We think of humans, animals, and machines as being entirely separate entities, but are they really? What if science isn't at all antithetical to nature? What if people are really just nodes in a network? What if we thought of technology as meaningfully linked to feminism rather than simply being a vehicle for further enshrining patriarchy?
These are just a few of the easy breezy questions Donna Haraway takes on in her canonical 1985 essay, A Cyborg Manifesto. "When Haraway says she's a cyborg, she's not claiming to be different or special," writer Hari Kunzru observes. "For Haraway, the realities of modern life happen to include a relationship between people and technology so intimate that it's no longer possible to tell where we end and machines begin." If this sounds mind-bending now, you can only imagine the kind of reception Haraway received when she first started articulating these ideas. Since the 1980s, the longtime professor of the history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz has been churning out theories that have had a heavy hand in shaping conversations around new technologies as they burst onto the market and into our lives.
In his profile of Haraway, published in WIRED just over a decade after her manifesto, Hari Kunzru pays homage to her impact on the philosophical underpinnings of the tech world. In fact, Haraway's ideas, though they can be abstract and complicated and, yes, strange, have been meaningful far beyond the parapets of academia. Kunzru, for instance, has since become a successful fiction writer, penning a number of novels and short stories that seem meaningfully connected to Haraway's work. "Technology is not neutral," she tells him during their interviews. "We're inside of what we make, and it's inside of us. We're living in a world of connections—and it matters which ones get made and unmade."
Do you buy Haraway's theories? From the vantage point of 2023, does all of this sound groundbreaking to you, or do you feel like we've more or less heard it all before? Let me know what you think in the comments below the story.
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حبيبي ليس يعدله حبيب *** ولا لسواه في قلبي نصيب حبيب غاب عن بصري وسمعي *** ولكن في فؤادي ما يغيب يا حبيب ...
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