Thinking of your phone as an extension of yourself isn't crazy.

To say that your phone knows more about you than you know about you isn't an exaggeration,

it's a statement of fact. Do you remember your location every minute of every day?

Do you remember what you said to your friend last leap day at 1047 word for word? Yeah, of course not.

Hell, without photos, entire holidays would slide out of your mind.

While paperwork that tracks us has existed since papyrus without people feeling like those hieroglyphs were literally an extension of the human mind,

a phone can hold the equivalent of millions of papyrus pages.

At some point, a difference of amount becomes a difference of kind.

Since you bought it, how many hours has your phone been more than an arms reach away?

Possibly zero.

There's no other object like that in your life.

Even the choice to have someone read your mind or read your phone, if you seriously

think about it, you'd probably pick the former.

Compared to what's in your phone, your brain holds a tiny amount of information.

Much of it wrong, all of it lossy. It's easy to forget what kind of embarrassment your phone contains because it has so much you can't even remember.

As you discover when someone flips through a bunch of photos you thought were safe but suddenly discover aren't.

And while the phone now is an extension of the self, we all know where this is going.

A computer chip in your skull will eventually be as quasi-mandatory as a phone is today,

and avoiding one will make you seem Amish.

If we don't protect our most intimate digital devices as part of the self,

legally, we're going to be in some scary places in the future, because the law is a complicated

brick structure of individual laws, each resting on what came before.

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