Is technology unnatural?

pp. 321-327

in: I. C. Jarvie, Thinking about society, Berlin, Springer, 1986

Abstract

A year ago Mr Tom Wolfe, that careful documenter of our mores, published a magazine article which told the story of Carol Doda. Miss Doda is the girl who pioneered topless dancing in San Francisco cabaret. Reflecting on the way Miss Doda's natural endowments had been enhanced by false eyelashes and polyethylene injections, Wolfe labelled her "the perfect put-together girl". He speculated that sooner or later we might find ourselves confronted with people who are almost totally put-together. Consider what is already technologically possible, reading down, so to speak: dyed hair, lightened skin, coloured contact lenses, remoulded features, lifted face and neck, inflated bosoms, stretched spines, transplanted organs, artificial limbs, and so on. Wolfe welcomes Carol Doda as a portent of something most of us find faintly sinister — the intrusion of technology into even the most intimate areas of our experience, including relations with the opposite sex.