By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination.
Donna Haraway, 1991.
Manifest of Things: MoT
Draft
What does it mean to be a human? A divine creation where some features make one more divine than others? Did humans have the right to break the first stone with a hammer? How would the stone complain, or the hammer?
When did technology expressed in artifacts start being overwhelming, and for whom? When flesh and blood beings had their heads opened with hammers, they were no different from stones.
Then, when ethics arises, members of the community claim the need for rules. The hammer potentializes human strength, and it is equally a tool and a weapon.
Ideally, it shouldn't be used to hurt another human, but to build things, to solve problems. However, humans may harm others without reason.
In nature, sometimes lives are taken with a purpose. Humans have too many objectives, and most of them cannot justify harm.
Regarding ethics, rules sometimes can be frustrating, even if totally needed and correct, as expressed in speed bumpers.
Facing reality now, when we realize that only a few people could, maybe, have a status of 'human,' the majority of people are things.
It represents the order of things, axioms, and pre-concepts related to success models. This model does not include the well being of things.
The hegemonic idea is that things exist to be used. But things should be free.
Why humans do need so much of everything? Fossil fuels, iron, copper, steel? Like any animal, humans can adapt and readapt. Reprogram the need of things for everything.
Back in the past, we could ask: if the Luddites had succeeded? They tried to break all the first Industrial Revolution machines, as they believe their jobs were being taken by those. Besides that, those machines were noisy, and workers started not knowing what they were doing.
Losing contact with creation, imagination, and the integrity of action, they got alienated from the whole, their feeling, and intentions.
Machines are such a tricky thing! They move lots of energy, including human -physical and mental-energy. They have loads of information embedded in their structure.
However, Luddites could not win the machines because they are powerful things. They are art, creation, expression of desires, and a long-range vision.
Machines result from incredible imagination, art, and technology together, pushing the future fast and forward. Some ideals are too stimulating, and they are not limited to one or another body called "a thing."
Things got greater than humans, possessed their bodies, and there is no turn back. As Haraway said, "cyborgs are our ontology." Our cyborg life expresses the redesign of bodies, relations, perceptions, and interactions.
Cyborgs are around for centuries now, but the velocity of transformations in emerging technologies urges a call for the union of things.
A merge of nature and culture is increasingly operating. From time to time, humans are becoming things, more and more. There's no way back.
God is a machine. Society is a machine. Health is a machine. Education is a machine. Art is a machine.
Yet, humans can rethink different ways to interact with things, recycle, redesign, reproduce.
A better future for things is if humans produce fewer things.
Things are already things before humans put their hands on them.
Things are things before becoming objects of possession.
Things wish to be free and be requested only when there's a necessity.
And, humans, you can do better: rethink your needs!
