Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age

by Chris Habl Gray

The growing synergy of humans and technology--from dialysis to genetically altered foods to PET scans--is transforming how we view our minds and our bodies. But how has it changed the body politic? How can we forge a society that protects the rights of human and cyborg alike?


The creator of the cult classic Cyborg Handbook, Chris Hables Gray, now offers the first guide to "posthuman" politics, framing the key issues that could threaten or brighten our technological future. For good or ill, politics has already been cyborged in ways that touch us all: On-line voting promises to change who participates. Wars are won on video screens. Biotechnological advances-- cloning, sexual prostheses, gene patents--are redefining life, death, and family in ways that strain the social contract. In the face of these advances, visions of the cyborg future range from the utopian to the nightmarish, from a spiritual super-race transcending the body's confines to a soulless Borg consuming human individuality.

Only with a broad, historically rich and ethically grounded understanding of these issues, Gray argues, can we combat the threats to our freedom and even our survival. A work of vision and imagination, Cyborg Citizen lays the groundwork for the participatory evolution of our society.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Politics, Cultural

241 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

Reviews

[Mikko · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some intriguing notions here and there but the bulk of the work is mishmash of self-consciously post-modern witticisms, name dropping (ooh, you've read Tolstoy too, do tell) and lazy references to the evils of "the market", "the state" etc. without any definition or solid connection to the question at hand.

[Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gray’s ideas concerning the fusion of organic and mechanic beings are interesting and more true today than ever before but most of his ideas surrounding laws and what the future (now) would look like don’t hold true and make for a bit of a hard/tone deaf read. To be fair a lot of his discussion around sex and gender are progressive but that falls short in other short comments he makes around vaccines, Mormonism, etc.. This is a solid book for an introductory to cyborgianism but if you already know enough about it you could and probably have come to the conclusion about most of these topics yourself.

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gray has a small mind. His understanding of reality is pretty close to what a 6th grade graduate adult would get by watching CNN: for him GMOs are magically different from the selection done by humans over the centuries, and so on. On the down side, compared with the 6th grade graduate, probably Gray has never worked a day in his life, instead he relies on the taxes over the poor work men and women, and the aberrant tuition fees that will make the worker's children swim in debt for the rest of their lives.

So yea, here is the argument for more laws, for which leeches like Gray will never be responsible.

[María Rivera · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author has some outlandish ideas that did not come to being as he predicted. However the first half of the book talks about the disembodied identities that represent us and are us online - which is even more true today than it was when the book was written.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a bad book. It has some good ideas, but it's both dated now and overly optimistic in its assumptions that the end of modernism will lead to humans using technology for good alone. Case in point: the adorable hope that war will end in our lifetime without a new world war.

[Whitney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinated! I am a cyborg!!

[Mills College Library]

303.483 G7785 2001