Reading Response (10/3)

Although at times I felt Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” was a bit far-reaching, her main point that we are all cyborgs was an unconventional twist on how we interact with machinery and technology. I have to agree that since we are so dependent on technology that we’ve become half-organic, half-machine in the way that we cannot function as a society without either half. The half-machine part of us is our constant connectedness to our electricity, the Internet, mass media, etc. Even the technologically basic pen is something we interact with that suddenly makes us a cyborg.

Haraway looks onto the near future (or maybe even the present) of how today’s machine’s are disturbingly lively compared to us, who are disturbingly inert. The common belief is that machine could never overtake man, but our social anxiety on the subject says otherwise. Just the number of movies about machine takeover speak to our fear that one day our own Frankenstein’s monsters will seek vengeance upon us. One of my favorite movies, “The Matrix”, is built on the premise that in a post-apocalyptic world, machines have taken over the world and are breeding humans for energy. But, if man builds machine, how is it possible for them to ever become self-sufficient and sentient? Well, from an arguably paranoid perspective, as machine is replacing man’s work and efforts we are increasingly relying on their performance and not our own. Instead of fearing the day the machine takes over, we should fear the day that machine no longer works. As we continue to exacerbate the imbalance between nature and technology, it becomes more obvious how we pit them against one another.

Judith Halberstam’s “Automating Gender” raises a similar issue concerning cybernetics. Her take on Apple’s logo of the bitten into apple as the digitalization of knowledge as sin, the bite becoming the byte, was enlightening. In this way, both Haraway and Halberstam claim that the cyborg is gendered female yet she represents intelligence, reason, and innovation. The way gender and technology is linked seems to be by fear of the “other”. In the patriarchy, woman and technology are bastardizations of men, inferior and irrational yet controllable to a certain extent. Both writers further this binary between human and machine, between male and female, yet interweaving infinitely. Just like computers and machines imitate behavior, gender is also constructed on a learned behavior that we come to imitate.