A Deconstructed Self: Reflections On The Frankenstein In Us – Essay

A nice weekend I am having.

I am reading Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, and Vyasa's Bhagavad Gita. These are foundational texts I have read before, and I have chosen to read them together as a thematic exploration of existentialism in the age of AI and smarter machines. I continue to stand at the crossroads of another phase of the Industrial Revolution — this time a significant one, with a trajectory and speed of advancement so striking that it poses a challenge to the idea of humanity itself.

Having not watched television for more than 35 years as part of my program of digital and media detox and abstinence, I only view documentaries as frequently as my lecture preparation demands. As a break from my hours‑long reading sessions, I watched the movie Frankenstein and a documentary on the life of rock star David Bowie — two media pieces I felt related to and that connected well with my readings of Walden, the Bhagavad Gita, and Future Shock.

I read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus when I was in my early twenties during my undergraduate years as part of my study of the Romantic tradition, alongside works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, William Wordsworth, and the illustrious Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron).

Mary Shelley's work is foundational for understanding our "future shock" in the age of generative AI and the imminent transformation of what it means to be human.

There is a certain amount of nostalgia and intellectual poignancy as I gathered these random photos to see what kind of narrative would emerge in my daily journaling (yes, I write daily in whatever form — a habit from my younger days).

These photos tell a well‑knit story of the self as it is mediated by the world outside, as I continue to experience and love life, as the rock icon David Bowie would say. Bowie embodies what the philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote about: how to live the life of an epicurean and be immersed in a Shakespearean notion that "all the world's a stage and we are merely players." In the case of Bowie, play becomes reality in his construction of identity, until he "found true love" later in life.

Fascinating analysis of the life of a man who was constantly curating himself from the time of Ziggy Stardust. Yes, "stardust" is the word Bowie was obsessed with; as we know, he was later cremated and his ashes were flown to Bali and scattered in the mountains. Brian May, Queen's guitarist (who later earned a doctorate in astrophysics and had an asteroid named after him), spoke of the "correctness" of the group Kansas when they said that "all we are is dust in the wind" as he played the song in a tribute concert to Freddie Mercury.

We are a construction of many things — whether physics in nature or metaphysics and culture. As if we cannot escape being construed by a creator, this reminds me of the theme of Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein: that the monster that is us and within us, which is also learning how to live and love, is an amalgamation of things and never an original copy of a core artifact of "human" as creation.

This notion of the construction of the self is even more problematic these days as we attempt to compartmentalize our being and existence from multiple perspectives — the self as psychological, cultural, cognitive, spiritual, and now cybernetic — moving into the realm of posthumanism and the notion of the total erosion of the idea of humanity itself.

More later, as I continue to have music of the '70s and '80s playing in the background.