It is time to integrate the struggle against the invasiveness of wireless telecommunications into our anti-globalisation work. The only way I know to reclaim our thoughts and acts, heal the schizoid fragments perpetrated by expansionist systems, and reconstitute lasting communities on this Earth is for us to listen, learn, and be visible.

Alexander Graham Bell is my ancestor. My brother is named after him: Alexander Bell Glendinning. We grew up hearing tell of that notorious moment in invention history - March 6, 1876 - when Bell set up his infamous gadgetry in Boston and called out via electricity to his assistant in the next room, "Watson! Come here!"

We were then regaled with the tale of the lone inventor's tragedy: loss of rights over his creation "for the good of humanity" - and the bank accounts of the already wealthy. It's true. Bell was corraled and quartered by zealous American entrepreneurs and never even received a free phone card for what has since become the most invisible and, at the same time, most invasive instrument introduced into modern life.

You may be surprised to hear that: the most invisible, the most invasive. Your surprise is testimony to the degree to which the artifact, plus its massive supporting technologies, have become part of us: our bodies, our homes, our workplaces, our landscapes, our assumptions.

Comparative literature professor Avital Ronell wrote a rather astounding book on the subject called, of course, The Telephone Book. Touted as a political deconstruction of technology, the book penetrates our deaf acceptance of telephony, exploring and revealing three areas of concern:

1. How much the machinery defines our every thought and act
2. How its existence furthers the schizophrenia of mind/body and human/nature inherent to technological society
3. How it lays the base for the technology-constituted state

Lending our ears to the rock anthem "Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss," we are reminded that what has been invisible and invasive in the past only becomes more invisible and more invasive in the present. Amid a fanfare of glamour and fantasy, enter: the new telephone. Or better put: the digital wireless phone-pilot. In order words, telecommunications with all its satellites, microwave antennas, dishes, and towers and their electromagnetic emissions; its supercomputers; machinery of propaganda; pyramid of CEOs, scientists, engineers, technicians, marketers, sales people, producers, directors, actors, artists, film crew, chemical clean-up crew, secretaries, janitors; and ... its cricket-chirping cell phone. To understand this "new boss" we might ask the same questions Ronell asked the "old".

How does the new wireless technology define our every thought and act? For survival, the human psyche is built to mirror its environs. We are made to think and act in harmony with what surrounds us, and for 99 percent of our evolution, what surrounds us has been wilderness and its human component, nature-based community. We see this mirroring in the fluid, non-ego-based personality of indigenous peoples and in their worldviews which give shape to human possibility in terms of nature's unfolding. We find a parallel mirroring in the technological world. Mental disorders from dissociation, anxiety, and narcissism to post-traumatic stress, schizophrenia, and multiple personalities provide disturbing reflections of an environment erected beyond the realm of human scale and ecological sustainability to the fragmented shape of cyber-mechanization.

The reflection is everywhere. Here's Jamie Lee Curtis popping a discrete wireless out of her gown at dinner parties. Hers is an artifact that encourages you to believe that at any time you can hook up with anyone and have a presence anywhere. And indeed you can. Kind of. At least you can make a stock trade at Merrill Lynch headquarters in New York from a rainforest in Brazil. The promise of such seemingly limitless possibility, against the profundity of the fragmentation that permeates our very thought and act in techno-corporate society, is seductive indeed.

The pain that lies behind the seduction is driven deep into our shared unconscious. In its place denial or, if you will, deafness appears. There is deafness to the very connection and rootedness our psyches, and our ecologies, expect. There is deafness to the lack of connection and rootedness we endure. There is deafness to the rampant social and psychological problems that result. And there is deafness to the biological effects of the technology. The truth is ear-splitting. You and I, along with all the other living beings on the planet, now exist within a planetary microwave oven. It turns out that the non-ionizing radiation emitted to produce wireless telecommunications causes far more bioreaction in living beings than do, say, television waves or household electrical wires. Studies published by government, corporate, military, and independent researchers link an array of illnesses with the electromagnetic frequencies that emanate from both handsets and towers: immunological deficiencies, brain tumours, cancers, high blood pressure, deterioration of the blood-brain barrier that protects the body from bacteria and viruses, leukemia, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, sleep disturbances, fatigue, miscarriage, infertility, and, curiously, deafness. Research also shows illness, infertility, and death among farm animals, wildlife, and plants living within the sphere of microwave towers.

Acceptance of such an outrageous predicament comes down to banality: if you use a cell phone, you think everywhere-nowhere telephones not only symbolize our disconnection. By their existence they add to the possibility of our extinction.

How do wireless communications further the mind/body, human/nature split?

If we approach this question with anything close to the phenomenal sharpness Avital Ronell brings to her analysis of the pre-wireless telephone, we will note that the fragmentation of consciousness created by the disembodied voice on the old black box is only amplified by the cell phone. We no longer have conversations with phantom voices merely in the TV room or at the office. This new experience of non-visual, non-sensual, and non-located relationships leads us to a heightened state of disembodiment. And a crucial question emerges: what might this condition of chronic dissociation by preparing us for?

I got an ear-full on the subject during a Public Radio International interview I shared with Marvin Minsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology's inventor of artificial intelligence. As he was expounding it's normal; if you think it's normal, you use it. Our every thought and act are then defined by the mundaneness of wireless telephony - while its inherent alienation, dreams of grandiosity, and on the social benefits of computers, Minksy informed me - with pride and certainty - that the final disconnect will be the removal of all life from Earth and replacement of sentient beings by "thinking" machines, genetically-engineered life forms, and nanotechnology.

Minsky is himself a fine example of mind/body dissociation, and his vision for the future is a fine mirroring of the separation of human from nature foisted upon us by technological society. Flying down ten-lane freeways in our computer-guided conveyances, plugged into devices biological effects are refused. Instead of listening for the sources of this tragedy, we fashion our dreams from the images on TV and revel in a corporate culture loud with a violence that mirrors the apocalyptic terror we harbor deep down. Our everywhere-nowhere telephones not only symbolize our disconnection. By their existence they add to the possibility of our extinction.