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: the traditional boundaries we’ve relied on are breaking down with the rise of computers and automation, so a tenuous new order is emerging - specifically blurring the lines between human and machine, physical and digital, natural and artificial, gender and biology, moral and immoral, to great social outcry. Sound familiar? This was prescient thinking for the mid-1980s, especially in a global (and academic) context of collective civil rights struggle across very different coalitions. She wrote it as a salvo appealing to fellow academic feminists and scientists not to be so skeptical of new and emerging computer technology that they lose on emerging opportunities.
Haraway challenged the either/or categories that dominate these debates: online versus offline, human versus machine, authentic versus artificial, even good versus 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.
If this is so, if we are already cyborgs in a network, how does this change our relationship to morality, purity, biology? This thought exercise had cultural legs and shows up in all kinds of digital rhetorics and perspectives today.
To live with complexity, she says, you have to embrace partial and incomplete perspectives, and recognize that our relationship with technology is fundamentally about networks and relationships between people. Technology that seeks to remove people from the network thus require additional interrogation. She suggests that instead of adopting tech skepticism or tech negativism, aka doomerism, that we develop a praxis for decision making within and around these systems. That we continue to trouble the problem until we find resolution in favor of a more humane network.
Haraway invites us to dabble in the Matrix, to take off your neo-goth trench coat and stay awhile, to see what it feels like in the relativism and ambiguity. Humans inevitably adapt to use tools for survival, so within this web of complexity lies pragmatic - and transgressive - 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.