Lack of Internet Leads to a Meditation on the Nature of Chickens

Several days ago in the morning, I was sitting at my computer, and there was suddenly a loud explosion from down the street, and I could see a flash of what seemed like lightning through the shades of my window. I knew it was a transformer blowing up. It used to happen every 2 weeks or so when I was living in Concord, New Hampshire. The power went out for a minute and then came back on. All of a sudden, we had no internet. Kay spent a long time on the phone with our internet provider, and they assured it had nothing to do with them, and it must be our router or Hub or some goddamn thing. It’s easy to forget how dependent we’ve become on being connected. I don’t know about you, but in my evening downtime, I’m either surfing around the various news sites or playing a video game, and now none of that works. I was forced to find other ways to amuse myself.

Luckily, for one of my birthdays, Kay bought me this giant book that has pictures and a little information on every bird species in the world. It seemed like a good opportunity to catch up on some of my reading. While I was going through the various exotic species, something occurred to me: What is a chicken, and where do they come from? All of my life I have seen and eaten them, and it never occurred to me to wonder what they are. Luckily, I can use my cell phone as a hotspot, so I was able to get online and do a little research. It turns out that all the chickens on Earth today are descended from a bird called the Red Jungle Fowl that originated in Thailand. They look a lot like chickens, actually.

Once you start doing a deep dive like this, you are bound to find even more amazing information, and chickens are no exception. It turns out that the red jungle fowl was evolved to take advantage of the 10-year bamboo seeding cycle, which produced vast quantities of seeds; this allowed them to boost their reproduction. This was perfect for humans because all you had to do was keep feeding them, and they would keep laying eggs and reproducing so as to produce a dependable crop of chickens on an ongoing basis. But that’s not all. The last time anybody counted that there were about 27 billion chickens in the world while there are only about 8 billion people. That works out to about 4 chickens for every man, woman, and child on the planet. I can’t help but wonder—maybe we’re not the dominant species around here. If an alien race came to visit us, they might send their ambassador to meet with the chickens, assuming that they were in charge. That would be interesting to watch; maybe the alien emissaries would start packing at the ground with the chickens, assuming it was some kind of social ritual. It would only be later that the aliens would realize how delicious those chickens were, whether slowly stewed in wine or fried and served with buffalo sauce and blue cheese dressing.

After reading this, I began to think about the influence of the internet on human thinking and consciousness. The first time I thought about this was when my parents moved to this gigantic condo out in Aurora, Ohio. The condo had a patio right out on the golf course, and there was all kinds of wildlife that made the golf course their home. My father was sitting out there and saw a chipmunk running across the patio. He told me that he thought to himself, “What the hell is a chipmunk? I’ve been looking at them for close to 80 years, and I never wondered what they were.” He looked them up on Wikipedia and discovered that they are a kind of ground squirrel native to North America and Asia. Once he had asked himself the question, he was able to instantly look it up on his laptop and get an answer. Back when I was younger, I would have had to go to the library and look up the answer in one of the encyclopedias, but now all this information just flows to us.

I can’t help but wonder how this is changing human consciousness. I read somewhere that we don’t really notice it, but unbeknownst to us, we’ve all become cyborgs. A cyborg is a living organism that has artificial body parts that enhance or restore its abilities.Now all of us carry a cell phone, and we’re hooked up to all of this information all the time. That makes us cyborgs, as far as I can tell. I recall someone telling me that she was a little disappointed at one point because when she was a child, she just assumed that by the time she became an adult, we would all have personal robots, and she was a little disappointed that hadn’t happened. Then, at one point, she realized that it had come true, just not in the form she expected. Instead of having Robbie the Robot following her around, she now had a little robot that lived in her pocket.