Look at your hand and fingers scrolling through the screen. Contemplate the regular movement of your thumb going upwards most of the time, downwards only sometimes. What a miracle to have opposable thumbs! From hand axes to your phone, the one you're staring at right now, all made possible by this little perk of human evolution. Pause for a second and look at your hand. You're looking at it right now. This image is a mirror or a window. Your phone is transparent.
Despite having grown up with them and seeing how this practice rose in popularity, I am a very clumsy selfie-taker. I never know which finger to use or how to position my arm and phone to get a good selfie. That people now point their cameras towards themselves instead of pointing them towards something away from them is a fascinating act of inversion of the gaze. Of course, what we capture is not only ourselves. Rather, every capture is a picture towards the representation of some desire. We strive for the perfect selfie like every chisel is a step toward the imagined form. We're looking for representations of ourselves, for whatever it is we'd like others to see in us. And you, how do you take your selfies?
The index finger is an indication of identity, at least for our devices and bureaucracies. This finger is so essential, in fact, that a life without it would certainly feel different, as many social and cultural systems are based upon its use for self-identification and identifying others through the simple gesture of pointing. This finger fulfills the double function of making myself visible to the machine, to the notary, to the cops, to my phone, and to whomever or whatever needs or wishes for me to answer the very difficult question of who I am, and of making the others visible by asserting their existence. Pointing is a way of acknowledging the other's existence. It says, 'yes, you are' and 'there it is'. Just like that, I exist and the world exists. The complementarity of self and world is revealed through the index finger, maker of worlds.
With a mouse, the position of your hand is translated into a bidimensional plain. The act of pointing at the world is transformed. You're now pointing coordinates on a screen. Your gestures are expanded and the mouse takes advantage of your fine finger movements. Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, thought of computers as augmentation devices. They could augment human intellect beyond the confines of its limited memory and calculation capabilities to unravel complex systems and information. The mouse was one of these first inventions he used to translate thought into movement into planes. Once again we witness the magical transformations: Your hand's movement - circular, precise enough, but not always, and continuous - is now a series of successive steps: up, up, left, left, up, left, down, click, right click. You're now communicating with the machine.
The shortest and mightiest finger, sometimes used to support one-handed typing on our smartphones. In a rather awkward position, the pinky finger acts as a stand, a fleshy lectern where a dent starts to form over time. It's a pseudo condition called 'smartphone pinky' and, as with many other pseudo conditions, it might be more a product of social media virality than an actual medical reason of concern. Be it the 'smartphone pinky' or the 'text neck', devices physically change our bodies as they become extensions of ourselves and disappear into the background of automated behaviors. Now we don't see ourselves or our devices, we're just seeing through them, looking back at ourselves.
The ritual fingers. These connect us more intimately to predigital technologies and customs, to writing machines and wedding ceremonies. Although no one learns mechanography anymore (and I certainly don't use my ten fingers when using a keyboard), there are correct placements for each of the fingers that map to each of the keys. The ring fingers are the custodians of the 'S' and 'L' rows, as they are usually called. Like opposing poles, as if magnetic fields that hold letters and words together, they stitch isolated bits one in front of the other and create meaning out of electricity. That's not so different from a ring symbolizing a particular kind of social tie when you think about it. Meaning is created out of electromagnetic pulses and air vibrations, embedded into rings and words in magnificent, magical transformations.
The coordinate system can be translated into a myriad of interfaces and use cases, like the joystick on a game controller. Often used to look around or move around, the joystick lets us participate in a world or reality that is separated, but parallel to the one our own embodied selves experience. While we explore these different worlds, a different self also emerges: Time and everyday responsibilities are suspended in favour of other objectives and timelines. We let the game suspend our everyday self, the one represented in our index fingers, and enact new, sometimes surprising. aspects of ourselves. How we wished sometimes to stay in the game, moving around with our thumb, the perpetual continuity of the experience halted only by our physical limitations: Tiredness, hunger, repetitive motions, cramping of the hand. We detach and back again. Our thumb goes back to gripping and our eyes to the all-too-material walls.
Fortunately, we don't have to settle with our thumb to grip things. We also have our middle fingers, and with the press of a button in a VR controller, we can grip things. This time the world is further apart from our own. We are still in the world, only our senses are elsewhere. Our bodies have been stripped of their physicality. Although we move our hands and fingers, is it really our body the one we're moving? We reach the paradoxical notion of having to move our bodies outside for these to be reflected inside the virtual world, or as Jaron Lanier puts it, we are inverted, the machine is the mirror image of sensory perception.
Which is, then, the more abstract experience? Maybe everything is the other way around. Navigating across a screen with mice, writing with keyboards and moving through a world with a joystick is the more abstract experience. Maybe VR is the more real one.
One common use of this finger in the West is to make promises. Technological advancement is itself a promise. Immaterial and always resting on future actualizations, it assures people that things are always going to be better with than without. Vannevar Bush, instrumental to some of the Second World War's most important - and deadly - technological developments, lays out such aspirations, such promises, on a device called memex, in which a machine would retrieve any material that the user wanted in an instant, much like modern computers. The promise was to emulate the human mind and augment their memory. Now, the body is also augmented, traversed and turned into bits. A continuous stream of information. The promise of technology is also the promise of betterment, of calculation and datafication of sensory experiences. We leave at last our bodies behind, down there. The haptic experience of the world is useless. Forget touching and counting with your hands, seize the promise of your newfound incorporeal experience.
As it seems, our hands are being liberated once again after millions of years of bipedal motion and tool creation and use. With smart-everything, voice commands, AR and VR-glasses, and bodiless forms of intelligence, we have freed our hands once again. We've gone to the tools and back. The techniques of the tools are transformed into techniques of the body. Our fingers, this first calculator, become less important as they disappear into the background of floating, immaterial information. Our own cherished digital technologies become a-digital. They are still expressed as ones and zeros but have been disentangled from their more material qualities. Supercomputers are being invented that can be in quantum states, at once zero and one, and yet generative AI is ironically terrible at making hands.
Perhaps some bodily involvement is still meaningful and necessary, at least to understand what hands are supposed to be for. There are a million verbs to describe their actions. In our hyperdigital world our digits are being left to motions in the air and badly generated representations of them. Maybe this freedom of movement is not freedom as such when their haptic qualities become meaningless. Maybe it is only by looking at them once again that we can really grasp the ways in which our technologies make us ever more free, ever more distant, attached or disentangled from our own realities.