Would be a fantastic way to outfit a bar or lounge. Severed spines with an e-interface for content access. Maybe some kinda laser pointer based lookup.
In K W Jeter's excellent dark cyberpunk novel "Noir", intellectual property theft is viewed as literally killing people by removing their livelihood, so copyright violators were punished by having their still-living spinal cords stripped out and made into high quality speaker cords in which their consciousness is preserved, usually presented to the copyright owner as a trophy.
"In the cables lacing up Alex Turbiner's stereo system, there was actual human cerebral tissue, the essential parts of the larcenous brains of those who'd thought it would be either fun or profitable to rip off an old, forgotten scribbler like him."
>My favorite section is the middle section where the origin of the asp-heads is detailed via McNihil’s pursuit of a small time book pirate and the preparation of the resulting trophy. The information economy did, in this future, largely come to place. As a result, intellectual property theft is viewed as literally killing people by removing their livelihood. Therefore, death is a fitting punishment. McNihil, in his point by point review of the origin of asp-heads, notes that even in the 20th Century there was the phrase: “There’s a hardware solution to intellectual property theft. It’s called a .357 magnum.”
>Actually it’s decided that death is too good and too quick for pirates.
>Their consciousness is preserved by having their neural network incorporated in various devices. (Turbiner likes to use stripped down spinal cords for speaker wire.)
>This sounds like a cyberpunk notion but, in other parts of the novel, Jeter takes a swipe at such hacker/information economy/internet cliches as information wanting to be free (McNihil destroys a nest of such net hippies) or the future economy being based on information. Villain Harrisch sneers at the notion stating that information can be distorted but atoms – and the wealth they represent – endure.
>Still, his novel is chock full of the high-tech, low-life that characterizes cyberpunk.
(I'd quote some more, but as a high-tech, low-life net hippie, I'm afraid of having my nest destroyed and getting my spine ripped out!)
K W Jetter was a good friend of Philip K Dick, and the character Alex Turbiner had some similarities and might have been based on him! From the review I linked to:
>A sort of Dick-like (in the sense of a largely ignored and prolific author of paperbacks and lover of music) author and idol of McNihil shows up in Turbiner. (Jeter wryly notes that authors were particularly “mean bastards” in regard to copyrights.)
It's ironic and fitting that PKD has been reincarnated as a robot and new versions of his mind and his work have been reconstructed by infringing on his intellectual property rights with machine learning.
