Sensory augmentation challenges current societal norms and views of what is conceived as a “normal” human being. Beginning with self reflections of a bodyhacker, the author proposes an extended view onto the human or respectively cyborg body. Based on cognitive theories, it is argumented that we are already mental cyborgs. Our brains plastically restructure themselves in order to meet new requirements of the technological extended human.

In this article, the sociocultural meanings and social relations and expectations that cohere around `road rage' and serve to invest it with its particular resonance in contemporary Western societies are examined. It is argued that the combination of car and driver in the driving experience produces a cyborg body, which influences the ways in which people experience, perceive and respond to driving and other cars/drivers. But in contemporary societies the expression of such `negative' emotions is problematic and complex. (...) In this context, `road rage' is deemed to evidence loss of appropriate self-control and as `uncivilized'. (shrink)

The article proposes that the modern notion of the spiritual in art, which was theorized at the beginning of the twentieth century, although remains pivotal to the discourse of art and the spiritual, has radically shifted as a result of changing attitudes to the body–mind relations instigated by popular trends of contemporary spiritualities. This cultural tendency is demonstrated by the analysis of the networked art form of Moon Ribas, e.g., dance with earthquakes. Ribas performs a cyborg body (...) and consciousness that, as contended, could be holistically enhanced and develop a unique compassionate awareness. In addition, I reflect on two examples from my performative practice of Networked Rites that interplay with speculative metaphors, spiritual and shamanic techniques, networked aesthetic forms and technologies. The first invokes communitas as a collective, non-local, networked noetic field. The second utilizes a decision-making app as a mediating device between the body and mind for the making of a prototype cyborg noetic field instilled with auspicious resonance. The article mainly implies that spiritual art continues to evolve through technoetic aesthetics fusing emerging technologies, science and shamanic, spiritual insight. Current trends may develop into benevolent and experiential applications based on the interrelations of human and cyborg body and consciousness. (shrink)

Starting with service robotics and industrial robotics, this paper aims to suggest philosophical reflections about the relationship between body and machine, between man and technology in our contemporary world. From the massive use of the cell phone to the robots which apparently “feel” and show emotions like humans do. From the wearable exoskeleton to the prototype reproducing the artificial sense of touch, technological progress explodes to the extent of embodying itself in our nakedness. Robotics, indeed, is inspired by biology (...) in order to develop a new kind of technology affecting human life. This is a bio-robotic approach, which is fulfilled in the figure of the cyborg and consequently in the loss of human nature. Today, humans have reached the possibility to modify and create their own body following their personal desires. But what is the limit of this achievement? For this reason, we all must question ourselves whether we have or whether we are a body. (shrink)

Believing that the enterprise of constructing "artificial intelligence" transcends the bounds of any one discipline, the editors of Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds have brought together researchers in AI and scholars in the humanities to reexamine the fundamental assumptions of both areas. The AI community, for example, could benefit from explorations of human intelligence and creativity by philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, literary critics, and others, while analysis of AI's theoretical struggles and technical advances could yield insights into such traditional humanist concerns as (...) the nature of rationality and the mind-body dichotomy.The contributions include a continuation of the famous Hubert Dreyfus-Daniel Dennett debate over Kasparov's defeat by IBM's Deep Blue; Philip Agre's tracing of difficulties in AI research to the inherited tensions of Cartesian dualism; Evelyn Fox Keller's examination of the development of computer technology in relation to biology; Douglas Hofstadter's argument that thinking is more than the theorem-solving activities of AI; and Alison Adam's discussion of the implicitly male universal subject used in AI. (shrink)

In June 1931, on the eve of the invasion of Manchuria, the Japanese mass media announced the winner of the first Miss Nippon contest. Applicants were limited to rank amateurs whose photographs, and not bodies, were judged by a panel of mostly elderly men who regarded the contest as `culture work'. A second contest was held in 1934. One of the main objectives of the Miss Nippon contests was to locate and record photographically, young women whose allegedly `pure blood' and (...) ideal bodily proportions demonstrated the success of eugenics and social hygiene programs launched decades earlier. Japan's imperialist aggression in Asia and the Pacific forms the backdrop to this study on the centrality of popular cultural events and media in the state's attempt to improve the `Japanese race' through technologies of eugenics and social hygiene. The article explores the politics of blood, body and beauty, three interrelated subjects, framed by the Miss Nippon contests, that were common to the colonial project and the discourse of eugenics alike. (shrink)

Nursing Sciences are at a moment of paradigmatic transition. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the new epistemological paradigms of nursing science from a critical approach. In this paper, we identified and analysed some new research lines and trends which anticipate the reorganization of nursing sciences and the paradigms emerging from nursing care: biotechnology‐centred knowledge; the interface between nursing knowledge and new information technologies; body care centred knowledge; the human body as a cyborg (...) class='Hi'>body; and the rediscovery of an aesthetic knowledge in nursing care. (shrink)

This essay gives a situated introduction to body hacking, an underground surgical process that seeks to transform the body’s architecture, offering an ethnographic account of the affects that drive this corporeal intervention for performance artist Cheto Castellano, and later, for the author. A brief history of recent body modification movements is offered. Through these situated stories of corporeal transformation there is an exploration of Eva Hayward’s concept of transbecoming, exploring the perpetual change of the body in (...) transition, particularly in relation to posthumanistic transformations. The article closes with a speculative cyborg feminist body modification project titled 10,000 Generations Later, which explores how a subdermal archive of silicone implants stored under the author’s skin may assist her in a posthumanist transbecoming after the death of her companions species toy poodle Luk Kahlo, and perhaps even in a distant future. The author argues that this project becomes an apparatus of mestizaje between speculative cyborg feminism and significant otherness. (shrink)

A provocative work by medical ethicist James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg argues that technologies pushing the boundaries of humanness can radically improve our quality of life if they are controlled democratically. Hughes challenges both the technophobia of Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama and the unchecked enthusiasm of others for limitless human enhancement. He argues instead for a third way, "democratic transhumanism," by asking the question destined to become a fundamental issue of the twenty-first century: How can we use new cybernetic (...) and biomedical technologies to make life better for everyone? These technologies hold great promise, but they also pose profound challenges to our health, our culture, and our liberal democratic political system. By allowing humans to become more than human - "posthuman" or "transhuman" - the new technologies will require new answers for the enduring issues of liberty and the common good. What limits should we place on the freedom of people to control their own bodies? Who should own genes and other living things? Which technologies should be mandatory, which voluntary, and which forbidden? For answers to these challenges, Citizen Cyborg proposes a radical return to a faith in the resilience of our democratic institutions. (shrink)

review of Stefano Franchi and Güven Güzeldere, eds., Mechanical Bodies, Computational Minds: Artificial Intelligence from Automata to Cyborgs.

This book uses a theory of cyborg semiotics to explore the similarities between language and cyborgs in their formation, interpretation, and relationships. This intersectional theory provides a unique perspective on power and the human condition.

As new communication technologies transform everyday life in the 21st century, personal, family, and other social relations are transformed with it. As a way of exploring the larger question, "how exactly does communication technology transform love and how love is lived?" here I explore the cell phone, instant messaging and other communication technologies as electronic extensions of maternal bodies connecting (cyber)mother to (cyber)children. -/- Feminist explorations of the marketing and use of cell phones, as well as other communication technologies, have (...) largely remarked on the pernicious gender ideologies intertwined with technological innovation and application. If, however, we take seriously Haraway’s (1991) claim that postmodern humans are cyborgs, the distinction between human animals and machines breaks down in ways that invite us to revision the questions we ask about technology. Thus instead of inquiring about the oppression engendered by the production and consumption of communication technologies, here I explore the ways in which technology functions as an extension and modification of human embodiment that transforms our experiences of intimacy and our ability to create, maintain and transform loving relationships with others. More specifically, I examine cyborg mothering as transformative of loving relationships between women and children. (shrink)

This excerpt from our collective biography emerges from a dialogue that commenced when Noel interjected the concept of ‘becoming-cyborg’ into our conversations about Annette’s experiences of breast cancer, which initially prompted her to interpret her experiences as a ‘chaos narrative’ of cyborgian and environmental embodiment in education contexts. The materialisation of Donna Haraway’s figuration of the cyborg in Annette’s changing body enabled new appreciations of its interpretive power, and functioned in some ways as a successor project to (...) Noel’s earlier deployment of cyborgs in what he now recognises as a ‘posthumanising’ of curriculum inquiry. Noel’s subsequent experiences with throat cancer drew us towards exploring the possibilities that concepts such as Deleuze and Guattari’s machinic assemblage and Karen Barad’s ontoepistemology offer as a mean of thinking the meetings of bodies and technologies in educational inquiry beyond Haraway’s hybrid cyborg. Through both collective biography and playfully scripted conversations with other theorists we explore what it means to perform diffractive interpretations and analyses in posthumanist educational inquiry. Our essay also contributes to contemporary conversations about the uses of collaborative biographical writing as a method of inquiry in educational research. (shrink)

This contribution includes three selected works from an exhibition on _Cyborg Encounters_. These works deal with hybrid connections of human and non-human species that (might) emerge as a result of enhancement technologies and bio-technological developments. They offer not only an artistic exploration of contemporary but also futuristic aspects of the subject. Followed by an introduction by Melike Şahinol, _Critically Endangered Artwork_ (by Ayşe Melis Okay) highlights Turkey’s ongoing problems of food poverty and the amount of decreasing agricultural lands. It displays (...) seeds of a promising endemic plant to mitigate these problems using the seeds of the _Thermopsis Turcica_, a herbaceous perennial endemic plant. _Ecomasculinist Pregnancy_ (by Burak Taşdizen and Charles John McKinnon Bell) follows the design fiction methodology and illustrates a future scenario through a patient’s diary and the medical letters he receives during his pregnancy with an extinct sea-lion. _Polluted Homes_ (by Beyza Dilem Topdal) is a fictional art installation consisting of polychaete species evolved in time under the ecological circumstances prevalent in the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara today. These works show, that manufacturing life has consequences, not only for the human body and its physical appearance, but also, for example, for gender orders, the social structure of society, and even the environment, and thus for (re)shaping (non)living matter and their environments. This Art-Science Collection intends to provide an impetus for debate about the extent to which cyborg encounters should be taken seriously. (shrink)

Compulsive smartphone users’ psyches, today, are increasingly directed away from their bodies and onto their devices. This phenomenon has now entered our global vocabulary as “smartphone zombies,” or what I will call “iZombies.” Given the importance of mind to virtually all conceptions of human identity, these compulsive users could thus be productively understood as a kind of human-machine hybrid entity, the cyborg. Assuming for the sake of argument that this hybridization is at worst axiologically neutral, I will construct a (...) kind of phenomenological psychological profile of the type of cyborg which engages in these patterns of behavior. I follow Judith Butler in seeing this identity as the result of performance practices, which as such can be modified or replaced using other performances. Pursing one such alternative, I compose a dancing critique that “reverse engineers” the choreographies implied by these cyborgs’ survival practices. The upshot of this critique is that their movement patterns do indeed align closely to those of horror cinema’s zombies. I therefore conclude by suggesting a few possible choreographic imperatives to facilitate more enabling ways of being for iZombie cyborgs today. (shrink)

Desde que se completó la secuenciación del genoma humano, el hombre pierde su “esencia”, pasando a ser un texto interpretable y modificable: una subversión de la carne. D. Haraway (1995) ha sido una de las pioneras en el tema defendiendo al cyborg como una entidad polémica, un ciberorganismo que cuestiona, desde una cierta perspectiva de la filosofía de la técnica, –e incluso los feminismos– en la que se inscriben también Sloterdijk, Sandel. T. Aguilar, entre otros, la pretendida esencia humanista, (...) misma que queda cuestionada en torno a “lo humano” y su identidad unívoca. Se analizan derivas estéticas de Orlan, Sterlac y Kac. (shrink)

As we become more and more enhanced with cyborg technology, significant issues of law and policy are raised. For example, as cyborg devices implanted within the body create a class of people with enhanced motor and computational abilities, how should the law and policy respond when the abilities of such people surpass those of the general population? And what basic human and legal rights should be afforded to people equipped with cyborg technology as they become more (...) machine and less biology? As other issues of importance, if a neuroprosthetic device is accessed by a third party and done to edit one’s memory or to plant a new memory in one’s mind, or even to place an ad for a commercial product in one’s consciousness, should there be a law of cognitive liberty or of “neuro-advertising” that applies? This paper discusses laws and statutes enacted across several jurisdictions which apply to cyborg technologies with a particular emphasis on legal doctrine which relates to neuroprosthetic devices. (shrink)

In “Body, Cyborgs and the Politics of Incarnation,” Bruno Latour recounts the story of Professor Paul Churchland, his colleague, carrying a portrait of his wife. “Nothing unusual in this,” Latour writes. “No, except that this picture was an image produced by computed tomography, a CT scan of his wife’s inner brain, in full colour”. The image of Professor Church-land proudly showing off a full-color CT of his wife’s beautiful brain has a wonderful sense of absurdity to it, and its (...) punch line depends on the reader being jolted by the strangeness of medical imagery standing in place of portraiture—no matter how stunning the cerebellum.However.. (shrink)

En este artículo se analizan las relaciones entre arte, tecnología y cuerpo, teniendo como marco de análisis el pensamiento del filósofo español Félix Duque. En primer lugar, consideramos la concepción del cuerpo como máquina y su derivación actual en la noción de cyborg. En segundo lugar, mostramos cómo la concepción del cuerpo-máquina se hace parte del body art de Stelarc y del arte carnal de Orlan, quienes plantean el diseño del cuerpo dada su obsolescencia. En tercer lugar, presentamos (...) las críticas de Duque a estos ciberartistas y en general a los planteamientos transhumanistas y posthumanistas. Finalmente, comparamos la metáfora del «cyborg» en Broncano con la «filosofía de la técnica de la naturaleza» de Duque, poniendo de relieve la necesidad de plantear y explicitar la cuestión política implícita en el diseño del cuerpo y la «libre creación». (shrink)

The paper takes as its starting point Donna Haraway’s suggestion, “The actors are cyborg, nature is coyote, and the geography is elsewhere”. It discusses first the understanding of the cyborg promoted by Haraway as illustrating an ontological non-humanist disposition, rather than a periodizing claim. The second part of the paper examines some instances of low-tech cyborg identities, which have emerged in developing countries (elsewhere) as a consequence of development initiatives. The paper argues that the quite literal attempts (...) to develop cyborgs in such countries gives rise to developments not foreseen or controllable by the development industries. If cyborg identities are developing and minds and bodies shaped in the frictions between culture, technology, economy, and development projects and activities then what are the implications for cognitive studies. In the final part of the paper this question is considered and it is suggested that cognitive studies would do well to expand their analytical foci to take into account cyborg bodies and minds found “elsewhere”. (shrink)

Progress has reached the point where cyborg technology is leaving the sphere of mere science fiction. Whereas society as a whole formed a symbiosis with technology long ago, individuals are now starting to merge with technology as well. The effects can already be studied by looking at the examples of smartphones, computers and the Internet. The idea of ‘repairing’ humans, medical implants more sensitive than our natural, human faculties and even non-medical implants raise a lot of ethical questions, and (...) require the concept of inclusion to be re-thought. (shrink)

In this article, I argue for an essentialist account of cyborgs. This means that one condition for being a cyborg is to possess phenomenal consciousness, ‘what it feels like’ to undergo an experience. In this context, I make two related claims: (1) the metaphysical claim that it is essential to cyborgs to have phenomenal consciousness due to their being augmented human beings, and (2) the related claim that this metaphysical constraint need not apply to cyborg-like entities, which may (...) or may not be augmented humans and so might not possess phenomenal consciousness. In support of these claims, I argue that cyborgs without phenomenal consciousness would lose information-processing abilities essential to the human condition and would be better understood as androids with biological body parts. First, I briefly characterize phenomenal consciousness in the context of the Mind–Body Problem. Then I introduce the Mind–Technology Problem and claim that it is better suited to frame the relevant discussion. In a second step, I argue that phenomenal consciousness is a vital feature of the human mind as it is fundamental for practices that relate what it feels to have an experience to other minds capable of such experiences, as in the arts. Briefly, thus, I argue that, without phenomenal consciousness, there is no art, and that art involves information-processing abilities essential to the human condition. Then I describe two different kinds of entity that might be considered cyborgs in the context of enhancement, distinguishing between cyborgs and cyborg-like entities. Finally, I argue that entities that do not possess phenomenal consciousness cannot be classified as cyborgs, since without it, an essential capacity of human experience, to be affected by the expressive arts, is absent. (shrink)

This paper argues that cyborg perspectives offer real possibilities for the debate around enforced caesareans and the search for a language to encompass embodied maternal subjectivity. It is suggested, with reference to the fictional narrative of Star Trek, that cyborg figures have the power to disrupt the liberal subject and the body in legal discourse, not least because the plethora of cyborgs challenges simple conceptions of connections/disconnections between bodies. Feminist readings of case law relating to enforced caesarean (...) sections have raised questions about the notion of autonomy at the heart of liberal legalism, have argued that law is complicit with white male techno-medicine's approach to childbirth and focused upon the pregnant woman's lived experience of pregnancy. The recent Court of Appeal decision in St George's Healthcare N.H.S Trust v. S., Regina v. Collins and Others, ex parte S., where the pregnant woman's self-determination was upheld, provides a good opportunity to confront both the liberal story and the idea of connectedness between mother and unborn child. (shrink)

What is ‘biohacking’? In fact, it refers to multiple things. Firstly, it refers to ‘hacking the body’, artificially enhancing one’s own body by technology and tinkering. A good example is the ‘grinder’ movement. Secondly, it also refers to ‘hacking the biology’, aiming to appropriate the methods and objects of the life sciences for our own benefit. This is at work in ‘Do-It-Yourself Biology’, inspired by synthetic biology. Both strands, however, share the same ambition to emancipate ourselves from traditional (...) constraints of biology and evolution – but they might also share the same problems. (shrink)

This article contributes to Science and Technology Studies on vulnerability by putting cyborgs at center stage. What vulnerabilities emerge when technologies move under the skin? I argue that cyborgs face new forms of vulnerability because they have to live with a continuous, inextricable intertwinement of technologies and their bodies. Inspired by recent feminist studies on the lived intimate relationships between bodies and technologies, I suggest that sensory experiences, material practices, and cartographies of power are important heuristic tools to understand the (...) vulnerabilities of hybrid bodies. Based on an analysis of how patients in the Netherlands and the United States cope with appropriate and inappropriate implantable cardioverter defibrillator shocks, I describe how defibrillators introduce two new kinds of vulnerabilities: vulnerability as an internal rather than an external threat, and as harm you may try to anticipate but can never escape. Despite these vulnerabilities, some heart patients don’t position themselves as passive victims of faulty machines. They actively engage in material practices of resilience by using magnets to stop inappropriate shocks. I conclude that anticipating and taming the improper working of technologies inside bodies constitutes a new form of invisible labor that is crucial to diminishing the existential uncertainties of cyborgs. (shrink)

In the special section ‘Body Hacking: Self-Made Cyborgs and Visions of Transhuman Corporeality’, attention is drawn to cyborgism, a set of cultural and very personal practices of experimentation with the human body that often take place outside the confines of institutionalised technoscience. Known, for example, as ‘body hackers’, ‘grinders’ or ‘self-made cyborgs’ and engaging in unusual forms of body modification, the practitioners are enthusiasts who do not necessarily have any ‘disability’ in the conventional sense of the (...) term. They consider the body a highly malleable material, a transformable, improvable, augmentable entity. The collection of papers in this special section encompasses first-hand accounts of cyborg practices as well as intellectual reflections on their implications. (shrink)

Although the body has become of increasing importance throughout the social sciences, it has been neglected by the discipline of social policy. The aim of this article is to rectify that neglect. It argues that the connections which some have begun to make between social welfare and the body can be strengthened by reference to the figure of the cyborg. The article develops a model that can be used to explain the cyborgization of social identity. This process (...) of cyborgization is then related to contemporary trends in social welfare: the individualization of rights and the collectivization of duties which is occurring via the prevalence of surveillance technologies and the ideology of productivism. These trends signify a drift towards what can be called post-social security. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg needs to be reassessed and extricated from the many misunderstandings that surround it. First, I suggest that we consider her cyborg as an ethical concept. I propose that her cyborg can be productively placed within the ethical framework developed by Luce Irigaray, especially in relationship to her concept of the “interval between.” Second, I consider how Haraway's “cyborg writing” can be understood as embodied ethical (...) writing, that is, as a contemporary écriture feminine. I believe that this cyborgian “writing the body” offers us a way of both creating and understanding texts that think through ethics, bodies, aesthetics, and politics together as part of a vital and relevant contemporary feminist ethics of embodiment. I employ the term “poethics” as a useful way to describe such a practice. (shrink)

In this paper we consider the creative realisation of new beings — namely, cyborgs. These can be brought about in a number of ways, and several versions are discussed. A key feature is merging biological and technological sections into an overall living operational whole. A practical look is taken at how the use of implant and electrode technology can be employed to open up new paths between humans/animals and technology, especially linking the brain directly with external entities. Actual experimentation in (...) each of the different cyborg forms perhaps defines the paper’s contents more than anything else. Considered are RFID implants, magnet implants, deep brain stimulation, Braingate implants and growing biological brains in robot bodies. (shrink)

This article explores the problems and possibilities of different feminist theoretical models of identity for challenging women's symbolic and strategic positioning in the discourses and conflicts that produce national, ethnic and racialized community identities. The discussion focuses on two of the most popular alternative models to emerge within white western feminism, the nomad and the cyborg, while also considering some other suggested paradigm shifts emerging from diasporic and postcolonial feminisms. It asks how successfully these feminist alternative models of the (...) self and community identities deal with two key issues relating to women's positioning in prevailing identity discourses – on the one hand, women's relationship to questions of ‘place’, location and dislocation, and on the other, questions of female embodiment and the ways in which the specifically female body becomes both a symbolic and material target of conflict and contestation in processes of constituting community identities. (shrink)

As a literary figure or conceit, Haraway’s cyborg is kin to Dumas’ and Balzac’s flâneur. As a social science fiction, crossing and mixing categories, the cyborg is an abject quasi-body who does not fit the Enlightenment model of the political subject and actor. The ‘Manifesto’ has a geography of sites - Home, Market, Paid Work Place, State, School, Clinic-Hospital and Church - which this article updates and to which it adds the Body and the Web. However, (...) Haraway’s ‘cyborg-analysis’ directs attention to the nanotechnological scale of biotechnology. The spatialization implied in the ‘Manifesto’ is more like a surface, a site of regeneration, not a space of the body or of rebirth or the space of institutions such as the Market or School. The cyborg cannot be an Enlightenment political actor, but challenges the traditions, scale and space of the public sphere even as she carries ethical qualities and potentials for less normative forms of politics. (shrink)

One important debate between scientific realists and constructive empiricists concerns whether we observe things using instruments. This paper offers a new perspective on the debate over instruments by looking to recent discussion in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Realists often speak of instruments as ‘extensions’ to our senses. I ask whether the realist may strengthen her view by drawing on the extended mind thesis. Proponents of the extended mind thesis claim that cognitive processes can sometimes extend beyond our brains (...) and bodies into the environment. I suggest that the extended mind thesis offers a way to make sense of realists’ talk of instruments as extensions to the senses and that it provides the realist with a new argument against the constructive empiricist view of instruments. (shrink)

By examining the contingent alliance that has emerged between the computational theory of mind and cyborg theory, we discern some questionable ways in which the literalization of technological metaphors and the over-extension of the “computational” have functioned, not only to influence conceptions of cognition, but also by becoming normative perspectives on how minds and bodies should be transformed, such that they can capitalize on technology’s capacity to enhance cognition and thus amend our sense of what it is to be (...) “human”. We consider “a moratorium on cyborg discourse” as a way of focusing the conceptual and social–political problems posed by this alliance. (shrink)

This book explores the theories of transhumanism and posthumanism, two philosophies that deal with radically changing bodies, minds, and even the nature of humanity itself.

Where does my body begin? Where does it end? What is inside my body? What is outside? What is primary? What is secondary? What is natural? What is artificial? Science fiction has long imagined a future fusion of humanity with technology. Today, many of us—especially people with health issues such as autoimmune diseases—have functionally become hybrids connected to other machines and to other bodies. The combination of artificial intelligence with implants, transplants, prostheses, and genetic reprogramming is transforming medical (...) research and treatment, and it is now also transforming what we thought was human nature. Mark C. Taylor identifies this process as “intervolution” and explores how it is weaving together smart things and smart bodies to create new forms of life. Our wired bodies are no longer freestanding individuals, but interconnected nodes in worldwide networks. Recognizing this transformation overturns deeply entrenched distinctions and oppositions between minds and bodies. Intervolution reveals that we are already cyborgs, integral cogs in what will become a superorganism of bodies and things. (shrink)

The ethical commitment to democracy requires creating the public space for a rational discourse among real alternatives by the population. In this article, I argue that the Internet fails in this task on 2 fronts. Inspired by the work of Jean Baudrillard, the work argues that the Internet reinforces a structure of passive political agents through its 1-way form of communication. The Internet is designed to deliver political text, not engage the public in dialogue about the direction of collective decision (...) making. Furthermore, the ideal of democratic politics relies on the notion of the "commons" as a real space for political activity, debate, and exchange. Virtual space cannot provide a substitute. Democratic politics must have as its premises real bodies, confronting real problems, in real space. The article concludes by arguing that the Internet is a place filled with political artifacts, largely without discourse and dialogue. As such, it has the potential to undermine democratic practice. (shrink)

The scientific and political debate over whether a fetus can experience pain highlights a vital and controversial boundary for governance—the boundary of human life. I use the 2012 and 2013 US federal debates over twenty-week abortion bans to investigate how personhood is constructed in a society transformed by biomedical science and technology in the United States. Although those who support and oppose the bill take different stances on abortion regulation, each relies on biomedical knowledge and risk assessment to substantiate claims. (...) Through content analysis of congressional documents, I find that members of Congress strategically draw on biomedical discourse to manage the boundaries of bodies and construct a universal “at-risk” political subject in need of governmental protection. These findings bring scholarly debates about personhood into the era of biomedicalization by emphasizing the latent process of creating a hybridized subjectivity that I call cybernetic personhood. (shrink)

A globe-spanning investigation into the Transhumanist movement, considering the tech billionaires, scientific luminaries, and DIY body-hackers attempting to prolong, improve, and ultimately transcend the limits of human life.

Today, technological implants to increase innate human capabilities are already available on the market. Cyborgs, understood as healthy people who decide to integrate their bodies with insideable technology, are no longer science fiction, but fact. The cyborg market will be a huge new business with important consequences for both industry and society. More specifically, cyborg technologies are a unique product, with a potentially critical impact on the future of humanity. In light of the potential transformations involved in the (...) creation of “superhuman” cyborgs, ethics must be a cornerstone of cyborg marketing decisions. Businesses need to take ethics into account, not only to ensure they behave ethically, as always, but also because ethics will be an important factor in buyers’ decisions in the emerging cyborg market. This is because the decision to become a cyborg is determined, among many other factors, by ethical judgment. Our research focuses on how the dimensions of the Composite Multidimensional Ethics Scale influence an individual’s decision to become a cyborg. To test our hypotheses, we surveyed a total of 1563 higher-education students in seven different countries. The results of the survey show that ethical judgment will be a keystone in individual cyborgization. Specifically, ethical dimensions explained 48% of the intention to use cyborg technologies. The ethical analysis showed that not all MES dimensions have the same influence on the ethical judgment regarding this decision. Egoism was the most influential dimension, while contractualism was the least. These findings have important implications for both academia and business. (shrink)