Nicola Liberati "The Borg-eye and the We-I”

The aim of my work is to analyse the possibility of the production of a collective living body [Leib] thanks to wearable computers and to probe what such innovation yields.
Nowadays the topic of collectivite subjects raises interest in the phenomenological research and there are many new studies concerning collective intentionality and collective emotions. These works focusses their attention on the “nature” of a plural subject in a “We-form” instead of a more classic conception of a single subject related to an “I-form”.
However, even if these studies tackle the problem of a plural subject, they start from the assumption of an I- form subject as a basic element in perception. They start from the assumption that a perception of a subject is private ad that the sole subject who is experiencing the world is living in his living body. Therefore, they assume a kind of “private” status of the subject’s perception and in the subject’s bodily life.
This assumption was quite valid in the past because nobody had a direct perception of something as if they were in someone other’s place. However, today this kind of privacy cannot be assumed so easily because there are new digital devices which aim to spy on everybody’s life as no previous technologies ever did.
Wearable computers are clearly designed to graft computer devices in our body and in our clothes intertwining the human body with digital technologies.
Even now our spatial position is recorded passively by personal devices such as our smartphone, but wearable computing will bring this embryonic feature to a higher level and they will spy on our life from the within of our body. For example, Google Glass will “mount” on us a webcam aiming to record our entire life, computerised bracelets will record our heartbeat and smart watches our hand gestures. Therefore, we cannot be blind to the possibility of having a shared experience where a whole community has access to our own vision, to our emotional state and to our hand gestures.
We have to take into account a we-form subject from the very beginning by analysing the possibility of having a common Leib and common experiences.
My analysis will study what these new technologies can do to our living body and if it is possible to talk of a common living body shared by an entire community who actually lives and perceives through us. Moreover, I will study if these new technologies can be seen as part of new computerised living body and if they work as digital organ mounted on us.
I will ask, and try to answer, these two questions.
Is it possible to have a common living body composed by shared perceptual digital organs?
Is it possible to have a Borg-like living body where the simplest thing as “your experience” turns into “our experience” and where the “I” has to be substituted by the “We” of “the Collective”?