The Biometric Selection Engine

If the “Petabyte Age” of information ends the long reign of Consciousness, what will take its place?

The Biometric Selection Engine(TM) is designed to supplement attenuated attention within today’s information-rich environments. The Biometric Selection Engine(TM) reroutes attentional circuits using biometric indexing of our total sensory attunement to an ever-changing world. The Biometric Selection Engine(TM) refines complex cultural artifacts and processes, including books, movies, the Internet, and even our realtime, embodied sensory engagement with the external world. As a flexible platform encompassing multiple modes of biometric feedback, such as GSR, heartrate, thermal imaging, and cranial bloodflow, the Biometric Selection EngineTM can be adapted to any situation of attentional overload where massive yet personalized compression of information becomes necessary.

Who, today, has the time to read the ever-growing corpus of books in any given interest area? The Biometric Selection Engine(TM) provides a powerful tool for cutting through today’s morass of information and for separating the wheat from the chaff. “Biometric Books” feeds Giorgio Agamben’s What is an Apparatus? through the “Biometric Selection EngineTM.” Since the output of this process preserves only that information which sufficiently stimulates selected sub-attentional bodily processes, what results is a much reduced version of the original text that is specifically attuned to readers’ personal biometric indexes. Unlike “CliffsNotes” and other rival selectional tools, the “Biometric Selection Engine(TM)” manages to balance the need for massive informational attenuation with a heightening of the personal stake in information. In this way, it hones attention using sensory attunement to the world in a way that, paradoxically, bypasses attention as it has been traditionally considered.