictions on software, and his discussion of it extends to the possibility for deconstructing the intellectual property whereby PDF documents are held -- it is worth noting that the same academic institution whose press published Mann's article in 2003, M.I.T., would play a substantial role in the prosecution (and arguably the suicide) of Aaron Swartz, founder of Reddit, who killed himself after facing extraordinarily harsh prosecution for the mass downloading of copyrighted academic articles and documents, in an attempt to make them available for free.

Of course the examples of Snowden, Google Glass, and Aaron Swartz all demonstrate that the philosophical issues that Mann was making central to his art in 2003 would become mainstream objects of concern ten years later. To a certain degree, this is a simple fact of Mann's area of interest: by making computing and information technology central to his concerns, he was arguably well-placed to see the ways in which surveillance and governmental control were central to the development of such technology from the outset.