A Cyborg Manifesto (1991) [pdf]

Before you read this, it's worth your time to check out Haraway's Wikipedia page. The criticism section sums things up nicely:

Haraway's work has been criticized for being "methodologically vague" and using noticeably opaque language that is "sometimes concealing in an apparently deliberate way". Several reviewers have argued that her understanding of the scientific method is questionable, and that her explorations of epistemology at times leave her texts virtually meaning-free.

This manifesto is exactly the kind of nonsense that led Alan Sokal to send his fake paper to Social Text. Essays like this should come with a Surgeon General's warning: this writing may be amusing, but if you take it seriously it will rot your brain.

I remember this era of cool and transgressive feminism and it had echoes of the late 60s "scum manifesto," and I even still have some Jenny Holzer art around here somewhere. "biological-determinism" was the thing to revolt against at the time. seeing writing from that time now, I remember presentations about archeological finds of crude goddess icons and carved stone sexual aids from more idealized ancient (and ostensibly non-patriarchal) civilizations and wondering how nobody else seemed to notice that these were all that remained of them.

I think what's come out of it is that 35+ years ago this was a conversation, and now it's just a power struggle.

she was right in that tech and feminism are inseparable because the homogenization of roles and overcoming physical sexual dimorphism is only possible with some kind of external technical aid. the argument at the time was even "nature," was part of the patriarchal ontology that must be rejected. sure, we can subordinate people to machines and processes that sustain an equality narrative, but they get quickly overrun by people who are not subject to it.

imo, millennia from now archeologists will be finding our own silicone dongs and wondering what could have befallen a civilization so advanced that it could produce these things in the billions, and yet so little else of it remains.

Stuff like this and CCRU is some of my favorite literary junk food.

There's an Instagram account called @cyborg.asm that famously matches up quotes from this text with Hajime Sorayama illustrations. Gotta love a good gimmick.

I was forced to read this in freshman English… it was awful. Realized you could make it say whatever you want and used that for the essay I wrote

> AN IRONIC DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WOMEN IN THE INTEGRATED CIRCUIT

Despite being written before LLMs, it really does seem like it was written by one from that title alone.

Wow, thanks for sharing, incredible stuff. I'm happily surprised to see this upvoted on here, I guess HN hides a sizable-yet-silent group of my fellow hopeless hippies!

Before approaching the content, the writing style here is one of the best versions of the vaguely french provocative style loved by psychoanalysts -- this is what Zizek, Boudrillard, and Foucault are/were ever striving towards. Occasionally funny yet deadly serious, poetically symbolic yet scientifically minded, and unique yet eminently comprehensible. It's infectious!

  Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste.

In case anyone hasn't read Hegel yet, now you don't have to -- a beautifully succinct summary of his whole project.

  Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.

One day, when I start up a software engineering institute for the (a?) new era, I'll get this quote chiselled in massive letters above the entryway. This is the end of the road (or a blind turn?) that starts with facetious hypotheticals about self driving cars, such as "who's to blame if there's an accident", "how should the car weight different human lives", "how do we deal with the anxiety of choosing externally-provided safety over self-determined risk", etc (see https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/trolley-5 and https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/self-driving-car-ethics). My code is more meaningfully my body than a cancer cell would be, and the jury's still out on how it might compare to the rest of my ever-decaying fleshy bits.

   Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction... We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.

... and this, in turn, will go above the doors to the New World Order headquarters.

Thanks again, OP. I'll have to look into this author more!