Orwellian Milkmaid Tech-Chip

I concluded my Performance Enhancing Body Modification blog a few days ago with a quote from Querzola taken from a passage within the Diller and Scofidio book FLESH. It was an ironic counter-argument to a stance which this blog post will address by looking at two of the coolest videos on Youtube. Prepare to be evoked!

From Flesh: “As for attempts to redesign the body, we need only recall cases of electronic transmitter implants which monitor bodies on supervised discharge. Surveillance, hygienics, health-any number of microrobots are waiting to invade our bodies...cause for concern, or even anger? One subject not mentioned in an ostensibly neutral scientific article in the New York Times is the use of such devices by psychiatric hospitals. What about mental compliance achieved through ‘psychotropes’ and drugs? New technologies are certainly providing the means of exercising total control over body and soul, through immense population-surveillance networks exercising bio-medical powers, ultimately more despotic than the most fearsome dictatorships...”

The installation of surveillance/monitoring chips and advanced body modification can be seen from two sides...the Orwell dystopian nightmare as depicted in 1984 or the more utopian Huxley school of thought from Brave New World. Why shouldn’t we be able to program our body, download its operating specifications and maintain a perfect bodily age of 30 until our death? Why should the installation of chips instantly become a state/corporate spyware threat? As the passage from Flesh ends:

“Donna Haraway maintains that “the cyborg is not subject to Foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations.”

The video shows cows being milked in an uber-high-tech way. The cows have a chip in their tags that activates the doors, feedbags etc.

Is this video terrifying or inspiring? Should we view it as somehow unnatural, a programming and ordering of nature to a perverted fascist extreme? Or should we see it as highly efficient system that is far more hygienic for both the cows and the humans? In this system the health of the individual cow can be monitored, treatments administered, production levels recorded in a clean and safe environment free from the shit/slurry and disease of the traditional farm. The cow has never know any other life, and like an Epsilon specimen in Brave New World is perhaps grateful that it doesn’t have to exert itself any further than what it has been programmed to understand. One thing’s for sure though, this is a sterile environment compared to the highly chaotic erotically charged milking sessions of days gone by.