While I still go back to Haraway’s “Situated Knowledges” for the argument that every view comes from somewhere, these days, the writer I read most closely on technology is Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom.
\nHaraway asks where a knowledge claim is standing, while Dr. Tressie asks who pays for it. Lower Ed traced how for-profit colleges sold credentials to audiences the rest of higher education had shut out. In a TikTok mini-lecture on AI, politics, and inequality, she carried that analysis forward using Daniel Greene’s “access doctrine,” which holds that the answer to economic inequality is more skills rather than more support, and which universities facing their own precarity have leaned into. Audrey Watters and Ed & Class both wrote it up.
\nHer March 2025 Times column argued that the fantasy appeals to risk-averse organizations because it promises control and oversight. Neil Selwyn’s notes on the column apply it directly to educational AI.
\nHer question fits my work life better right now while AI begins to show up in procurement, policy and training decks, and her ongoing attention to pedagogy keeps the conversation tied to what happens between a teacher and a student. I read Haraway for the epistemology and Dr. Tressie for the current evidence of how it plays out in real classrooms.
\n", "date_published": "2026-09-25T09:43:11-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/two-steps-forward-one-step.html", "tags": ["Education","AI","Platforms","Donna Haraway","Tressie McMillan Cottom"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/14/gender-power-and-ai-wrestling.html", "title": "Gender, Power and AI: Wrestling for the soul of the network, again", "content_html": "Stanford’s Clayman Institute ran a virtual panel this morning called “Gender, Power, and Artificial Intelligence,” with Safiya Noble (UCLA), Catherine D’Ignazio (MIT), Angèle Christin (Stanford), and moderator Genevieve Smith, a Clayman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. The panel applied principles from feminist tech studies to the current moment, and covered how gender norms get encoded in data and reproduced by AI systems, and discussed whether the technology has real capacity for equitable design and implementation at scale.
\nNoble’s argument throughout is that the governance conversation has gotten too high-level and universalizing while the actual outputs of these systems have profound day-to-day consequences for specific people today. She named the role of AI in the recent gerrymandering of Louisiana and Indiana as examples, and called for tripling down on long-term social science research about AI’s impacts. She also pointed out that philanthropy is retreating from feminist academic and organizational work because that work originates from the same dynamics that critique philanthropy itself, precisely at a point when this research is sorely needed. A lot of money is moving in AI, and very little of it is funding the people best positioned to study how it impacts everyone downstream.
\nD’Ignazio was asked directly whether feminist generative AI at scale is possible. Her answer was no, with caveats, given who owns the technology today and the current emphasis on profit motive. She suggested it is more important to consider how to organize around our relationship to technology, and how we might approach questions of profit and ownership, policy and decision-making, and data and tech governance.
\nShe provided an example of a reasonable use case by walking us through a project from her Data + Feminism Lab. The example is documented at length in her recent book “Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action,” where her team partnered with activists who scour news reports to document the gender-related killing of women and girls, including cisgender and transgender women. The lab built a very lightweight AI-based approach that streamlines the scanning and identification of news stories as possible cases to include in their project, supercharging their work (note: very similar to how the NYT uses AI to analyze data for reporting). In this example, the AI’s job is task-scoped, democratically co-determined with the people who use it, and small. Smith picked this up: there is an idea baked into the current LLM moment that AI must scale to make it marketable, and the alternative is using purpose-built models that are right-sized against a body of work.
\nChristin spoke at length about how embodiment is one of the primary focuses of feminist theory, and how AI perpetuates the “disembodied” illusion of technology, and how this dynamic shows up in everything from the marketing to UX to user comprehension. This spoke to my thoughts on how the single-interface design of LLM chat reproduces Haraway’s “god trick,” knowledge that presents as universal while concealing the specific and situated position it comes from.
\nThe parallel I kept returning to, listening to this, is one I think about often with my own cohort of early bloggers, women who grew up alongside the rise of the internet — and then the rise of ad tech. The internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s was being shaped by several camps: writers, students, information architects, and user-centric researchers who saw it as an information access network and a space of possibility; entrepreneurs and opportunists who saw it as a channel for marketing, monetization and extraction; and a smaller boycott camp that wanted to limit and refuse the whole personal computing and digital revolution altogether.
\nIt was generally considered weird to be a girl on a computer or a woman on the internet — so weird that many of our peers didn’t recognize us at all — and we were there anyway, making stuff, witnessing, learning, advocating, producing, influencing. So when I watch some of my old peers, many of whom are professional writers and academics today, treat LLMs as a question of refusal rather than a condition to engage with critically, I worry we are abdicating a responsibility at precisely the moment when our technical and rhetorical expertise applies. Their refusal has good logic: user-centric researchers and communities engaged extensively with the early internet and the extractive camp won anyway, so why expect a different outcome here?
\nBut Noble’s work on algorithmic bias attributes that failure not to engagement, but to the institutional and financial disadvantages that user-centric approaches operated under relative to gargantuan commercial interests. David and Goliath. That gap does not close through abstention. Understanding the trade-offs around tech, producing knowledge and analysis that does not depend on investors and marketers to frame the platform and the questions, requires presence. Refusal cedes so much ground.
\nOverall, the recommendations from the panel were practical. Noble called for people with capital (and the political will to spend it) to consider how to put money toward socially responsible research and development. D’Ignazio called for alternative funding infrastructure outside of venture capital logic, and pointed at European digital sovereignty models as worthy of consideration here. She also gestured at the popular AI Skeptics reading group as one current example of mad-and-commiserating-as-organizing that is creating safe psychological space for people to talk about AI and its tradeoffs. Christin’s recommendation was community organizing, on the grounds that LLMs are unpopular with a lot of people who feel there is no space to say so, and that finding those spaces is itself worthy because it provides shared language and awareness of others’ knowledge and experiences.
\nPersonally, it was refreshing to hear reflections on the work (and the feelings) of being inside institutions that are being reshaped by AI, and being responsible for some of how that reshaping gets communicated and absorbed. I’m thinking about the incredible value of interdisciplinary governance, and how the commitment to governance is a specific position, and all the margins to consider.
\nFurther reading:
\nCatherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein, Data Feminism. The foundational text on applying intersectional feminist thinking to data science practice.
\nCatherine D’Ignazio, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action. Extended case study of the grassroots data activism project D’Ignazio described on the panel.
\nD’Ignazio et al., “Feminicide and Counterdata Production.” Research paper on the counterdata methodology behind the femicide tracking project.
\nD’Ignazio et al., “Data Feminism for AI.” Conference paper extending the data feminism framework to questions specific to AI systems.
\nSafiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression. Noble’s study of how commercial search engines reinforce racism and sexism through their ranking systems.
\nDonna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988). The original essay where Haraway introduces the god trick and the case for situated, embodied knowledge against the view from nowhere.
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-14T19:59:40-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/14/gender-power-and-ai-wrestling.html", "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","Gender","Platforms","AI in Practice","Essays","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/07/one-of-the-tricky-things.html", "content_html": "One of the tricky things about consumer AI tools like Claude and Gemini is that the experience varies widely depending on the person using it, and it’s not always clear why. I have spent a lot of time learning the tools so I can advise on them in my work, and this variance of experience has become a frustrating part of the deal.
\nI manage a team of writers and creatives at work, and we are expected to be familiar with the tools, despite complex and sometimes hostile feelings about the political and environmental implications of this sector. That’s quite a pickle, organizationally, managerially. Borrowing from Haraway, I thought, okay, what if we take these tools seriously as a team of writers and creatives and put our professional standards up against them?
\nAmong other exercises, I did a couple of comparisons on my team that help create discussion around the “plausibility” question. People dismiss LLM outputs as being merely plausible answers, rather than accurate or factual ones. And that’s correct; they are, and that’s the design. In many cases, plausibility is fine. Take Wikipedia, for example, which we understand to be a pretty good source, a plausible source, unless you’re writing a formal paper requiring original sources.
\nI digress. Ultimately, we needed to understand together that LLMs are not a WYSIWYG tool and talk through the implications.
\nI asked everyone to run the same paper through their LLM of choice, prompting it for a plain language summary. We then copied and pasted it into a shared doc, and compared and contrasted for discussion. Upon discussion, we had several takeaways, including that they were all similar in spirit but sometimes varying wildly in style and approach.
\nKnowing that algorithms are responsive and not static, we did it again later in the day and copied and pasted our outputs into the shared doc. We compared and contrasted the difference between AM and PM. Again, it was similar in spirit but varied in style and approach. Some changed dramatically. One team member whose morning summary had been jokey and conversational received a much more staid and serious version in the afternoon.
\nAt the time, I asked Claude to explain the variance: “Even with the same prompt and source material, LLMs don’t produce identical outputs each time. This is by design — there’s a degree of randomness (called “temperature”) in how the model selects words, which means each run produces a slightly different path through the text.”
\nAnyway, this got our gears turning on how (and whether) to approach LLMs as a team and as individuals and led to good group discussion. (It’s important to create space for criticism and critical approaches here.) It also gave us more confidence as a team responding to this new layer of complexity in our work, and helping our professional contacts and peers think about how to approach the tools and when and whether to use them. There will be tasks where AI-based tools are “good enough,” and tasks where they are not.
\nThe swirl of mystery and speculation around this sector has people up in arms, and it’s useful to have approaches that give people firsthand experience and to see how the experience works for others. The god trick of the singular interface turns out to be a bear for navigating it in the workplace, where our work is foundational, prosocial and specific.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-07T20:48:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/07/one-of-the-tricky-things.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Digital Rhetoric","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/this-new-report-from-anthropic.html", "content_html": "This new report from Anthropic is depressing at best, as it tries to measure which employment sectors carry the most exposure around AI expansion into the economy. In short, the tech is likely to impact two groups the hardest: educated professional women, and young workers for whom the career ladder will never materialize. In a right-side-up world, this would change the political dynamics of any policy response considerably. In this one, I don’t know.
\nAnthropic’s positioning here is curious, very god tricky. They are claiming the mantle of responsibility and transparency while predicting an inevitable end nobody wants, that they’re also selling as a service.
\nI still think much of the forecasting is oversold – the tech performs well in optimized environments, and last mile issues are a perennial concern in any engineering venture because the practical world is non-optimal. Time will tell, and there are big incentives in play. But the hunger and animus around the forecast feel bad.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-06T00:36:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/this-new-report-from-anthropic.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/04/i-have-pretty-strong-feelings.html", "content_html": "I have pretty strong feelings against the use of AI around military operations, based on my hands-on experience with the tools. When the tech’s creators say the tech isn’t ripe for warfare, that’s strong feedback. And I agree, with the risks and implications around trust, marketing and hallucinations, it’s not even really ripe for the consumer marketplace, much less drone warfare. Whether or not artificial intelligence tech should be used for war is, of course, at the root of Haraway’s thesis, which we like to noodle with around these parts.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-04T13:50:26-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/04/i-have-pretty-strong-feelings.html", "tags": ["AI","AI Policy \u0026 Law","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/27/second-wavers-in-tech-and.html", "content_html": "Second wavers in tech and engineering talked a lot about the “god trick” of presenting knowledge and information, particularly around math and science, in a way that suggests its objectivity is eternal, immortal, unknowable. Work by Safiya Umoja Noble and others extended this lens to Internet search and architecture, finding that the search algorithm was never neutral, instead it was a series of business decisions wearing neutrality like a costume, creating a customer service experience. LLMs take that same trick and compress it further.
\nIt’s an old idea, and one I’ve been drawing from while I tinker with Claude, which is purportedly the best in the game. The “god trick” is baked right into the AI interface: one input, one output, an authoritative-seeming answer, offered without named perspectives behind it, trained on text produced overwhelmingly by a narrow demographic who has historically had access to both literacy and publishing, by programmers and new media drawing from the same well. Smushed together, it gives the impression that consensus exists where there are in fact many, many loose ends.
\nI increasingly find it annoying that even “good” AI outputs seem fixed on phrases like “key,” “core,” “exist,” “actually,” “never,” and possibly the worst sentence structure of all time, “it’s not X, it’s Y” — and I’ve begun to recognize how LLMs work like autocorrect for phrases and ideas, drawing from ranked search sources first before fanning out to more obscure sources, trying to determine and assert what’s important to me, a user known by demographics and data. It feels like a big linguistics machine, which is pretty cool in some regards, but also aggressively semantic. The math doesn’t always work to connect me to what I want to find because I am situated in my individual context in ways LLMs are not able to understand, with my memory, in my body, with my unique experiences, which shape and translate meaning for me as I interact with the world (and the web).
\nAnd so for you, in your body and memory and experience. An LLM can approximate the outputs of an experience without having access to the experience itself. Sometimes this is useful, sometimes it’s reckless.
\nOverall the dynamic reminds me of the famous scene from Good Will Hunting: Claude is a smart kid, and he’s never been outta Boston.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-27T16:20:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/27/second-wavers-in-tech-and.html", "tags": ["Tech","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/26/mckenzie-wark-for-verso-books.html", "content_html": "McKenzie Wark for Verso Books on Donna Haraway, in 2015: “Creating any kind of knowledge and power in and against something as pervasive and effective as the world built by postwar techno-science is a difficult task. It may seem easier simply to vacate the field, to try to turn back the clock, or appeal to something outside of it. But this would be to remain stuck in the stage of romantic refusal. Just as Marx fused the romantic fiction that another world was possible with a resolve to understand from the inside the powers of capital itself, so too Haraway begins what can only be a collaborative project for a new international. One not just of laboring men, but of all the stuttering cyborgs stuck in reified relations not of their making.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-26T16:43:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/26/mckenzie-wark-for-verso-books.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Gender","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/18/there-are-many-hyperbolic-essays.html", "content_html": "There are many hyperbolic essays on AI going viral this week. This essay gets into some of the emerging politics around AI in the United States and how they map onto electoral politics, and is irritated with the American left’s approach to AI.
\nI agree on one angle, that as a cohort, abstaining entirely from new tech is a bad approach.
\nHaraway (obvs) suggests we stick with the trouble, that sometimes our very presence in the room is what’s required to trouble existing narratives, and that it’s important that share what we learn back to our people at home, whatever that means in our context.
\nFor me: I spend a lot of time at work translating technical ideas and projects in an institutional voice, but on nights and weekends, I’m explaining the ins and outs of the internet to my working class friends and family. Increasingly, I’m asked to explain LLMs and AI and how it relates to their needs around business, the news, entertainment, and as a legal aid.
\nThe “cyborg’s mark” is a metaphor for writing, our duty to translate, and the inevitability of translation through experience. Perhaps staying with the trouble allows us to articulate our experiences in and around the science in ways that both advance our interests and that keep our communities safer. For those of us who straddle multiple worlds, translation is a responsibility.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-18T03:07:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/18/there-are-many-hyperbolic-essays.html", "tags": ["AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI Policy \u0026 Law","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/08/my-undergrad-experience-in-college.html", "content_html": "My undergrad experience in college really shaped my approach to the internet. I was an English Education major at the time, in the early 00s, when the internet was around but mostly the wheelhouse of scholars and nerds. I was a nerd, learning code as a vehicle for writing, primarily to amuse myself and my friends.
\nThe English department was an embattled unit within a school within a college of a STEM-centric university whose administration was perennially annoyed by the Humanities and their writing requirements. One of the English department’s survival tactics was to grow their approach to technical writing, getting deep into the question of how technology changes, shapes and shifts reading, writing and literacy. Thus they organized loosely around an emerging field called “digital rhetoric.”
\nFor a time this was the top rhetoric and composition program in the field, populated by scholars from scrappy programs. My closest mentor, an English PhD from Wayne State in Detroit, studied race and gender representation in video games and how programmers (particularly Black and trans programmers) write themselves into existence through code, design and other aesthetic and storytelling choices. Outsiders had a really hard time understanding how this work belonged in an English department, but ultimately, she was focused on the question of authorship and how the author is projected throughout her work, a classic literary debate. She treated video games as texts and gamers as an audience, an approach that foretold many things about our current political era.
\nIn this space, “digital” doesn’t just mean content on a screen. The concept is more complex, including social, cultural and rhetorical dimensions, in addition to shifts through time. Digital “texts” and practices exist on a continuum with print and other media, rather than in isolation, transforming how persuasion and communication work, both separately and together.
\nI took all these lessons and ran with them. This is where my approach to the internet is situated, and there are a few truisms that I learned from that time and era that further position my writing and approach.
\nWriting and code are fundamentally the same thing in digital contexts. Both are systems of symbols that create meaning and action through semantic rules. The line between “content” and “container” blurs in digital spaces. A blog post is the copy on the page – and it’s also the metadata, the responsive design that adapts to different screens, the accessibility markup that makes it readable by screen readers. Each of these elements is written (coded) and each carries rhetorical weight and communicates something to the audience, intended or not. If you understand these relationships, you understand how the internet works as a social and information system.
\nThis convergence of digital and material amplifies the concept of intertextuality, the idea that all texts reference, respond to and build upon other texts. In the classroom, intertextuality often focuses on plays and novels, and explores how authors speak and refer to one another’s work over time. In music, this is the study of sampling and referencing and why.
\nIn digital environments, intertextuality becomes literal and functional. Code libraries reference other code libraries. Websites link to and embed other websites. APIs allow different platforms to communicate and share data. A single digital text might pull content from multiple sources simultaneously – a Twitter embed, a YouTube video, a Google Map – creating a networked document that exists across multiple platforms and authors. Virality builds rhetorical velocity through layers of meaning being added by individual users in real time, creating new texts and contexts through iteration and sharing.
\nKnitting patterns are technical writing in its purest form. A pattern is a set of instructions that must be precise, unambiguous, and reproducible, the same goals as any technical document. Pattern writers use specialized notation (K2tog, SSK, yo) that functions like code, compressing complex physical actions into standardized symbols that individuals interpret using sticks and string. The pattern must account for different skill levels, anticipate common errors, and provide enough context for the knitter to understand not just what to do, but why.
\nGood instructions and an able translator may result in a wearable delight: a sweater, a scarf, a cozy and colorful pair of socks. When a pattern fails the result is the same as failed technical documentation: confusion, wasted time and an unusable product. Piles of string. Dumb, useless sticks. It is an incredibly strong reminder that technical writing isn’t confined to manuals and protocols. It exists anywhere complex processes need to be communicated clearly and consistently so others can replicate results – including in your granny’s yarn basket.
\nSo that’s how I learned to knit. Digital rhetors link physical practices to digital ones to illustrate highly conceptual ideas about writing and social networks. And one reason why digital spaces like Ravelry deserve recognition as thoughtful, functional social platforms is that this link between conceptual and material is made explicit in the digital knitting community. Designed for information sharing among a particular audience, decisions about information architecture and community management reasonably cascade from the mission, so Ravelry has remained a reasonably healthy community experience for most users despite its massive size and sprawling discussion. It remains an example of positive social dynamics online, unlike its behemoth competitors.
\nOne major takeaway from Haraway’s work is the importance of rejecting binary thinking around technology and science. This approach aligns with other humanist and feminist perspectives that foundationally believe technology is by, about, and for the human experience, thus providing new and novel sites for political struggle. This gave people frustrated by tech a permission structure for interacting with technology rather than avoiding or abstaining from it entirely.
\nIf these questions of knowledge and power remain central to technology, we want the people making those decisions to share our values and interests, and to be in the room when decisions are made. This argument is ripe for various challenges, which is why it was such a provocative starting point for cyberpunks and cyberfeminists alike.
\nWe let public and private live alongside each other without rigid boundaries about professionalism and polish. Your serious professional work could sit next to a meme, which could sit next to a picture of your cat, and none of it diminished the other.
\nThis was an intentional acknowledgment that people are multifaceted, and that the digital spaces we inhabit should reflect that complexity. Putting the personal and the real alongside the artificiality of digital communications builds a relationship between the viewer and creator in ways that carefully curated, brand-managed presences just can’t (also: yawn).
\nVulnerability, humor, expertise, horror, scholarship, and joy coexist, as in real life.
\n", "date_published": "2026-02-08T17:19:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/08/my-undergrad-experience-in-college.html", "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/16/affinity-as-an-organizing-principle.html", "title": "Affinity as an organizing principle", "content_html": "Reading this blog post by a political scientist explaining the problem with our fractured information landscape, and how calls for more information and media literacy are not likely solutions:
\n“In short, decades of research have demonstrated that our political beliefs and behavior are thoroughly motivated and mediated by our social identities: i.e., the many cross-cutting social groupings we feel affinity with. And as long as we do not account for this profound and pervasive dependence, our attempts to address the epistemic failures threatening contemporary democracies will inevitably fall short. More than any particular institutional, technological, or educational reform, promoting a healthier democracy requires reshaping the social identity landscape that ultimately anchors other democratic pathologies.”
\nAs always, this drives me back to Haraway’s cyborg, a useful metaphor for thinking about our political, environmental and social tangle and how it butts up against emerging tech and science. (In Haraway’s context, it was the rise of STEM as a driving force in academia at the dawn of the computer age.) Bagg’s argument lands in familiar territory for anyone who’s wrestled with the cyborg metaphor. Both reject the assumption that better information alone will save us from ourselves, whether from context collapse or the dualisms (binaries, heh) that structure how we think about technology, nature, humanity and politics.
\nBagg arrives at something parallel from political science: We trust information that affirms the groups we belong to. (Business and marketing, for what it’s worth, tell us the same thing from a slightly different angle: you’re most likely to convert on a recommendation from a trusted friend. The next best thing in our current media landscape: a trusted influencer you identify with, which is why TikTok increasingly feels like QVC.) The problem isn’t that people lack access to truth, it’s that they’ve lost affinity with the experts, institutions and collaborative practices that produce expertise.
\nBoth perspectives point toward the same conclusion: you have to recognize shared affinities through the slow work of creating conditions where people want to trust each other across differences.
\n", "date_published": "2026-01-16T16:55:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/16/affinity-as-an-organizing-principle.html", "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Platforms","Essays","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/05/why-emphasis-on-literacy-writing.html", "content_html": "Why emphasis on literacy, writing, reading and the canon is always politically prescient. Also why the cyborg’s mark remains one of my favorite metaphors.
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-05T18:12:04-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/05/why-emphasis-on-literacy-writing.html", "tags": ["Writing \u0026 Language","Donna Haraway"] }, { "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/01/returning-to-haraway.html", "title": "Returning to Haraway", "content_html": "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 forty years old, it continues to offer insights into how we understand technology’s role in our lives.
\nHaraway 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. The world order was undergoing a remodel, the guys were designing the game board for the next era, and she worried that refusal meant catastrophic and strategic losses to research, creating the cyborg metaphor to challenge her cohort to consider her angle. 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.
\nHaraway 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.
\nHaraway 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.
\nTl;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.
\n\n", "date_published": "2025-11-01T12:11:00-05:00", "url": "https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/01/returning-to-haraway.html", "tags": ["Gender","Platforms","Essays","Donna Haraway"] } ] }