LEUCHTTURM1917, purveyor of fine notebooks, has the motto 'Denken mit der Hand' -- 'thinking with the hand'. This is very much how I think. There's only so much I can accomplish in my head before it becomes recursive and looping or just overly linear, and my mental buffer fills up quickly. There's a marked difference when I can sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and thrash things out on paper. It feels sometimes that I can't think clearly -- expansively and productively -- without that.
This is technology. It can feel strange to stick that term to what feel like quite basic things in comparison to the heights of high tech in which we live. But I'm obsessed with it. (And bags. And chairs.) Who would I be if I didn't have access to abundant and disposable writing materials? (Leaving aside for a moment the vast webs of other things that make that meaningful to begin with, like mass literacy or easy access to an abundance of received, asynchronous knowledge.) If an apocalypse were to come, and make paper scarce, how would that change me? My brain?
This is technology, and where technology meets the self. I can say the same for my computer keyboard, the suite of software that I use, the arrangement of things on my desk. I have learned to use and rely on them. I have learned to think with them, and if I am thinking with my brain as well as these things, then what is that except an extension of the boundaries of the self?
This idea gets more attention right now in the context of collaborative AIs or centaur pairings like chess, and it's more manifest with the ways our high technology can interface with the body. It's certainly not a new idea -- a cursory search of 'we are all cyborgs' reveals a wealth of thought and writing (and isn't the very fact that I can reach into the aether for that information with the barest of efforts part of my point?). But I think it has been true for a very long time.
(The taxonomy of when, precisely, that starts seems potentially more confounding. Is there a distinction to be drawn between tool use and being a cybord? Do clothes count? Cooking? Those were, I think, the ur-technologies which made us who we are, and we would more or less die without them. )