Taking into account the colonizing character of the human domus (0.24, 8.4), it is rather unsurprising that the entry point of the paradeisos into the digital world took place in nature. In 1964, during the International Expedition to the Galapagos Islands, a group of scientists began to apply the new discipline of telemetry (the remote measurement of physical magnitudes) to the study of the native animal populations of the archipielago. Among these specialists, physicist, biologist and electrical engineer R. Stuart MacKay was especially insightful about the potential these technologies offered for the understanding of animal behavior in their natural habitats.

The use of a radio signal, says MacKay, 

from a transmitter, in or on a subject, to carry information to a remote receiver for recording allows flexibility of movement and permits disturbance-free exploration of otherwise inaccesible parts of the body without the subject even being aware of the measuring process…the methods leave the subject in a relatively normal psychological and physiological state, and do not interfere with the continuation of normal activities.¹

The technological intervention of the biological substrate implemented by MacKay expanded the scope of data collection techniques—which until then had only been carried out in artificial conditions—throughout the natural world. This new technological reach is an “extension” from the anthropocentric point of view, but from the biological point of view it is a “contraction,” a reduction of the ways in which nature (which of course includes humans), can perceive itself. MacKay’s telemetry experiments are a new iteration of the extension of the domus and of human dominance (0.24, 0.26, 7.11) that has now begun to envelop what remains of alterity in the world. An enclosure of the zoē on the part of the bios that focuses on the strictly quantifiable.

Note that the most recent invasions of media and technology into the domus come from sciences such as anthropology (9.9) and bio-telemetry, which aim to study human and animal populations in their natural habitats; an indication that life understood as zoē is essential to the current movement of things. Seen in this light, it is not surprising that what happened to nature would also eventually happen to the human household, which in our time must begin to be understood as the anthroposphere.²

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1. R. Stuart MacKay, Bio-medical Telemetry, 18-23. ↩︎
2. The musician and mathematician Jurij Moskvitin defines anthroposphere as: “the world of human relations, direct and indirect, of whatever kind in which all humans live and breathe, containing and consisting of all structures that may be said to govern the actions of human beings.” (Jurij Moskvitin, An Essay on the Origin of Thought, 11). (Jurij Moskvitin, An Essay on the Origin of Thought, 11). ↩︎