Cyborgs are "Proximate and Contingent." Pass it on.

Let me explain what I mean when I say that cyborg relations are always proximate and contingent.

First let me give some examples of cyborgian relations:

An athlete on steroids.
An athlete on blood pressure meds.
An accident
survivor with an artificial leg.
A wheelchair bound news reporter.
A commuter.
The civil rights coalition of the early 60’s.

Numbers 3 and 4 are perhaps the most obvious, and 1 and 2 are a logical extension, since they merely entail a different form of advanced technology. Let me focus on the last two.

The civil rights coalition of the early 60’s was an odd conflagration of old lefties from the 30’s (Pete Seeger’s friends), MLK and his followers, the NAACP and their members, black radicals and their followers, Jews, and middle-class white kids who believed in the idealism of the GI generation, i.e., their parents. The poster children for this has always been Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, three young civil rights workers, two Jewish, one Black, who were murdered in 1964. The story of discrimination waged against Jews is very different from that waged against Blacks, but there existed a clear commonality of interest in opposing all forms of discrimination.

What happened to this coalition? The Arab/Isreali war of 1967, for one. As a group, Ameican Jews backed Isreal in great numbers. African Americans—owing in part to the Nation of Islam movement, but not only—were much more likely to see Isreal as an aggressive, imperialistic force.

I don’t know if this schism could have been avoided. I do know that the coalition was proximate and contingent, not forged around a “naturalized” identity.

By contrast, when black women, in the seventies and eighties, often began to see that their interests didn’t always rest in supporting the political/social/economic interests of black men or white women, they were criticized, ostracized (and critical OF) those groups, precisely because they weren’t backing their “natural” allies. No identity has been more technologically created than that of “Black American,” to the extent that it is often considered as a “natural” identity.

Most commuter’s probably don’t see themselves as cyborgs. I do.

This year, 2007, we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that book which celebrated the power of the automobile, by featuring a new American archetype, the cyborgian centaur--half man, half car. “See the USA in your Chevrolet,” the post WWII generation was told, and we did!-- Or they did, I wasn't there. You want to be in Denver instead of NYC? In four days you’re there. Mexico City? No problem. San Francisco? Three more days.

“It’s not just your car, it’s your freedom,” my generation was told, and not without honesty. Thanks to my car, I live in a small, rural area surrounded by farms, though my work has nothing to do with farming. I have almost 1.5 acres, and next to me is a tiny, tiny pond that attracts all kinds of pleasant wildlife.

Thanks to our cars, millions of Americans live miles from their work, to a notable increase in their individual quality of life. This is a fulfillment of the man/technology promise. And the blowback has been incalculable.

 Every ten years, our roads kill a population roughly that of Miami, Florida, or Oakland, CA.
 The infrastructure of our cities has been neglected.
 Public transportation is woefully neglected.
 The infrastructure of our country is decaying. It is simply too large to maintain; witness the bridge collapse in Minnesota. Bridges collapse every week.
 We are a nation addicted to gas and oil.
 Are foreign policy adventures as a nation have been driven by the need to secure access to oil.

I haven’t mentioned carbon emissions, the loss of farmland that has been paved over, or the steady decline of songbirds to feral cats who follow humans to the country, but you get my point, or. It is not population growth that has presented these problems. It is the lack of population density, and lack of planning. Without cheap abundant automobiles, some of these problems never raise to the level of problem (though obviously others would rise up).

For the majority of Americans, owning a car is preferable to not owning one. Progress is measurable! For a society as a whole, though, some lesser reliance on the personal automobile would have clear advantages.


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One of the sillier ideas on the “quiz” that I responded to in my last post was the idea of transferring human consciousness into a machine.

Let’s consider for a moment what in the real world that might mean..

Let’s say we created a machine that can fool us into thinking it is human by reliably passing the “turing test.” What would this mean? That we have a machine that can fool us into thinking it is human by reliably passing the “turing test.” When you IM with it, you can’t tell if you’re talking to a machine or teenager.

Let’s further suppose that the software exists to make it mimic me or mimic you, or mimic John Wayne in terms of thought. What have really done? We’ve created a machine that can mimic you or me or John Wayne, in some way.

The illusion wouldn’t have to be very deep to be convincing. A few phrases would do it.

The idea of uploading your consciousness into a supercomputer is absurd. Your thoughts are embodied. They exist in you, in your brain, in your body. With a few drugs, though, I could easily convince you that you are having an out of body experience. Give me 30 million, and I’ll build a machine that can talk just like you and promise to keep it alive. Think about the possibilities! I’ll have your estate paying me in perpetuity!


AT&T will probably start up a business offerering this service, then sell it to a European conglomerate. Apple will have the public trust, but Dell will offer a cheaper service. An entirely new arm of the FCC will grow up and later be merged departments from health, and human services and the FDA.

And it will all be a sham, regulations designed to promote the illusion that there is a legitimate service there to be regulated. But of course, you’ll be dead. All I have to do is keep a program running, and convince the courts that “it” “is” “you.”