The essay talks about the society’s arrival to ‘a disembodied style of life’ and the way people ‘dis-connect and reconnect through various networks’ and replacing human components in the realm of cyberspace.
In the 2009 movie ‘Gamer’, society has come to accept reality games where volunteers are controlled by other humans via a virtual network, where the controller takes over the volunteer’s body and is free to do whatever he/she wishes at a price. This brings up ethical issues regarding the disconnection with oneself, and realising that your moral inhibitions are removed and in many cases, the controller acts upon desires they would never think of doing if they weren’t in control of someone else’s body. This is similar to the example given by the novel The girl who was plugged in, in which a person’s brain is electronically implanted into a perfect artificial body. Though the similarities lie in the control of another being/object, the difference is the permanence of such a control.
The other example given is another ‘game’ where controlled death-sentence convicts are pit against one another in a game of warfare, with the prize freedom for the inmate if he/she survives 10 games. The use of convicts in this scenario, particularly death-sentence, removes the morality of killing in that throughout history, with society seen as an organism, the ‘ill’ largely consisted of convicts and people of poor health, ‘an excess which must be rooted out’ where ‘the “ill” is attributed to a lack which must be compensated for’.
Jacky Chan
archandphil 
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