Buzz Aldrin’s first footprint on the Moon

My father stood barefoot on an elevated plexiglass platform. Underneath him, a mirror contraption was directed at his soles, which a young man in a yellow uniform was fiddling with. After having properly inspected my father’s plantar arches, he motioned for him to step down and to follow him to the treadmill which had been equipped with a video camera pointed towards my father’s feet.

I was in Sweden, in a sports shop, and my father was undergoing a ‘running gait analysis‘, which would ensure his feet to be matched with the perfect pair of Nike shoes, fit for his gait, posture, and foot shape.

Our feet are as personal as our fingertips. Humans can recognize with astonishing accuracy the differences between female and male gaits when these are but dots on a computer screen, and given the attention it’s been given in recent years, the future of biometrics may very well lie, not in fingerprinting or iris scanning, but in gait detection methods.

If you can put the soul on the sole in the living, when it comes to the dead, a footprint can, ”in a sense, [be] like putting flesh on the bones” – according to John Harris, an anthropologist with the Koobi Fora Field School of Rutgers University regarding the 1.5 million year old footprints discovered in Northern Kenya this past month. In moulding itself to that Homo ergaster‘s foot, the mud not only perfectly preserved its shape for posterity, but in a sense also its identity, its individuality, onto the earth’s surface.

1.5 million footprint from Kenya

Just like ergaster’s footprints, we too are desperately seeking to brand the world’s skin with our singularity, and shape its mud to our measure. Long gone are the days when telling consumers they can “choose the colour of their car, so long as it’s black” was acceptable. We are biometrically unique creatures, with singular strides, fingertips and eyes, and as such we want the world cut to size, we want our singular feet fitted with cushions tailored to our singular gaits, and we certainly want our plastic trinkets imbued with our uniqueness.

Transforming our surroundings and our bodies on the basis of ‘just because we can’ has been a human signature since our dawn. High status humans have since long been modifying their bodies (often in painful ways) to assert status and power, by altering their skull shape, shaving their teeth, incrusting them with precious metals, or by painting their bodies with permanent colours. All in an effort to establish and advertise their singularity to the world. And now that there are 6.76 billion of us crawling about, there is nothing more appealing to the powerful and the average Joe alike than the prospect of ‘customization’.

While the modern upper crust gets diamong encrusted cellphone covers, and stainless steel tyre rims with clocks built in, the commoner gets the distilled and affordable version of the ‘bling’, the core element behind the glitter that trickled down the echelons of social strata: the luxury of the ‘tailor-made’ object. ‘Custom made’ is the new black, and in order to fulfill our need to express our uniqueness, we bend the world to fit our absurd whims and uniquely shaped egos.

Engraved iPods, custom designed shoes, personalized ring-tones, or smaller simpler gestures, like choosing the colour of our cars, choosing their features, the texture of their seats, picking the cover of our Macbook, the layout of our website, the background image of our Twitter; these are all ways for us to satisfy our need to fingerprint our surroundings, so the world knows who we are…. And so that we too know who we are.

In an era of necessary mass-production, of standardization and templates, we are desperate to break out of the chain line. We don’t want the ‘one size fits all’ shirt, we want to be our own icons of singularity and sport that custom designed T-shirt with a hand picked print and slogan.

But it’s not just the outside world we are interested in, for our singularity runs skin-deep. From trinkets to our flesh, from our bones to our genes. Our genome is the single-most personalized element about us; and this is our next target. If the future of biometrics lies in gait detection, the future of pharmacology and art lies in gene sequencing. We are but a few steps away from our cures being custom-fit to our genetic makeup; all the while multicoloured versions of our own genome can already be made to order, to be put up in our living-rooms for our guests to see. At last, we have grasped what makes us truly special and have projected it into trinket-heaven in the hopes of finding ourselves in the process.

DNA portrait by Dna 11

… But have we?

What we fail to notice is that it is precisely this quest for our uniqueness that makes us ‘more of the same’. Even our customized bagatelles are just mass-produced pre-planned, straight-off-the-mould, variations of the same. Yes we can choose,  personalize and customize, but always within the boundaries pre-defined by our mass-produced world. Customization itself, is a product of mass-production catered to the masses. From footprints to genome prints, we are living in a ‘mass-customization’ era, where sameness is sold to us sugarcoated in ‘customize me’.

… So while my father’s truly singular feet bounce off the earth on a not so custom-made pair of Nike shoes that support his truly unique gait, what really should be setting him aside from the rest of humankind are 23 pairs of another kind. Yet even our genome, that epitome of our oneness, that thread of biometrically unique material, is the one we have been mass-producing the most as the standardized template for all of humanity for the past 200,000 years.