Portrait of a Cyborg ("Present Day-Present Time")
A lone man, in his mid-20s, sits in front of two computer screens at three in the morning. His room is small and cluttered--a mess of books, strewn clothing, empty food containers, and lots of computer-related hardware. Music occasionally plays in that room, but even when there is none, the hardware pulses and hums 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The room is lit only by the glow of the monitors, shining a pale greenish light on an unshaven and untanned face. Upon first glance, one might be tempted to call that face "dull." However, it is impossible to ignore the sure signs of life--the only signs of life--in the room: the unceasing movement of fingers on an unmarked keyboard, steady but very quick, and punctuated very occasionally by sudden bursts of almost unnatural speed. Hunched over on a chair, his eyes point straight forward--almost glazed over--and one gets the impression that who we are looking at is not really here at all, but elsewhere, and whatever he'’s looking at is more real to him than the chair he is sitting in. Something lies beyond the screen, beyond the computers, beyond the wires that make those computers part of a vast network, and maybe even beyond the network itself, that is seductive enough to make people such as him ignore the necessities and limitations of their physical bodies. That thing is information, and its seductiveness comes from the power that it implies. A new tribe of information-fetishists is being born. Perhaps such people have always existed throughout history, but something about our modern society has brought them to the fore in increasing numbers. It is a tribe of people who are solitary and independent but, perhaps paradoxically, are highly connected to others at the same time.
In Japan, such info-philes are called otaku. In the United States, we might call them cyberpunks. Both are fitting labels, as much as any labels have any real meaning or power of distinction, but otaku and cyberpunks alike can also be considered cyborgs. It is important for us to define, at least operationally, what a cyborg is. Put very simply, cyborgs are fusions of organisms and machines. Although it is possible to have cat and dog cyborgs, or even microbial cyborgs as may develop in the case of nanotechnology, the "organism" generally referred to in the discussion of cyborgs is human —Home sapiens sapiens. The word "cyborg" is a shortening of "cybernetic organism." The word "cybernetic" spawns the prefix "cyber," with more and more "cyber"-words entering into our everyday vocabulary. According to the Principia Cybernetica Web,
Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, engineer and social philosopher, coined the word "cybernetics" from the Greek word meaning steersman. He defined it as the science of communication and control in the animal and the machine. (1999)
Although there are several competing definitions, Wiener’s definition of cybernetics is currently the most well-accepted one. The notion of communication and control is the heart of the definition, as cybernetics seeks to understand the complex interaction between organisms and technology. But again, definitions are tricky and often require more definitions of terms in order to make any sense. In this case, we need to consider the nature of organisms and of machines. This leads us directly into a discussion of what it means to be a cyborg.
If a cyborg is a fusion between a human and a machine, what does that really mean? What is really meant by "fusion"? What is a machine? Are people with artificial limbs cyborgs? Transplant recipients? People with fillings in their teeth or contact lenses "in" their eyes? What about people with pacemakers? I would tend to say yes. However, implantation or replacement of parts is not necessarily a good absolute criterion of what makes a cyborg. In fact, the term "machine" itself may be misleading, and the broader term "technology" might be more useful, as many technologies (such as pharmaceuticals) are not traditionally thought of as machines. "Fusion" implies a degree of contact, but what constitutes "fusion" versus "casual" contact between humans and technology is a very relative and subjective measure. If we consider cyborgs to be any form of interaction between humans and technology, we cover a lot more ground. Now, we can consider users of everyday drugs to be cyborgs, as are people who use the telephone, drive cars, watch television...…the list ispotentially endless.
The obvious consequence of adopting such a definition is that much of its power of distinction is lost. Far from making the term "cyborg" useless, however, such a definition is actually more useful and accurate, as any attempt to use a definition with much stronger distinctive ability is arbitrary and not necessarily representative of the "fuzziness" of what it means to be a cyborg. In other words, the broad definition of cyborg suggests that all humans are cyborgs. All humans interact with technology, but the degree of interaction varies and is what determines "how much" we are cyborgs. Such a non-binary, non-dualistic definition of "cyborg" which covers a gradient (a continuum) of human/technology interactions makes epistemological and ontological sense. Any clear binary distinction between human and machine is questionable, as humans can and have been considered machines. Yet, for sake of identifying ourselves as a species separate from those things which we fashion and create, we agree to make such a distinction. It is wholly appropriate, however, to recognize the distinction is an unclear one, and any definition of cyborg needs to take that into account. There is no such thing as a pure human being just as there is no such thing as a human being who can become a pure machine (pure technology). There are only hybrids. Only an unborn baby is purely human free from interaction with technology, but even that may not be true if one considers reproductive technologies.
Casting the notion of "pure human" and "pure machine" aside, but recognizing there is a distinction between the two, we can acknowledge the existence of a large gray area in between, even if the extreme poles are only abstract concepts with no basis in ontological reality. This gray area is the domain of the cyborg, and some people are more cyborg-ed than others. Some people use and are affected by technology more than others.
"We are all cyborgs" is a powerful statement that requires us to look at the conditions which make us cyborgs, and the consequences thereof. The "information age" we live in is aptly named. While it is obvious that we know more in the present than we did in the past, it might also be true that the rate at which we increase our knowledge is also increasing. Robert Anton Wilson, a futurist, refers to this phenomenon as an "acceleration of knowledge." The power of science (via the scientific method) has allowed humanity to better understand and represent reality; and as our knowledge increases, so does our capacity to create new and more powerful technologies. Our modern developed society has truly become a technoscientific one, where the practice of science is inherently technological, and the results of science yield technological applications. The state itself has become increasingly technoscientific, with science and its related technologies becoming more and more networked with government and industry.
Knowledge and Technology
However, as knowledge increases, so does uncertainty. As science reveals to us what is real, our previous notions of reality become obsolete. Old paradigms are constantly being replaced by new ones. Science has made it ever more clear that all human knowledge is provisional, subject to revision and change. A good example is the science of nutrition. New data emerges from the study of nutrition so regularly, consumers are no longer certain of what constitutes a healthy diet. Easy answers and clear paths to salvation are lacking in our postmodern era. We are only beginning to understand that we cannot understand everything about anything. Far from making things certain, science has re-emphasized uncertainty, which can cause anxiety in some people.
Technology is not something to be thought of solely in terms of the social forces that shape it. Technology has profound effects on human life. Marshall McLuhan, social philosopher and media theorist, described technology as something which extends but amputates at the same time. McLuhan described tools as extensions of our bodies, extending our reach and our ability to grasp, to manipulate, to move, to sense our environment, and to process information. According to McLuhan, all technologies are extensions. But even as they extend our abilities, they amputate us. For example, when a person uses a gun to kill, while the gun extends his ability to kill, it is such a specialized tool, it amputates the basic combative function and movement of the hand as it would be used in unarmed combat. The evolution of weapons technologies in general, while extending our destructive power, has amputated the ability of the human species to fight unarmed. The development of the internet is another technology which amputates even as it extends. Computer networks allow us to have an electronic existence where we can communicate with others over great distances, but as we extend our consciousness out of our bodies into cyberspace, it becomes easy to lose our sense of self-identity. Long-distance communications technologies such as the internet or even telephones or televisions extend us and when they overextend and spread us thin, we increasingly lose our sense of self.
Our society is becoming increasingly technoscientific. With heightened knowledge comes heightened uncertainty. With increased usage of technology, we lose our sense of self-identity, our basic human-ness. Ambiguity has become the norm. We don'’t know what is going on. We no longer are so certain of who we are or who we are supposed to be. We are no longer grounded in our physical bodies. We have become cyborgs, the perfect metaphor for ambiguous existence. The cyborg condition has interesting implications in terms of Foucault’s theory of discipline, biopolitics, and biopower. Donna Haraway, author of A Cyborg Manifesto, asserts that cyborgs are not subject to Foucault'’s biopolitics. Yet, the cyborg condition is not implicitly free from biopolitical concerns. Cyborgs are not implicitly free from controlling structures. An uncertain populous desperate for self-identity and concrete answers can be controlled by those who provide a group to join and easy answers. However, not all cyborgs are the same, and just as there are those who are controlled, there are those who seek to be in control of themselves.
Three Cyborgs
It may be useful to describe three categories of cyborgs in relation to controlling power structures (such as the mass media, corporations, and the government). Anti-cyborgs realize what it happening to society and understand how and why people are becoming cyborgs. This group rejects and seeks to avoid being controlled through technology. Anti-cyborg philosophy is one of "getting back to human nature," free from artificial technologies which are "impure" and "unnatural." They are against the hybridization of man and machine. They reject uncertainties and ambiguities and those things that foster them. They cultivate self-identity through self-certainty and other forms of faith.
The second category of cyborgs refers to those people who do not think of how technology influences them. This may be the largest of the three groups. These people are cyborgs and they are barely aware of it, if at all. These are the cyborgs who are most easily controlled by authoritarian powers. These people belong to the consumer culture and believe in advertising and media hype and use technologies without second thought. The identities of these people are defined by those who control the information and the technologies. Like the Borg, the race of cyborgs portrayed in Star Trek, these people lack individual autonomy and are "plugged into" a "collective." Each part of the collective is in total connection and communication with every other part. There is no self-identity-- no independent thought--only unthinking obedience for the good of the collective.
The third category of cyborgs are those who, like the anti-cyborgs, understand what is going on and realize that they are cyborgs, but instead of rebelling against human-machine hybridization, they embrace it. These people embrace technology and the process of becoming cyborgs, but they seek to do it on their own terms so as to control themselves instead of being controlled. They become cyborgs, accepting the uncertainties and ambiguities of postmodern society, and seek to find some sense of self-identity in their own way, not by retreating from technology, or accepting it without thought, but by exploring and finding their own answers. Amongst this group of people are the cyberpunks and the otaku.
The anti-cyborgs, the cyberpunks, and the otaku all share the common desire of finding self-identity and not being controlled by others. However, the anti-cyborg view may be naïve in its attempts to avoid interacting with technologies. If completely rejecting technology and hybridization is impossible, even the philosophy of minimizing interactions with technology may not be the best strategy for living in a technoscientific society. To refuse to intimately understand the new technologies that are arising can only lead to another type of slavery to it--a reactionary retreat from it. Those who run away face the risk of being bypassed and left behind, if not engulfed, by the new technologies they only barely understand. Self-certainty and faith may be comforting but only offer so much protection from an ambiguous reality. Where anti-cyborgs see technology as being unnatural, the cyberpunks and the otaku consider technology and culture to be essential parts of nature.
Cyberpunks and Otaku
So who are the cyberpunks, these self-made cyborgs? What constitutes a cyberpunk is highly debatable, and for every person who calls him or herself a cyberpunk, there is another who will claim that he or she is merely a poseur. Emerging in force out of late 1980s and early 90s science fiction, the cyberpunk genre describes a near future world that is often dark and deals with the relationships of people and technologies and the social structures that emerge from such relationships. Science fiction is often a better indication of present-day societal conditions than it is a predictor of the future. Critics of cyberpunk fiction blame it for being myopic and oftentimes pessimistic. If that is indeed its "weakness," perhaps that is also where its importance lies.
What cyberpunk fiction might really be doing is mirroring our world, but just 10 minutes into the future. It may be pessimistic because the present day players are indeed pessimistic about the state of society and the technopolitics of control that threaten individual freedom. But at least where there is awareness of a situation, there can be positive change elicited by those who are aware, and that is ultimately what the cyberpunks want to do. The "punk" label is one that implies rebellion. The "cyber" relates back to technology and the control of it. The cyberpunks rebel against the stripping away of individual identity and the control that others try to impose through the use of technology. The cyberpunks willingly become cyborgs by embracing technologies, but seek to understand those technologies beyond the way the creators intended them to be understood, and finding novel uses for them. A character in one of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels says it best when she explains: "The street finds its own uses for things."
The ethic of the hacker is the cyberpunk ideal, not just computer hacking, but reality hacking. Hacking, as opposed to "cracking," does not automatically imply criminal behavior, but describes the desire to have full knowledge of things, especially technologies. Cyberpunks hack technologies in an attempt to understand them fully, and with understanding comes power and liberation. By understanding the controlling technologies, the cyberpunks avoid being controlled. Cyberpunks are equipped to be reality hackers because they realize that reality can be hacked and that it needs to be hacked. If reality has been shown to be uncertain and increasingly ambiguous, only through hacking can they attempt to find the necessary information to survive in the information age. Donna Haraway states the situation in A Cyborg Manifesto, "The issue is dispersion. The task is to survive in the diaspora." As we become extended and as society becomes ever more connected, maintaining self-identity is not enough. To survive the diaspora, we need to find and create new identities.
The cyberpunk phenomenon is too broad and generalizations are too often faulty, and the public image of the glamorous outlaw/desperado hacker results in people who claim to be cyberpunks who do not have an underlying understanding of the philosophies which inform the cyberpunk ethic. As a result, the cyberpunk concept has become vague. The ideals of the self-made cyborg, then, are best understood and examined in the context of a specific subculture that is not generally associated with dark futures and high technology. We shift our attention to Japan, and we encounter the otaku.
The otaku are not so much rebels trying to change society, but people who are literally trying to survive the diaspora, to find some sense of meaning and self-identity, even if it is only transient. The otaku are a diverse subculture in Japan, and they have been left generally unstudied. More so than cyberpunks, the otaku are discriminated against by the mainstream, and the stereotypes used to describe them are not pleasing. What is their crime? They are fans, perhaps fanatics. They are obsessed experts on topics considered useless by most people. Their passion is information, and they are drawn to information technologies such as telephones and computer networks. The stereotype portrays them as being overweight and unwashed and socially inept. As Volker Grassmuck describes in his seminal otaku-studies paper "I'm alone, but not lonely: Japanese Otaku-Kids colonize the Realm of Information and Media," a possible English equivalent of "otaku" is "nerd" or "geek." However, those terms have their own unique connotations which themselves are constantly changing, so it is important not to place too much emphasis on potentially equivalent terms, as "otaku" itself is an especially difficult term to define. Operationally, we can think of otaku as fans. They can be fans of anything. Although the term is most often used to describe fans of Japanese animation, otaku can be fans of computers, comic books, televisions shows, video games, music stars, cars, goldfish, etc. It doesn’t really matter. What sets otaku apart from others is that they are not casual fans. They are not dilettantes. Otaku are experts. Otaku are obsessed with their "hobbies."
Although otaku are not explicitly rebelling against control structures and loss of identity, they do so naturally as a reaction to the society (Japan) they live in. Raised in a high tech society and educated to memorize huge quantities of factual context-free information to successfully pass college entrance exams, their notions of intrinsic self-worth, self-identity, and deep meanings have been lost or become vague. With no underlying truths and certainties to guide them, the otaku are a tribe of postmodernists. The otaku-lifestyle arose as a reaction to the loss of identity. In other words, the kids adapted by becaming cyborgs. In her book, Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and Censorship in Japan, Anne Allison describes the fetish-ization of the Japanese culture. If nothing has intrinsic deep meaning in Japanese society, and everything is fetish-ized, the otaku can be seen as information-fetishists, as described Volker Grassmuck (1990). If no meaning can be found from authoritative sources, otaku find and create meaning for themselves by seeking out and creating information.
The otaku are fully aware of how technologies affect them. Yet, they are not anti-consumers. Instead, they are super-consumers, extremely well-informed and conscientious of what information (i.e. products) they seek out. In that sense, they direct their own cyborg-ization process. The otaku love the media and technologies. However, they love it more than was intended. For example, if normal consumers see television ads for a brand of soap, they watch it and are convinced to buy it. For the otaku whose obsession is that brand of soap, he doesn’t buy into the hype of the commercial because he knows more about the product than those who made it. Yet, instead of protesting the commercial, he loves it, has recordings of every different version (available online, of course), has information about every staff member who made it, and maintains a website of every little detail one would ever want to know (or not want to know) about the product. Implicit value is unimportant. Only the information counts for anything. According to Karl Greenfeld in his book, Speed Tribes, "the objects themselves are meaningless to otaku—you can’t send Ultraman or a German tank through a modem, but you can send every piece of information about them." Not only do otaku find meaning for themselves in the details, they compile and create information for the benefit of like-minded individuals. This also gives them status, which is a real form of power that can be exercised.
The cyberpunks and otaku and other self-made cyborgs seek awareness of the state they are in. Instead of being oppressed by cyborg biopolitics, they seek to define and control themselves by fusing with technologies and by constantly seeking out information. Instead of blindly accepting technologies, the self-made cyborgs define their self-identifies carefully by consciously choosing which technologies shape them and how. The self-made cyborgs accept the uncertainties and ambiguities of life and are liberated by them instead of enslaved. Instead of retreating from the frontiers being opened up as the walls of certainty come tumbling down, they are whole-heartedly and enthusiastically exploring and charting them for those who will follow.
References and Literature Cited:
Allison, Anne. Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mother, Comics, and Censorship in Japan. Boulder, CO: HarperCollins Publishers. 1996.
Benedetti, Paul and Nancy DeHart, editors. Forward through the RearView Mirror: Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan. Canada, Prentice Hall. 1996.
Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. NY: Pantheon. 1984.
Gibson, William. Count Zero. NY: Arbor House. 1986.
Gordon, W. Terence. McLuhan For Beginners. NY: Writers and Readers Publishing, Inc., 1997.
Grassmuck, Volker. "I'm alone, but not lonely" Japanese Otaku-Kids colonize the Realm of Information and Media. 1990. http://race-server.race.u-tokyo.ac.jp/RACE/TGM/Texts/otaku.e.html
Greenfeld, Karl Taro. Speed Tribes. NY: HarperCollins Publishers. 1995.
Greenfeld, Karl Taro. The Incredibly Strange Mutant Creatures who Rule the
Universe of Alienated Japanese Zombie Computer Nerds. 1993. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.01/otaku_pr.html
Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. NY: Routledge. 1991
Principia Cybernetica web entry on Cybernetics: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/Cybernetics.html
Wilson, Robert Anton. Prometheus Rising. Phoenix, Ariz., U.S.A. : Falcon Press, 1983.