Why be interested in cyborgs?

Well I am at 8000 feet, looking at a quiet fire flicker behind its glass window. I had a memory: coming to California for the first time in 1976 as a graduate student at Stanford, I landed in a house with two fellow grad students in Atherton. I was lonely and missed my friends and felt like if I heard "have a nice day" one more time in my present noir sensibility things could get ugly. So I walked to a terrific bookstore in Menlo Park (no longer there, sadly), lost myself in titles and authors, and then walked in the chill twilight to a restaurant with a fireplace. I got some food and sat next to the fire and began to feel better...and then this guy came up and TURNED OFF the fire. I was stunned. I was now seriously in California (fires in New England in 1976 tended to be, well, fires, involving something we called "wood").

I don't thing the guy turned to me and said have a nice day, but he might as well have.

That was 1976, right around the time Pohl was writing Man Plus about cyborgs going to Mars, and Martin Caidin was writing Cyborg, the novel that became the basis for The 6 Million Dollar Man. "Nature"is more and more controlled and controllable; the shock of discovering this where you didn't expect it makes you consider where else the order of the "natural" is subordinated to the order of the technosocial, so that technology becomes our nature and the natural world is always already massively hyphenated by human technologies and effects.

Tomorrow I'll get on a ski lift and go up a mountain and look out over a world of snow and generators, wonderfully engineered ski boots and forests of dark green pine, houses like toys seen from on high and a lake that hides its pipes and effluents and oil slicks and compromised biota. And I'll wonder how, even if humans wanted to, could we strike that balance between our manipulation of the earth's resources and complex systems, and the sustenance of those resources and systems.

So right this minute I have two books in front of me: Gregory Benford's Beyond Human: Living with Robots and Cyborgs, and N. Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman. Benford's book is written in a clear and lively fashion, something like the voice and style I'm reaching for in my own writing; Hayles' book is a powerful, dense examination of cybernetics, of literary representations of cybernetic organisms and their ilk, and of informatics, defined as

the technologies of information as well as the biological, social, linguistic, and cultural changes that initiate, accompany, and complicate their development (Hayles 19).

I'm going to leave this post with a question: why should we care that much whether we are becoming cyborgs, or whether robots and/or dematerialized human bodies begin to populate a changing posthuman landscape?

The answer has something to do with cybernetics' obsession with notions of control. The answer also has something to do with what I am calling "machine time," the notion that as we interact more, and more closely, with all sorts of boundary-breaking technologies, we begin to run at machine paces, and several machine paces at that (the pace of a car when we drive our exoskeletons around; the pace of packets flying down the alleys of cyberspace when we drive our laptops /they drive us; and so on).

And we should care partly because for good and ill we are leaving a world that I (born in 1954) can barely recall; much will be forgotten about that past, and the focus on how we are changing into cyborgs, mundane and otherwise, is partly a mirror for how we were, the kinds of control previous humans desired and executed. We were always partly made by our tool use; we have always been slightly crazy monkeys, open to the idea that the magic in the cave painting connected to the juju we felt running at the prey, and connected as well to the spear or bow in our hand. In a wildly more complex world, what counts now as the spear? As the prey? As the cave painting? And how is this analogy no longer very apt?