A significant step towards articulating the discomfort I referred to in my previous post was a random encounter on the web with a ‘hoax’ perpetrated by Richard DeGrandpre, author and associate editor of Adbusters magazine. The hoax, perpetrated at the time through a Flash app at cyborgmanifesto.org, is old enough that I had to go to web.archive.org to get a link. The app, essentially, just presented some text for you to read, and I’d love to type it all out here to make it more accessible, but that would be an abuse of copyright.
The text opens with an imagined conversation in an internet chat-room, in which the participants discuss the formation of the Cyborg Manifesto, which is built around the seemingly noble goals of advancing and disseminating human knowledge, eliminating human suffering and increasing life expectancy; and the more questionable goals of making human biological systems obsolete and engineering artificial consciousness. The subsequent text is presented as a series of scrollable pages within the app, each accessed by pressing a button at the bottom of the previous page. It covers themes familiar to any sci-fi and cyberpunk fan: what it means to be human in an increasingly artificial reality, and the blurring of the boundaries between human and machine. It was clear that the ultimate destiny the manifesto had in mind was the complete subsumption of human existence in computers.
The app then invited people to submit comments for or against the manifesto. What seems to have shocked Richard DeGrandpre was that — whether comments were in favour or opposed, whether they thought it was really possible to bring about or not — people took the manifesto seriously. Fifteen to twenty years later, there are people working to bring about the kinds of phenomenon discussed in the Cyborg Manifesto: body–hackers, biohackers, and life-extenders — somewhere in the world there’s an underground movement working away right now to make all this happen. Almost incredibly, there’s even the 2045 initiative with its own manifesto (one that is absolutely not satirical) that mirrors, if not word-for-word, then intention-for-intention, the one at cyborgmanifesto.org.
The cyborgmanifesto.org hints at what might have been the inspiration for its content with a rather disturbing reference to Donna Haraway. Her 1991 book Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, contains a chapter more modestly entitled “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” This is a highly-influential piece of work that has been cited thousands of times, but a little bit like the way Richard DeGrandpre embedded his text in Flash, Donna Haraway’s text is couched in the turbid language of critical feminist theory. I have what might be called a mental ‘Foucault-horizon’: a little bit like the boundary of a black hole, any article mentioning Foucault is going to be one I will struggle to comprehend. But in the Cyborg Manifesto chapter, he’s right there at the bottom of the third paragraph: “Foucault’s biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics.”
Whether satire, vision or blasphemy the three manifestos for cyborgs mentioned here focus on the human; as though humans are distinct ‘things’ that can have an independent existence, as opposed to deeply interconnected networks of collaborating cells engaged in a constant exchange of materials and information with an ecosystem in which they are embedded. Cyborgs, if they are to exist, need an ecocyborg to exist in. If we are already engaged in projects to bring about the cyborg manifesto, what is the manifesto that underwrites what we are doing to our environment?
The Ecocyborg Manifesto 