Homo Cyborg: Fifty Years Old

Homo Ciborg: Cincuenta aos despus

Chris Hables Gray
The Union Institute and University, California, EE.UU.

ABSTRACT
While the term cyborg is only 50 years old, the process that has produced cyborgization is
much older: the evolution of the human. Humans have evolved to modify ourselves and our
environment, especially through evolving culture and the technologies it creates. Culture is part of
nature. Todays mundane i-cyborgs, military drones, intimate human-machine merging and genetic
engineering are a result of this; which in turn produce feelings of uncanniness, hubris, and fear.
Contemporary politics must take this complex dynamic into account if we are to secure a
sustainable, survivable, future for ourselves and our descendents. Social experiments such as
Burning Man are a prefiguration of the kinds of (self) conscious techno-social creativity needed.

KEYWORDS
Cyborg, cyborgization, culture, technology, politics.

RESUMEN
Mientras la terminologa ciborg tiene apenas 50 aos, son mucho ms antiguos los procesos
de ciborgizacin: la evolucin humana. Los humanos evolucionaron para modificar su entorno y
a s mismos, especialmente a travs de la cultura y las tecnologas. La cultura es parte de la natura-

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leza. De ella resultan los i-ciborgs mundanos de la actualidad, los aviones militares no tripulados,
la fusin ntima humano-mquina y la ingeniera gentica: lo que a su vez produce sensaciones de
inquietud, arrogancia y miedo. La poltica contempornea debe de considerar si estamos asegurando un futuro sostenible y vivible para nuestros descendientes. Algunos experimentos sociales como
el Burning Man son una prefiguracin de esta necesidad creativa por la concienciacin tecno-social.

PALABRAS CLAVE
Ciborg, ciborgizacin, cultura, tecnologa, poltica.

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i-cyborg
I thought it would be good to have a new concept, a concept of persons who can free themselves
from the constraints of the environment to the extent that they wished. And I coined the word cyborg. I remember he [Nathan Kline] said, Oh, that sounds like a town in Denmark.
Manfred Clynes (Gray/Clynes 1995: 47)

Fifty years ago, 1960, the eccentric Austrian-Australian-American polymath, Manfred Clynes,
created the term cyborg from cybernetic-organism. NASA was having a conference on adapting
humans for space and Manfred and his mentor, Nathan Kline, were invited. When I became a doctoral student to work with Donna Haraway in the History of Consciousness Board (Histcon) of
Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I assumed Manfred Clynes was dead.1 None of
the Histcon cyborgologists had heard anything about him for years. After I graduated I got a fellowship from Oregon States Humanities Center to research the implications of the idea of the
cyborg and began writing to Clynes publishers, asking about him. Lo and behold, he wasnt dead
but living in the same small Northern California town as Donna Haraway!
By the time I finally met Manfred, a few years later, I was quite infected with cyborgs even
though I certainly did not plan on studying them when I went to grad school. True, I applied to
Histcon because of Donna Haraways Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985) in Socialist Review but I
went to study military tech (AI especially) and its social implications. I considered cyborgs real
enough (if mainly in the future), but not central to our technoscientific condition. Donnas call for
taking responsibility for technology, not just loving or hating it, and other aspects of her analytic
drew me much more than the sf term cyborg.

FIGURE 1: ROBOROACHE (PENCIL BY JOSHUA GRAY)

Human cyborgization has extended throughout nature, ending wildness.
Whether it is domesticated plants and animals, bioengineered bacteria,
or roaches controlled through implants by teams of Japanese scientists,
the world is now our garden city, and thanks to our ubiquitous pollutants, our overheating garbage dump.

The boldfaced hunks of text are a homage to The Cyborg Handbook (Gray, Mentor & Figueroa-Sarriera, 1995),
which had the same feature.
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Studying the contemporary military changed my view. It was soon clear that the cyborg (usually called the
man-machine weapon system or just weapon) was a key aspect of postmodern war and therefore of
postmodernity (another meme I unsuccessfully resisted). While trying to understand the deep relationship
between war and technology I read many people, but especially most of Lewis Mumford and the science
studies feminists and although the insight was framed in many ways, and denied in many others, it became
clear to me that our tools and ourselves were the same.

FIGURE 2: NASA SYSTEM DIAGRAM (NASA)

Culture is part of nature. Human-machine space systems are
all cyborgs, from space suits to space stations. They are also
as natural as jungles.

Over the years I have tried to unpack just why this is. There seem to be so many drivers of our cyborgization: war, work, medicine, and pleasure. It is overdetermined. This sea change in our relationship to
technology, this culmination of the tool-machine journey in incorporation has been noticed. It has been
called the vital machine (Channell, 1991), the 4th Discontinuity (Mazlish, 1993), radical evolution, and other
things. Cyborgization is just one, very useful in my opinion, way of framing this moment.

FIGURE 3: CYBORG HERMAPHRODITE (PEN AND INK, BY BOB THAWLEY)

Culture is incredibly plastic. This image, never imagined before the artist.
Bob Thawley took up his drawing pad, has now been reproduced around the
world and has infuenced the way thousands of humans think about technoscience, sexuality, and pop culture and their complex dances. Culture is the
fastest way humans evolve.

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The human is the protean animal, modeling animal, the making and remaking animal, homo faber,
the naked ape (Morris 1980), the artificial ape (Taylor, 2010), the civilized (city living) ape,
clearly the cybernetic organic primate. We have transformed the world into an extension of
ourselves, from ecology to cybernetic organism; call it noosphere (Teilhard de Chardin, 2004),
metaman (Stock, 1993), conscious Gaia, global intelligence (Dyson, 1998) or inevitable singularity/apocalypse. Whatever you call it, it is an expression of what makes us. Cyborgization is
human nature. Not only are we all cyborgs, but also it is as part of one cybernetic organism that
is life on this planet. The pace of global human-machine integration is impossible to track.
Scientists continue to perfect infecting people with new inheritable genes, drone/human systems are replacing manned aircraft as the air dominance weapon system of terror war, new
vaccines are constantly being created to reprogram our immune systems (especially against the inevitable pandemics our recent biological success portends), the web spreads, computers (as links to
the net, as photo and text systems, as access to mass media) become even more intercompatible
and ubiquitous and tiny, nanotechnology advances arm in arm with neurotechnoscience in a quest
for perfect lie detectors, and eventually, mind reading, and mind control technologies, and so much
more.
There is now talk of saving the planet from ourselves by cyborging Gaia. The hope is that directly intervening in massive climate change consciously, instead of doing it unconsciously with our
wastes and our lusts as we have for the last 200,000 years, will turn out better. We shall see. Certainly, this will make the whole mutilation-prosthetic dance of using technology to cure the
problems of technology an integral part of our biosphere. Technoscience produces a mutilation
of nature so it is called on to craft a new prosthesis, which is a further mutilation, which then
needs new fixes.
We are attaching ourselves to a succession of smaller, more powerful, and more seductive
communication / music / calculation / memorialization technologies that become mundane parts of
our lives. These devices and our cars and our houses and our network software take over large
parts of our daily mental work, they are making us: icyborg. We want to make Google the third
half of your brain. Co-founder Sergey Brin declared, while explaining the new search feature that
guesses what the users want. (San Francisco Chronicle, Sept. 12, E10)
Dont worry about whether or not you are a cyborg. Ask instead, What kind of cyborg am I?
A cybernetic organism is any self-regulating (homeostatic) system that includes organic (living,
natural, evolved) and machinic (unliving, artificial, invented) subsystems. Civilization is a cycle of
systems: organic creating machinic to perpetuate more organic to making mixed. A cyborg can
also be a biocomputer (with memory that can die), a transgenic plant (jellyfish genes in tomatoes,
for instance), or a cockroach with electrodes in its head controlled by Japanese scientists) . Cyborgization is not limited to systems incorporating human elements, but humans perform all
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cyborgizations. Still, in many ways, human based cyborgs are the most interesting, whether it is
the fantasy of Robocop, a maimed soldier with a sophisticated prosthetic arm, a dead person kept
alive with machines awaiting organ harvesting (a neomort or living cadaver) or anyone whose immune system has been reprogrammed by vaccinations. There are many different types and levels of
cyborgization. The incorporated living elements (viral, bacterial, plant, insect, reptile, rodent,
avian, mammal), the technological interventions (machine prosthesis, genetic engineering, nanobot
infection, vaccination, xenotransplant) and the level of integration (mini, mega, meta, mundane)
can all vary, meaning that basically an infinite number of possible cyborgs exist, life multiplied by
human invention and intervention. (See Gray et al. 2010The Cyborg Database, for examples
and discussion of the range of possible cyborgizations.)
While millions use the internet, where every user is a temporary cyborg, and billions have
been immunized, cyborgization is little known nor understood. Much of the most interesting
theory is actually found in science fiction but there is also a growing body of literature from critical and cultural studies, catalyzed by Donna Haraway's famous Manifesto for Cyborgs (1985). Her
argument that cyborgization mandated a deeper engagement with the politics of technoscience and
a challenge to simple dichotomous epistemologies has resonated broadly through many fields and
disciplines. The politics of cyborgization is a subfield of its own, as in Cyborg Citizen (Gray,
2001), Our Posthuman Future (Fukuyama, 2002) and Citizen Cyborg (Hughes, 2004). There is
also a growing literature about being cyborged, the best of which are from the wearable computer
pioneer Steve Mann (2001) and the cochlear ear implant recipient Michael Chorost (2005).

The Implosion of Nature and Culture

It has taken 15 years of studying the cyborgization question for me to realize the answer is evolution. Cyborgs evolved, and by accepting this we can begin to really understand our nature, and
therefore shape our future.
The category natural is imploding with the complete technocolonization of wildness. Humans are insinuated into almost every ecological niche and biological process on the planet, either
as active shapers or through our ubiquitous pollution. The category natural is imploding with the
multiple intimate intertwining of the artificial into almost every macro and micro living system in
the biosphere.
The cultural is now fully revealed as natural. There is no culture not evolved as nature. There is
no outside to culture, it is inside nature. The speed of human evolution and biosphere domination has been extraordinary and it is increasing. Wildness is tamed; progress is now defeating
death and chance while expanding pleasure infinitely, in other words the intimate mergings of ma-

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chinic and informatic systems into humans and other biological organisms and the integration of
these organisms into vast technoscientific nets.
This relentless multiplying ubiquitous transformation is producing a great dis-ease in our culture. As death has haunted all humanity since sentience, so now does cyborgization permeate
everything we think and do. Such major transformations of human consciousness/culture have occurred before: Taming Fire, Recognizing Death, and creating Story, Tools, Music, Language,
Culture, Civilization and Machines were clearly on the same scale. Still, such ruptures are not
common and this current break with the past could well herald the end of the human in extinction
or in the proliferation of posthumanities.

Feeling Uncanny
an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are
once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted
seem once more to be confirmed. (Sigmund Freud 1919: 249)
There can be little doubt that the fabrication of the cyborg is a sign of a collective anxiety
around the ubiquitous presence of the machine. (Bruce Grenville 2001: 47)

To be human is to feel uncanny. We are home and not home with our bodies. Because of the
lens of consciousness our very nature is familiar and yet uncomfortably strange. Our models of
reality are always in tension with reality itself, as a model can never match reality that is too complex to predict consistently anyway. Even that sliver of reality we have evolved to interact most
with, the vulgar physics of the Newtonian model, of hunting and hunted at the water hole, is truly
beyond our ken. Base desires, the blood and mucus and excrement of living and the inevitable totality of death, are concealed in our daily lives but always present. So it is always there, the itch in
our mind that cannot be soothed, that feeling.
Even if we grow comfortable into the world in which we are born, that world is inevitably
swept away by relentless and accelerating technoscientific change. Our first technologies came directly from wild nature (as we did) and were intimate with it: fire, wood, stone, cultivated plants
and domesticated animals. Today we transform everything and we feel losses we do not know how
to articulate. Our almost complete alienation from wild nature, and our increasing transformation
and integration into our own creations, produces uncanny waves of fear and denial.
The fear is easily seen in the reception to Donna Haraways Manifesto for Cyborgs. It is
clear that many of its detractors have not actually read it. They rail against some text they expected
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to read, a paean to cyborgization, rather than the subtle critical analysis that Haraway wrote. As an
icon, the text has become a litmus test on cyborgization. If you hate and fear a cyborg society of
humans and machines (that is, the society we currently live in), you denounce the text whatever it
really says. If you have a more complicated reaction to cyborgization you engage it quite differently.
There are many examples of such willful readings but two of the most revealing are the Adbusters spoof manifesto and Bill McKibbens discussion in his best-selling: Enough: Staying
Human in an Engineered Age.
McKibbens reading is the subtler. He characterizes The Cyborg Manifesto as a clever argument, with appeal." (2003: 194-5) But what is it a clever argument for? For Selektion, Nazistyle eugenics, an idea he attributes to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and to Haraway.
(italics in original, p. 193) While this is the biggest leap he makes, other jumps abound. According to McKibben, Haraway finds man and woman...natural categories, but cyborgization
will deconstruct them. And, politics, he explicitly claims, is also rendered irrelevant in the view of
the cyborgologists, since Cyborgology gave up on the old ways of building a just society (the
bumper stickers, the endless meetings...) and substituted a technological end run. (McKibben
2003: 194-5), a claim that is contradicted by the text, and Haraways life as an activist.
Linking Haraway to masculinist fascism and its crude, horrific, attempts to remake humanity
reveals more about McKibbens fears than about anything Haraway actually wrote. So it is intriguing that The Cyborg Manifesto hoax promulgated by Adbusters (a slick neo-Situationist
magazine and collective in British Columbia) starts with a graphic of intertwined DNA and
swastikas. No explanation is offered, just the image. This is quite an incongruous design choice,
considering the pretense that this manifesto was written by militantly pro-cybogization thinkers
looking to convince. Even if one were to call for eugenics (positive or negative), one would hardly
do so by invoking the Nazis. The little manifesto pamphlet (without page numbers) was stapled
into the center of the Adbusters magazine, which is quite widely distributed. It is without authors,
but it starts by acknowledging For their inspiration and unswerving devotion to the spirit of this
manifesto Donna Haraway along with Howard Bloom, George Gilder, Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil, Pierre Levy, Hans Moravec, Nicholas Negroponte and Stelarc. This is quite a diverse group
with many different takes on cyborgization.
Human denial of cyborgization is everywhere. It is clear in the fantasies of the Singularity, the
rapture of the machines, which focus on the unlikely spontaneous development of artificial intelligence while ignoring cyborgization. It is obvious in the confation of robots and human machine
systems such as the war drones of Afghanistan and the repair systems for the Gulf oil disaster.
NASA, which sponsored the conference where the term cyborg was coined never committed to the
term, preferring technical language (bioinstrumentation, human-machine systems). Explain to your
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friends that they are cyborgs because they are immunized or because of the many intermittent
mundane cyborg technologies they are implicated in and most will respond with horror and disgust. This fear and denial of cyborgs is mirrored by similar feelings many have about evolution.

Participatory Evolution
For some people, evolution is too mechanistic to believe. But this is only because they dont
understand it. On closer inspection, evolution is an extremely complex process that although we
are part of we can never comprehend. It is way beyond any overall system we can use to explain it,
because, among other things, evolution is evolving. The clearest, and most important way this is
happening is through human ingenuity, the integration of organic (evolved, alive) and inorganic
(invented, machinic) systems: cybernetic organisms, cyborgs.
Evolution is not just biological, the same forces of reproduction/chance and selection/necessity
work on nonliving matter and on cultural constructions. Humans have evolved to be a transformative species. To gain reproductive advantage, to achieve the dominance over the rest of nature that
we have, we continually transform our environment and we transform ourselves. Our ability to
make mental models of the way things are and predict what may be is what allows us to imagine
the world, and ourselves, as different and to make it so.
Humans are makers of changes to nature. It seems to have started with making stories, making
culture, making sense of the world, or at least enough to manipulate it, to foster fire, to kill at a distance, to notice the powers of the moon and sun. From there, from planning the hunt and the
barbecue, it is just a hop skip and a jump to selling insurance, going to the store, and barbecue. Of
course, now there are 9 billion of us, and many of us have really nice caves and there is the car
thing and the war machines and television and satellites and vaccines and prosthetics and genetics
and
So where did we come from? We evolved. Evolution manifested us and we perpetuate it. Still,
what is evolution? There is something. It reproduces and adapts. There is selection. Repeat infinitely. Seems simple enough, but in the details of this simple process there is incredible complexity.
Darwin identified two forms of selection: natural and artificial. Natural selection is the synthesis of chance and necessity generating increasing complexity out of oneness / nothingness /
energy. Matter to particles to atoms to molecules to compounds to stars to planets and solar systems and, sometimes, life. Life, a tangled bank through time that fills the Earth.
Artificial selection is human action on other organisms. 20,000 years ago a wolf lurked by the
fire and was lured in by warmth, food, and interaction. Now we have Mexican Chihuahuas and
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English mastiffs. We have corn and roses and kittens and lemon basil. We have patiently worked
on nature to make of the tangled bank our garden.
We now see that there is also self-selection. This is obvious with germ line (inheritable) genetic engineering, but it is now clear that our own mating choices profoundly shape evolution as
well. In the last 10,000 years, self-selection has produced an incredible rate of change in the
human brain.
Chance/reproduction and necessity/selection arent simple dialectics, there is a cyborg epistemology of thesis, antithesis, prosthesis, synthesis, in different progressions. By modeling the world
we can plan not just to deal what will come, but also to shape the future by modifying the world
and ourselves. This modeling, this theorizing about the world and explaining it and trying to control it, started with each other. We are social animals and our success has been because of that.
Once we evolved culture, tamed fire, and invented tools (the first prosthesis) we were on our way
to today.

FIGURE 4: LETS PLAY PARTICIPATORY EVOLUTION GAME BOX (COLLAGE BY BROKEN DRUM)
The 2009 theme for Burning Man was Evolution. The Broken
Drum Collective of the Syndicate for Initiative created this
game about evolution as a gift to Black Rock City 2009 where
it was given away to various strangers and friends. It was designed to put the reality of evolution at the heart of peoples
understandings of where they come from, and where they
might go. Darwin identified two forms of selection: natural
and artificial. Natural selection is the blind culling of chance
and necessity (survival of the survivors). Artificial selection is
human action on other organisms. We now realize there is
also self-selection, obvious now with germ line genetic engineering but discernible in our own mating
choices, no matter how bizarre. These are the Gates into the Labyrinth of Participatory Evolution.

FIGURE 5: GAME BOARD: THE LABYRINTH

OF

PARTICIPATORY

EVOLUTION (BY BROKEN DRUM)

To Play: Pick a piece.
Choose a gate. Roll the dice.
Move the piece.
Take the cards if indicated. Obey. Or not. The game was created by
anarchists so, please, argue against and change the rules. Movement:
Each square is one evolution. You move by rolling the die and through
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the commands of the cards. The movement into the center of the spiral and out is forward through time.
Whether it is forward in any other way is an ongoing philosophical debate. If you land on a space with
another player on it one of you has to go. Roll dice and the loser has to go the number the winner rolled back
the way they came. Or thumb wrestle. Or declare yourselves a symbiotic meta-organism. Or mate. Whatever,
it is Burning Man.
.

FIGURE 6: ADAPTION CARD (BY BROKEN DRUM)

Anthropologist
Go Forward 10 steps
Image: Know Thyself
Adaptation is the process of organisms adapting to their environment (including many other organisms) through mutation, genetic drift, learning,
inventing, and other processes.
The term Adaption is used here to refer to adaptation, but also to humans
adapting memes, tools, and cognitive frames. Culture, especially technoscience, is a major distinguishing trait of humans and it is deployed to adapt
us and the world around us.

FIGURE 7: EXTINCTION CARD (BY BROKEN DRUM)

War
Go Back 50 Spaces
Image: War is interested in you!
Extinction happens on many levels. On some it is clearly a
setback for the proliferating of life. Think asteroid hit. On
smaller scales, down to the inevitable fate of the individual
(you too must die!), death is a necessary part of evolution.

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FIGURE 8: REPRODUCTION CARD (BY BROKEN DRUM)

Cyborgization
Go Forward 5 Steps
Image: Cyborg Goddess
If you are sent to the Reproduction site you can choose from one of the two
reproductive methods: Cloning and Sex. Thanks to mutation and genetic drift
even cloning produces differences that can improve survival chances, but sex
produce a much wider range of possibilities. And it is more fun!

Uncyborgable?

A human child raised on a desert island with no social interaction would end up with the cognitive skills as an adult that are not very diferent from an apes, because a lot of our really smart
adaptations are adaptations for putting our heads together with others and learning from others.
(Michael Tomassello, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology)

The choices we make about our cyborgization are political choices, whether driven by fear, the
desire for justice, or aesthetics. They are limited by our culture, of course, but also by the technical
limits of cyborgization itself, the technoscientific processes that make it possible. Cyborgs are systems and all systems, of being and of knowing, are profoundly limited. This is seen most clearly in
formal systems. Kurt Gdel showed that the mother of all formal systems, mathematics, is profoundly limited because it is necessarily incomplete, or paradoxical, or both. (Both arent yet
proven but it seems most likely.) He did this proof by making a perfectly legitimate mathematical
algorithm from the famous paradox of Greek philosophy about the Cretan liar, who always lies. If
a Cretan tells you he always lies then is that a lie? As it turns out, the mathematics proves that
mathematics cannot be perfect. Alonzo Church and Alan Turing used the same trick to show that
an infinite computer inevitably is incomplete, or has paradoxes, or both.

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From physics we know that the observer always affects the system being observed, which is
known as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. And since the observer-system is always changing
(being observed itself, for example, when we ponder it), no system can be fixed. An implication of
the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is the Bayesian Paradox: to know the position of an electron
means one cannot know its path, or vice versa. In other words, we cannot know everything, to
know some things means not to know others.
Any non-trivial cyborg system is out-of-control in the sense that it cannot be controlled from
outside, it has self-regulation, homeostasis. This is one of a number of insights from complexity
theory on the unpredictable, uncontrollable, unmodifiable, aspects of complex systems, including
all biological ones. Even if artificial (machinic, genetic, nano) become a million times more complex and sophisticated, there will always be technological limits to the replacement of the biological
by us.
The great cyberneticist Gregory Bateson has pointed out that a system cannot know itself. At
the best it can make a map, a model, but the map is never the territory. The tension between
needing to believe in our stories, our models, our maps, and yet realize that they are not reality will
never disappear. We need to embrace it, not repress it for the repressed returns as irrationality or
worse.
What is uncyborgable? By definition, parts of every cyborg have not been cyborged, that is the
paradox at cyborgs heart. A cyborg is always biological, at least in some small way. When machines totally replace the biological that will be a robot and the cyborg will be gone. But that is
very far away from today. As long as there are cyborgs, the organic will survive.
Fear, and desire, and other human emotions and choices will set limits on cyborgization, as
will the very nature of systems and the realities of technology. But as an expression of human
nature, our morphing, moding, messing around with our environment and us, cyborgization is
going to continue and deepen.
So the issue isnt if well be cyborged, but how and who will decide. As Donna Haraway proclaimed a quarter of a century ago we must take responsibility for our cyborgorization. We must
take responsibility for our evolution. Otherwise, somebody else will. The Borg of the Star Trek
universe are a good warning. If we dont chose participatory evolution with cyborg family values
our future will not be guided by ourselves or even the blind hand of chance. Instead, tomorrow will
be molded by the vulgar fist of governments, corporations and other authoritarian systems that in
service of their short term ends will warp us into nightmares. Here the Borg are wrong. Resistance
isnt futile, it is fertile. Evolution is a series of revolutions and now we are the revolutionaries. It is
evolve, or dieoff.

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New technologies mandate new political systems and institutions if democracy is to be preserved and deepened. Constitutions, Bills of Rights, and (self) governing initiatives are crucial
democratic technologies, but so are autonomous decentralized organizations that cut across and
below ofcial systems to do directly what civil society or specific communities desire. These new
political technologies are based only in part on old political theories. New theories, coming out of
actual political struggles and practices and from artistic and technological innovations, are crucial.
Theories about information, the sign/trope/hallmark of postmodernity, are particularly important.
The process that produces all cyborg technologies, including the political, follows the cyborg
epistemology proposed in 1995 by myself, Steven Mentor, and Heidi Figueroa-Sarriera: Thesis,
antithesis, Prosthesis, Synthesis. And again. In other words, part of the dynamic is dialectical. As
the monetization of culture overwhelmed so much in the twentieth century, attempts were made to
limit its dominance in the form of anti-monopoly legislation, lobbyist limitations, and campaign
finance reform. That these efforts have totally failed has created deeper critiques, especially those
of the 21st Century movement of movements. They have led directly to privatization software, decentralized networking strategies, DIY (do it yourself) projects from the global (indymedia, Linux,
the Social Forum and counter-forum network) to the most local such as my beloved Santa Cruz
Farmers Market. This nexus of theory is also based on a long practice of grassroots democracy,
afnity groups and consensus, feminist process and real community. But other alternative knowledge systems can make use of the same tropes.
Al Qaeda (base in the net in Arabic) is a perfect example, with its cyborg suicide systems,
decentralized command and control with media linkages and high levels of secrecy. It is also a refection in an asymmetrical (as in war) mirror of the information-intensive high-tech cyborg
combat systems of the U.S. and NATO and the contrasting liberatory potential of the interweb.
(Gray, 2005) Reaction, inheritance, prosthesis, refection, and always something new--the causality of culture is never simple, binary, or ever fully understood
Human biological evolution in the last 10,000 years has been rapid. Human cultural evolution
in the last 10,000 years has been much faster. The relationship between biological, technological,
and cultural change is impossible to sort out but we can certainly affect it. We are it. Emotionally
accepting that is the hard part. Coming to terms with our cyborgization is learning how to live with
our uncanny feelings, and grow through them. We see this in culture with new belief systems and
institutions. But the danger there is believing totally in partial stories. Better to believe partially in
many things.
A good model for this is the festival called Burning Man. Every year, for one week, Black
Rock City is built on an alkaline desert, 50,000 people inhabit it, and it is dismantled. The city is
DIY, almost entirely self-governing, an almost pure gift economy where money is banned almost
everywhere, and it never stops making fun of itself. It is only possible because of the clever and exhttp://teknokultura.net
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Chris Hables Gray

tensive use of technology, which is a central part of the art and fun of the place as well. It shows
how contingent, how created, human cultures are. It is living proof that other worlds are possible,
perhaps even better ones.

FIGURE 9: BLACK ROCK CITY

2010: METROPOLIS (BY BROKEN

DRUM)
The 2010 theme for Burning Man
was Metropolis. This collage is a
homage to the previous three incarnations of Black Rock City and
the different people who camped
with Broken Drum in them. The
temporary, intermittent, DIY, gift
based, art and pleasure focused
nature of Black Rock Citys culture
demonstrates the incredibly creativity, fexibility, and contingency
of human social adaptability and
technology and the power of decentralized decision-making. All of these qualities, and more, will be needed
if humanity is to survive the current crisis of crisis we are undergoing.

FIGURE 10: BURNING MAN

(BYDOCTORS WITHOUT BOUNDARY

CAMP)
It is not enough to describe the future. We must live it if it is to come
to pass. This is prefiguration. Black
Rock City is prefiguration by economics (gift), politics (DIY), and
culture (art, music, consciousness,
leave no trace on the Black Rock
desert) of a better world that is certainly possible.

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FIGURE 11: ETHEREAL (OIL BY JULIA C. R. GRAY)

Imagination is one of humanity's most extraordinary capabilities. To think of possible futures is to begin to actualize them.
If we are to evolve into posthumous of grace and harmony, a
good place to start is by contemplating creatures such as Ethereal, by the artist Julia C.R. Gray. An Aqua human of beauty
and calm, at home in the fowers, at home with itself..

Acknowledgments
This essay has a complicated genealogy. To start it is based on my previous writings on cyborgs
and several ongoing research projects, such as the Cyborg Database. Its specific origin is a talk in
the summer of 2009, "Only Good and Evil: Postmodern Technoscience", Bellas Artes, Madrid,
Spain, sponsored by Cibersomosaguas. I added the idea of the uncyborgable later, when it was put
forward by the organizers of Amber 09, a wonderful conference on Art and Technology in
Istanbul. This formed the basis for a short article I wrote for the magazine Literal, published in
Spanish and English. That article was the frame for my keynote talk at the Amber 09 conference
and, in turn, parts of both were incorporated into a longer essay for the Amber 09 proceedings,
Uncyborgable, which also drew on an essay written with Steven Mentor, Cyborgs, Masculinidad, Manifiestos y Cambio Social published in Spanish in Cultura digital y movimientos socials,
Igor Sabada y Angel Gordo, eds., Madrid: Catarata, 2008, pp. 125-148. Then in July of 2010 I
used much material from these to write a long essay, The Uncanny Evolution of the Cyborg, for
a volume being put together by the Contemporary Art Museum of Kaliningrad, Russia, called
Evolution Haute Couture: Art and Science in the Post-Biological Age. It should be published in
Russian and English some time in 2011. That text has been truncated, modified, and elaborated
upon here.

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