Cyborgism, To The Bitter Ends Of Krapitalia ?!
other possible C-Kino interventions ...
Proposal title: CiTiZEN KiNO #99.9: Cyborgism, To The Bitter Ends ( Of Krapitalia ? )
Abstract: If we wish now (finally) to get serious about any kind of path towards sustainability in our high-tech + hyper-industrialized culture, it may be urgent to reassess the ingrained fetishes of the Cyborg, which were spawned from the idea of "hacking" the human for space travel, and then took on new strains in the era of the Capitalocene ( incl. Donna Haraway’s Kin ). Have we unleashed untenable and unethical fantasies which have now taken hold in the unregulated marketplace(s) of a new "Guineapigdom" ? And how do we get back down to Earth from this invasive corporate-made mess ?
Description: C-KiNO is a platform for "cinema hacking" and investigating urgent topics for us to navigate better possible worlds. We screen curated film + media clips in a performative and interactive environment in order to encourage deeper critical analysis and constructive discussions + strategies.
Notes: A Brief History of Cyborgism … and how to route around it …
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This is a rough draft of our proposal to present at the upcoming Chaos Communications Camp.
On the CCCamp site : https://pretalx.c3voc.de/camp2023/talk/review/RKEVEWSVLZQBMWQ79KZJXH3UZU87MUAU
We’ve written about all this dozens of times in various ways ! Those techno-dystopias are boiling over again ! For those who have been following the XLt work this may seem like old cranky hat, but for us it’s still an extremely hot - and getting hotter - topic, especially as the CCCamp 2023 is just around the corner. ( Aug15-19 ), and all the debates and myriad conferences on how to cope with all our mad-(mostly-men )-made + civilization-groomed fuck-ups that are staring back at us in a dark + dead-end alley !
And it always seems of utmost importance, HOW to communicate these dilemmas in a way that empowers an individual and/or communities to engage, to get inspired, to dream and to act against the dark grains. And take action, where actions are possible !
Having just participated in the “Non-Machines” conference in Weimar, and then seeing our anarcha-feminist hacker comrades post this very informative + concise agitprop video called "Feminist Ninja: upgrading intersectional feminism with the hacker class" ( WATCH HERE ) … we feel a very strong and urgent need to speak out, and express our doubts + critical analysis about the Cyborg concepts that are so prevalent these days in academia and in all those arenas where both the tech industry AND the radical tech resistance are intersecting, colliding, fusing, falling in line, or just flailing for whatever escape hatch might be near.
“ Warning : There is No Machine-Planet B ! ” XLt analyst
Note: we ARE in solidarity with the groups forming out of the anarcha-fem hackerdom and the M8 Cloud Strike Movement ( more HERE on the fediverse ) ! We are in solidarity with the anti-patriarchal struggles, and against the Tech Oligarchies! And for the creation of new community-based tools, for communications and other social experimentation ! But we also have quite a few different views and hopefully constructive critiques. ( More details to come )
It seems like an important moment to step back and research where all these strange and unsettling and disruptive narratives are coming from … and try to clarify our XLt positions … and our XLt oppositions…
And explain our rejection of Cyborgism !
( Oddly this lead image of a Guardian article on UKR drone pilots, which we will refrain from linking, has changed from its original version, b/c quite shockingly and very unprofessionally did NOT shield the pilot’s face/identity. )
One of the reasons we decided to “come out” now, was this disturbing ( media ) perspective of drone pilots in the Ukraine War, without much serious reflection or analysis, just more like the daily flag waving to say whose side we should be on ! A headline Guardian piece from just a few days ago essentially *celebrating* a not-so-odd 32-year-old IT geek turned into game-player assassin, who operates in this new “exogenous” soldier-cyborg format ( i.e. the drone as an extension of the body, if we can critically describe it as such, for our purposes here. ) ! One unusual and complicating element of the story is that he is not with any official military / unit, rather he is a ‘freelance’ warrior, raising funds to buy his own assault tech weaponry ( “only” about 400e per drone, assembled with component parts from China. The cost for C4 explosives is not mentioned ). Sounds a bit like a whole new Guns-In-America-like crisis of the near future !
A quote from him states, “It’s like playing a computer game, you know?… It’s fun, you know? When it’s fun, when you relax, it’s easy. When you are tense, it is not possible to work correctly. Anyone can do it.”
And of course all sides are using it ! It’s all the rage on the new cyborg market ! An image of the military camouflage-outfitted temp-job cyborg with his headset, goggles and little control box in his hands. This is what de-humanization looks like ! This is one of many devolution routes being designed for us ! Reality War Games at your fingertips, what a surprise! Not.
But there are numerous other reasons to raise alarms about the Cyborg escalations ( military, commercial and grassroots ) and the theoretical territories plus marketplaces that are fueling them !
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While researching the origins and concepts around Cyborgs ( what the XLT prefer to call "Guineapigdom" ), the original scientific inquiry/proposal coining the word was from 1960 to ( biologically ) adapt ( or hack ) humans for space travel!
The image above comes from Life Magzine - July 11, 1960 - is reporting on the work which first appeared in the journal Astronautics' September 1960 issue, And it was called "Cyborgs and Space," by two white men Manfred Clynes ( Austrian) and Nathan S. Klein ( American ). This is all well-documented online, and there are a number of articles revisiting its history. For us, it is particularly interesting that Clyne was a scientist, inventor, and concert pianist best known for his his innovations and discoveries in the interpretation of music, and for his contributions to the study of biological systems and neurophysiology. And Klein, a researcher in the field of psychology and psychiatrist best known for his work with psychopharmacologic drugs ( i.e. pre-Big Pharma? territories, and he also advised the World Health Organization. ). Incredible career academics to learn about… BUT… This may also be very much in line with the techno-scientific trajectories that have explicitly helped push and shape our current techno-dystopian calamities-in-the-making !
Both the original article and Life mag’s sensationalist versions are fascinating media specimens ! We’ll pull out some highlights of the texts later. Some of it, in hindsight is pretty hilarious ! But you can also understand how it added a new layer to a generation that was already lit up by the ( MIC-primed ) imaginations of The Space Age !
And then after those Star Trekkie-like dreams more or less crashed ( i.e. read Kim Stanley Robinson’s fairly recent scientific debunking of any likely mission to terraform Mars or other planets. Not for several generations, at least ! ) the industrial-futurist-colonialist ideas migrated and re-emerged with even more loopy and evangelical notions as The Virtual Age ( with all its Military + Silicon Valley cosmological injections and investment ) !
It gets more odd, and even one could say *creepy* when we start to analyze 25 years later the "Cyborg Manifesto" ( 1985 ) from Donna Haraway. One might call this ( academic ) *mission creep* when the "adaptations" embark upon another giant speculative trend/enterprise in hacking humans to adapt to accelerated degradations of our terrestrial habitat... i.e. Anthropocene + Technosphere + the whole Cybernetic Digital Overdose ... Or as we should now realize this became extremely influential theoretical constructs to DRAW DOWN the lines ( and barriers, both imaginative and ethical ones ) between machines and humans and all biological organisms, and that our machines would quickly become a force to shape us + all life ( Mechanomorphism ). Thus, no longer tools ( which anyway are never neutral ) but now a mutational kind of predatory, invasive, and artificial “species” with “alien”+ post-human agendas!
We are in far different territory now, which is no longer about voluntary missions for space exploration ( and we can still debate the viability of those scientific outcomes ), but something more along the lines of INVOLUNTARY grand experiments on humanity, and imposed designs and wild gambits on the entire population of Earth, and with dramatic and/or severe impacts on all its very diverse + fragile cultures + social fabrics ! We will also have to come back in another round to critique all the ‘collateral damage’ on the individual and collective Psyche !
So maybe better contextualized and more critically put in Romain Felli's book " The Great Adaptation - Climate, Capitalism and Catastrophe" ( 2021 ), where this researcher explains that since the Club Of Rome (70s) , we - as a society ( governance, institutions, business models + operating systems, industrialization, fossil fuel industries, NGOs, Big Data, cybernetics + panoptic control, etc. ) - have NOT been attempting to solve the catastrophes and errors and exploitations of predatory krapitalist systems, but rather being used to ADAPT ( + de-humanize ) PEOPLE to an unceasing Corporate Krapitalist Expansionism ( irregardless of the disasters it brings upon the Earth and all its inhabitants, i.e. all species ! ) .
Welcome to the Anthropocene ! Welcome to Guineapigdom ! ( as explored in CiTiZEN KiNO #47 ) … and Welcome to Techno-fascism ?!
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There is so much more to say about all this. And this text is very much a work-in-progress and is meant to open up much-needed review, discussion, debate… and to formulate new resistances !
We are not Haraway experts. In the bits we’ve read and observed ( incl. the whimsical and unconvincing "D.H.: Story Telling for Earthly Survival" documentary ) , we can extract many positive things in her life’s work. We just revisited Staying With The Trouble ( 2016 ) today, and found some very encouraging elements ( like women’s reproductive rights and the right to control one's own body ! Absolutely ! ) On the other hand, from an XLt perspective there is evidence of a kind of obfuscation of the real and dangerous “Anthropocene Politics” going on… and what all seems like a slippery academic-style refusal to provide the names and addresses of the elephants in the transnational, globalized and planetary-scaled room / house on fire !
This is not even really meant to be so focused on Haraway… but her work happens to have become a very key influence, and since it is SO prevalent in Tech, Biology and Environment intersections, it is therefore an extremely useful starting point for unraveling the dubious hype in all that Human+Machines discourse !
This will take time to carefully articulate…
But for now, the quick version: what we can very concretely state… nearly every time we have witnessed Haraway-influenced arts+culture + activist projects… “the Haraway-school”… it has come across as incredibly weak and ineffectual in terms of confronting the primary causes of environmental destruction and exploitations : Corporate Krapitalism ! And holding those entities and actors accountable ( and reigning in their power ) is absolutely crucial ! While the problems may be “artfully” named by Haraway, they are NOT pragmaticly confronted ! And we have dozens of encounters and anecdotes where these projects demonstrate that failure !
And we would also begin calling into question her seminal work from the 80s, her Manifesto ! This re-spawning of the Cyborg fetish + its re-branding was - and is - much more obvious now in the deep shit of our disastrous Techno-colonial times - a highly problematic technotopian positioning, now thoroughly intertwined in California Universities ( US Academia Inc. ) in the shadows and in the grip of Big Tech and Big Bio Tech and Big Science influences !
But we’ll have to come back to share more considerations and evidence of that later.
to be cont.
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Some Extra Notes ( on The Haraway School ):
We think it is more important to examine the problems that occur with the blurring of lines… that are happening in the corporate cyborg manifestations, rather than in Haraway’s historic experimental and pioneering theories… i..e “ 20th-century machines have blurred the lines between natural and artificial; and microelectronics and the political invisibility of cyborgs have blurred the lines of physicality.” ( from Wikipedia entry on Cyborg Manifesto, obviously very synthesized and/or reductionist versions ) … But as we witness its influences on things like Anthropocene narratives, various arts and activism, and cultures of resistance, runaway technodystopias…we are more concerned about these ideas as they migrate into further volatile applications in our newly “ situated” and very real devolutionary descent into Techno-colonialist predicaments. All without cultivating some sense of LINES that NEED DEFENDING !
“We Are Nature Defending Itself” - for example - is a book from 2021 that seems more relevant now to responding to our crises !
In other words, much of Haraway’s theory for a radical materialist socialist Cyborg ( and those explorations ) can now be seen as very outdated?, and needs questioning and revisiting, and perhaps altering course entirely. Or, perhaps there is somethin in it, that is upgradable, but only if it doesnt allow its radical elements to only swim in the academic language, but simultaneously refuses to submit to the Industrialized machinic calamities version that now looms so darkly upon us !
And her and Bruno Latour both, do not really seem to have gotten their feet wet or dirty in the real indigenous resistances that have long perceived - more clearly - the techno-scientific “progress” as a continuation of colonial nightmares ! ( ie. situated crises moments like Standing Rock to Idle No More and various Tar Sands resitance movements, nor Rojava, nor European struggles for autonomy like ZAD, and other occupied zones, etc , etc. … nor even supporting fellow University colleagues in micro-biology like Ignacio Chapela, who fought fiercely against corporate influences in his department at Berkeley. ). As historian Howard Zinn would say, you can’t be neutral on a moving train ( that’s heading off the cliff ) !
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“ Haraway’s piece is a novel approach to examining the culture-nature divide. She introduces the potential of a completely new ontology of hybridization of nature and culture through the cyborg, a combination of machine and organism. Haraway’s use of the cyborg illustrates her conceptualizations of socialism and feminism in the examinations of dichotomies such as nature/culture, mind/body, and idealism/materialism. Haraway’s cyborgs are a blending of imagination and material reality. The cyborg is a dualism, as opposed to a dichotomy; there is value perceived in the confusion of the borders of bounded categories. The need for the divide between culture and nature is no longer relevant, and the cyborg emerges from the blending of that boundary.”
There’s a lot to debate here !
to be cont.