Becoming the Borg: how wearables quietly assimilate the self

The more we let devices optimize us, the less we trust ourselves — until the line between decision and suggestion is all but erased.

As a lifelong Star Trek fan, I’ve always been fascinated by how the show reflects — and even predicts — our world through speculative storytelling. Talking computers, tiny communication devices, and holographic environments were once ideas that felt like distant fiction. But perhaps the most unsettling idea I’ve begun to witness is how, metaphorically, we’re becoming more like the Borg.

For those who may not be Trekkies, the Borg are among the most relentless antagonists Starfleet has ever faced — a cybernetic collective that invades civilizations and assimilates individuals into a hive mind. They don’t conquer with malice, but with cold efficiency, convinced they’re helping by erasing what makes you human.

Their power lies not in fear, but in making the idea of choice irrelevant. Once you’re inside the hive, there’s nothing left to resist. As the Borg mantra goes, “Resistance is futile.”

If you’ve ever silenced your intuition to obey a gentle buzz from your wrist, you’ve already taken the first step towards assimilation. It’s not as dramatic as a mechanical arm or a red laser eye, but the principle is the same — autonomy surrendered to the system.

The more we hand over decisions to devices that monitor and guide us, the more we lose touch with the instincts that once defined us. What feels like progress often becomes something else — a quiet trade-off between convenience and self-trust.

But today’s wearable doesn’t arrive with force. It comes as a friend. A motivator. A health guru who never sleeps. It won’t shout or demand — just nudge. Suggest. Whisper that it might be time to move.

And like a fool craving approval, you comply — grateful that something seems to care. It’s all very convenient — until you realize you haven’t made an unsupervised decision in weeks.

When your brain gets outsourced to a wristband

The appeal of wearables isn’t hard to understand. Life is chaos, the body is confusing, and we’re stuck in a loop pretending it’s progress. So we outsource.

We let the device remind us to stand when we’re drowning in emails. We ask it how well we slept instead of checking in with ourselves. We allow a heart rate chart to determine whether or not we’re stressed — and if it says no, then we’re not, even if we feel like we’re dying. The device knows better.

Of course, there are real benefits — especially for those managing serious health risks. For example, a retired man in New Jersey was woken up in the middle of the night by his Apple Watch warning him that his heart rate had dropped dangerously low. He felt fine — no symptoms at all — but ended up needing a pacemaker. According to his doctor, without the alert, he might not have survived. In cases like that, the trade-off is worth it for some.

But that kind of outcome can obscure the cost. We pay with our attention, our agency, and the gradual atrophy of instinct. The more precise the data becomes, the more uncertain we become about what we actually feel.

There’s something quietly tragic about needing permission to rest, or a digital thumbs-up to trust our own bodies. The wearable didn’t demand that power — we handed it over. And we even pay extra for the privilege.

Surveillance disguised as self-improvement

At some point, surveillance became a wellness feature. You don’t have to wear a wire anymore — you can wear a ring that listens to your pulse, your sweat, your sleep.

You can stream your biometrics into the cloud like it’s a morning playlist. This isn’t privacy invasion — it’s optimization. Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves. The Borg never needed to hide their control. Our tech overlords don’t either — we do it for them.

It’s tempting to believe you’re still in control — that you can stop anytime. But stopping now means going dark. And going dark isn’t rebellious — it’s suspicious. The world is built on metrics, and the absence of data doesn’t make you free — it makes you unaccounted for. No steps, no sleep, no stress readout? You might as well not exist.

The algorithmic collective

The beauty of the Borg is that they didn’t just replace your body — they replaced your mind. Everyone was wired into the same consciousness, speaking without words, thinking without individuality. It was grotesque in fiction. But in practice, it’s something closer to a shared dashboard.

Your wearable learns from you, sure — but mostly, it learns from others. It optimizes your life based on what millions of other people are doing. You’re not an individual. You’re a data point swimming in a statistical sea, and your “goals” are reverse-engineered from collective averages.

You close your rings because others did. You pace yourself against strangers you’ll never meet. You’re nudged into a behavioral pattern not because it’s yours — but because it’s common. This isn’t the Borg of titanium implants. This is the Borg of invisible compliance. No neural jack required — just a software update.

Convenience is the most beautiful cage

The genius of the modern wearable is that it asks for nothing you weren’t already willing to give up. Who needs to listen to their body when an app will do it better? Who needs to cultivate discipline when you can gamify it? The wearable doesn’t demand anything. It doesn’t need to. You’ll comply because it’s easier than resisting.

In Star Trek, the resistance was heroic. In real life, it’s exhausting. Try ignoring the buzz from your watch. Try leaving your wearable at home. Try spending one day without checking in, logging, syncing. You’ll feel the absence like phantom limb syndrome. Like a part of you is missing.

The elegance of soft tyranny

No one forces you to obey. There are no punishments. Only nudges. Gentle reminders. Passive prompts. We live in a new kind of dystopia — one that flatters us, supports us, tells us we’re making healthy choices — all while shaping those choices from beneath the surface. There’s no need to coerce when you can persuade. No need to dominate when you can incentivize. The best kind of control is the kind that feels like a favor.

As Aldous Huxley warned us in Brave New World:

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

The future is already wired

Wearables will only grow more intimate. Glasses. Implants. Neural links. Eventually, there won’t be a device at all — just a service. You’ll interface with the collective through your biology. And it’ll feel so smooth you won’t remember when you had to press buttons to be understood. The tech will become the self. And when that day comes, the only question left will be — who will be in control of your life?

Because by then, it won’t be you.

The last choice

Here’s the darkest part — you get to choose whether or not to surrender, and somehow, it still doesn’t feel like a choice. We didn’t wake up and decide to become cyborgs. We just wanted to be a little healthier. A little more efficient. A little less anxious. And so, step by step, feature by feature, nudge by nudge, we handed over the steering wheel.

No need for an invasion. No need for assimilation chambers or mechanical limbs. The machines didn’t come for us. We went to them — wrists first.

Welcome to the Collective.

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Becoming the Borg: how wearables quietly assimilate the self was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.