A few decades ago, cultural historian and author Mike Jay stumbled onto the unfortunate story of James Tilly Matthews. In 1797, Matthews was locked in a London psychiatric hospital known colloquially as Bedlam because he had become convinced that his mind was being controlled by a machine he called the “air loom.” That machine, he believed, manipulated his mind via a magnet that had been secretly planted in his brain by political operatives. This was a florid fantasy, but Jay was fascinated by the echoes Matthews’ delusion contained of many real-life, cutting-edge technologies in development in the 1980s, two centuries later.
As Jay attempted to trace the history of ideas about brain-technology hybrids back to their points of origin, he realized that such cyborgian notions had persisted throughout the industrial age. They were embedded in science fiction but also repeatedly brought to life in scientific invention, though the quest was always incomplete. Read more: “We’ve Got News for You About Supercharging Your Brain” “The imagined locus of the magnetic or electronic brain device is always in the future, where it will control our minds or endow us with superhuman powers, attack us with invisible rays or create seamless virtual realities,” Jay writes in the introduction to his new book, Wireheads: An Unnatural History of Technology in the Brain which tracks the course of this history.
I spoke with Jay about the ways culture and science can become mismatched when it comes to cyborgian fantasies, whether all brain-machine hybrids are technologies of transcendence, a device called the “God helmet,” his dislike of AI, and the dominant voices of technofuturism. You write in the book that you first encountered the term “wireheads” in Bruce Sterling’s science fiction novel Schismatrix, where it was used as a contemptuous term to describe people who lived off grid. That’s sort of a fun twist because you would think wireheads would connote the opposite.
Was there something about this double meaning that you felt made it especially fitting as the title for the book? Where I first came across the term “wirehead” was in Schismatrix, but it predates that. It started to be used in the 1970s.
The idea was that people were going to get addicted to sticking electricity into the pleasure centers of their brains, which was a thing back then when people believed that brains had pleasure centers and you could stimulate yourself with them. It became a term for the ultimate addiction to technology. I liked it as a term because it suggests that there’s a slightly retro history of the future.
I’m trying to give the idea that this isn’t the first time we’ve conceived of these things that we’re used to talking about rather breathlessly as in the future. There’s actually a history to this kind of speculation. I’ve heard people use the term wireheads to mean electronics geeks and people who are very into technology.
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