A Tangle of Wires? Maybe It’s Time to Unwind

E-mail. Cell phones. Personal digital assistants. And, of course, the illustrious PC.

We rely way, way, way too much on digital technology, and, according to the online artists at L-Dopa, we are all slowly turning into robots.

Think about it. When was the last time you actually broke out a weighty Yellow Pages, instead of zipping over to YellowPages.com? Or borrowed a friend’s bootleg tape of a Phish concert, rather than ripping a copy of the MP3 off Aimster? Can you even remember the last time you sat down, picked up a pen (or used--gasp!--a typewriter) and wrote an actual letter?

Teasing consumers about their gadget-laden lives, employees from the Bay Area-based L-Dopa, a graphic studio, and art collective Mentary are wandering through San Francisco and papering the walls and telephone poles with a mock-stern warning to adapt, unplug or die.

“We’ve been very successful in our ability to adapt to and modify our environment,” said L-Dopa founder Nik Schultz. “We’ve just modified it so much that now we’ve turned our natural environment into an almost entirely manufactured one.”

Their urban-art project, titled “You May Already Be a Robot,” begins this month and underscores what we all know to be true: Americans cannot live without their digital crutches. Luddites living outside dot-com central can check out their effort at https://www.l-dopa.com.