Today the professor kept asking us the question: “Why can’t we choose to sell ourselves into slavery?” and I honestly could not answer. I don’t know why it’s wrong. I just know that it is. Indentured servitude is dehumanizing and I can’t imagine it every being ‘voluntary’ because even just saying ‘voluntary indentured servitude’ is an oxymoron, but he kept asking us ‘what if?’ questions that were hard to answer.

We also talked about how technology could potentially be undermining people’s divided sense of self. There is a private self, and a public self. I honestly am having a hard time conceptualizing the whole ‘sense of self’ thing that he keeps talking about in class, but I feel like every time he starts to rant about it I start to understand a little more. I’m waiting for the day I’m sitting in class and it all of a sudden clicks for me and I finally understand it. It’s just really hard for me to think about myself and the way I think, it is kind of mind boggling. Things have become instinctual to me that I know aren’t natural; walking on the right side of the sidewalk, crossing my legs when I sit, going to the bathroom sitting down on a toilet- these are all things that people have to be trained to do. I literally never think about them because it’s second nature to me to behave the way I do, which means that technology has affected the way that I think, behave, and live my life in more ways than I had previously thought about.