[future shock] 8 theses on cyborgism

I like (most) cyborgs.

photo credit: Walraven

I like Donna Haraway, Ghost in the Shell, and talking at length about technological prostheses.

And here we are, doing just that.

This round of discussion has its roots tangled messily round Tim Maly‘s 50 cyborgs, a month of posts celebrating the term’s fiftieth anniversary, back in September. This was something Chairman Bruce described as:

‘a large clique of obviously intelligent and creative people who all more or less know each other through the Internet, and are all loosely riffing about cyborgs, and what-cyborg-means-to-them.’

Then, more recently, we had Amber Case at TED and Lepht Anonym talking about self-bootstrapping with implants. In reaction, Matthew Battles wrote a piece for Gearfuse, which M1k3y read and tweeted. Based on that piece, I had a late night discussion with Matthew about who gets to be a cyborg, which Tim Maly later compiled and annotated on Storify.

With me thus far? Good.

Next, we took it into a Google Document and – 13,000 words and two days later – found ourselves with a mammoth discussion/exploration of all kinds of nuances and discontinuities in our use of the term ‘cyborg’, with contributions from Tim Maly, Amber Case, Matthew Battles, Tim Carmody, Ella Saitta, Deb Chachra, Hilary Dixon, Adam Rothstein, and others. None of whom I have met in the flesh — something worth highlighting.

Strange and all kinds of epic.

Now, there’s a lot of these 13,000 words to leak out over the coming weeks and months, but this is something that stuck with me. Originally authored by Tim Carmody, but edited by committee — to the point where we felt we could agree.

Thus: 8 theses on cyborgism. Martin Luther by way of Steve Mann, though, if that’s the case, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to nail it to. The TED website? Donna Haraway’s office at UC Santa Cruz?

Either way, here’s what we came up with:

1. Pointing to something like cell-phone use and saying “we’re all cyborgs” is not substantially different from pointing to cooking or writing and saying “we’re all cyborgs.”
2. Cooking and writing are nothing to sneeze at! They’re important technologies that we’ve incorporated nearly seamlessly into our psychological lives and (in the case of cooking) our biological evolution.
3. Despite our long-running species enmeshment in technology, we’re witnessing the emergence of something closer to the popular techno-organic image of the cyborg, if not necessarily the original idea of either the cyborg or the broader field of cybernetics.
4. That new thing (whatever form it takes) is bigger than computers or phones or consumer communication technologies. It points to the incorporation of technological components that violate or transform the bodily/agential integrity of human beings.
5. This is happening in a way that’s partially invisible, as part of the medical/industrial/networked aspects of our societies (tooth fillings, drugs, Google Instant, etc.), and in a way that’s much more visible, more closely related to our ideas of disability, transgenderism, etc.
6. This presents a weird synthesis of the classic idea of the cyborg, the development of medical technology, the evolution of consumer technology, and identity politics.
7. Cyborgs have a troubling dual origin, which includes both mega-reliance on techno infrastructure and homesteading DIY self-emancipation. This tension will not go away.
8. Equally, this tension is nothing new. This is a tension that began in earnest during the Macy conferences in the 1940s, when cyberneticists, technologists and anthropologists began to meet to discuss this very subject.

I have a great deal of fondness for this list, even as it dodges controversy by charting a safer path. How about you? Partially-formed thoughts? Observations? Strident cries of diagreement?

Let us know.