Returning to Haraway
There are certain pieces of writing I return to when thinking about our relationship with technology. Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” published in 1985, is one of them. Despite being nearly forty years old, it continues to offer insights into how we understand technology’s role in our lives.
Haraway used the cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism, as a metaphor for understanding identity in an increasingly technological and scientific world. Her central argument was this: because the traditional boundaries we’ve relied on are breaking down with the rise of STEM, computers and factory automation, a tenuous new order is emerging, blurring the lines between human and machine, physical and digital, natural and artificial, gender and biology, moral and immoral. Many women in academia resisted the political push for STEM, concerned about the impact on the humanities. This was critical stuff in the mid-1980s, especially in a global (and academic) context of collective civil rights struggle across very different coalitions, amid the science and all of its implications. She wrote it as a salvo appealing to fellow academic feminists not to be so skeptical of new and emerging computer technology that they lose on emerging opportunities. To her, the implication of these new technologies meant new political landscapes and platforms for discussion and iteration.
Haraway challenged the either/or categories that dominate these debates: online versus offline, human versus machine, authentic versus artificial, even good and bad. Instead, she proposed we’re already living in a world of hybrids and overlaps and contingencies and compromises, where identity and experience are shaped by our relationships with technology and science and capitalism rather than existing separately from it. Whether you wear glasses, take daily medicine, strum a guitar, drive a car, or regularly log into a device for work or leisure, our lives are heavily augmented by layers of tech already. Your cyborg self is already here. We are already deeply technical creatures, living in concert with machines.
Haraway invites us to dabble in the Matrix, to take off your trench coat and stay awhile, to see what it feels like in the moral relativism and ambiguity. Within this web of complexity lies a lot of opportunity.
Tl;dr: the cyborg metaphor is a permission structure and a thought exercise: Instead of asking if or whether to accept tech, she asks you to consider something more pragmatic, how your cyborg self might use and shape technology to assert your particular existence, politics and interests across the network. This is an if/then that is simultaneously empowering, cynical, dystopian, ironic and futurist, but allows us to set aside some limiting binaries and narratives when thinking about the specter of new technology.