Most species of animal interact with the world in a direct physical sense. In order to manipulate their prey, predators, mates, offspring and shelters to their ends they must rely wholly on their own bodies. It is only by bodily contact with the objects of their lives that they survive.

A few species, including Homo sapiens, have learnt to use intermediate devices called tools. These species wield their tools, and the business ends of their tools affect the world. Humans may be alone in using tools as sensors as well as effectors. The simplest form of sensory tool may be the blind person’s walking stick. The world acts upon the stick when it is moved around, and by the vibrations and movements transmitted to the other end of the stick the blind person is able to form a spatial representation of the world as prodded.

At some stage in their evolution, tools became complex. By this I mean that they developed both effector sub-systems and control sub-systems of their own. Prior to this stage, the tool simply translated a human’s effort into something smaller, more distant, more powerful, or more reliable. But in the new phase the human did not have to put effort in at one end (such as tightening a screw or pulling a lever), but instead could issue a command of some kind, which would itself then initiate an action. For example, the engagement of a gear allows a windmill to turn its millstone. The effort of the operator is unrelated to the output of the machine. Instead, it simply permits the machine to work.

Later, as the complexity increased, the controls of machines were grouped around the operator, and consisted of both effector and sensor types. Thus were born control panels, dashboards, switchboards, and keyboards. Now, not only were humans often separated from the objects or materials that their machine worked on, but they were further insulated from the machine itself, by the control interface.

The process of intermediation has continued even further. The latest development is the digital interface, which has dispensed with the need for physical control, and has replaced levers and switches with a means for issuing information to the machine through a medium that translates it from a human-understandable form to a machine-readable form. The advent of the information age has enabled a complete separation of the machine’s effector parts from the human. This is called ‘fly by wire’. The physical laws that govern the operations of a machine do not apply to a digital human interface, and so a new kind of unreality has become real. It is the representation of machines.

Many machines now manage themselves, the human simply stands by to react if something unforeseen happens. The next stage might be to remove the human from the process completely.

O B Hardison wrote of this, and other related phenomena in an intriguing book called Disappearing through the skylight. The cover note says, ‘Today nature has slipped, perhaps finally, beyond our field of vision.’ The thesis of the book is that we have, in many aspects of modern life, created nested layers of representation, and cemented our dependencies on them. Our world is now a world of information or messages about the exterior world that our animal cousins still scratch and bite at.

The digital interface was debuted on computers, and has since spread to many other electronic devices. Around the world the same basic machine may now be found in several stages of development. The old mangle-topped washing machine may look advanced next to the scrubbing board and bowl, but it now shares the market with the electric washing machine, and the push-button washing machine, and, in Japan, the washing machine controlled from its own touch-screen. It is not that Japan is the only place where digital interfaces and other kinds of world-distancing intermediate systems exist, it is just that Japan has more of them per square metre, and loves them with a depth and madness not yet seen elsewhere.