I don’t need a think tank to tell me why I won’t be getting a brain chip.
I just have to look at my mouse.

I’ve gone through the whole evolution: the clunky wired bricks that needed a dedicated port, the wireless models with a fat USB dongle and batteries that died at the worst moment, the rechargeable versions that insisted on their own cables, and now the Apple Magic Mouse that charges like a fainting goat, you lay it on its side and wait while the port on its belly sips power. Somewhere in there, Logitech made a genuinely superior touch mouse that’s now a ghost: discontinued, eternally dependent on a dongle that can vanish into a carpet forever.

That’s what “innovation” really looks like when you’re the one actually using it. Not a straight line to the future, but a junk drawer of adapters, dead receivers, orphaned drivers, and designs that were briefly perfect until the company killed them. Every few years, the old device becomes a liability; the manufacturer gets bored, pivots, or decides you’re due for a new form factor whether you wanted one or not.

Now imagine that entire circus stapled to your nervous system.

When Silicon Valley and its media chorus talk about “merging with AI,” they act as if hardware is some timeless artifact, a final evolutionary stage. In practice, it’s more like the mouse: a series of slightly different shells wrapped around a software ecosystem that keeps moving without them. You’re not becoming a higher being; you’re volunteering to be legacy hardware. Your brain has to last decades. Their device is built for product cycles.

It’s not just the mouse. My own life is a museum of dead formats. I had a Walkman that ate tapes, a Discman that skipped if a bus hit a pothole, MP3 players that needed proprietary software to sync, and now a phone that swallowed all of them whole. For years, I had a landline with its own rituals: answering machines, long‑distance rates, cords you twisted while talking. Now the cell phone is the only line left, a slab of glass that quietly assimilated the music players, the cameras, the alarm clocks, the address books. The hardware kept mutating; the idea, carry your media and your connections with you, moved from shell to shell.

That’s the real pattern: the shell never lasts, the function migrates. A brain chip is just another shell being sold as a sacrament.

So when someone solemnly warns that “there will come a time” when I decide whether to put a chip in my head, I think of the mice in my drawer, the Walkman that felt immortal and now would puzzle a teenager, the landline that vanished without a funeral. I’m supposed to believe that this specific generation of silicon, from this particular startup, will be the one piece of hardware exempt from the obsolescence cycle? That this thing will age better than my cassette player?

If you want to know why I won’t merge my brain with their latest gadget, it’s simple: no piece of hardware in my lifetime has earned that kind of trust. The future doesn’t live in the shell. It moves on without it.