Cyborg Pandemonium!!!!!

The body is politic. If this statement is true and not merely an agreement between the mind and the knowledge it has, but rather a startling reality, then outside influences not only empower the individual, but also take advantage of the body. It is said “Knowledge is power” and as technology is a golden gatekeeper and flood of knowledge, its stakes are higher for the individual involved, as it understands more, its responsibilities are also greater. The individual’s ability to conceive their own existence is threatened when a dualistic and self-imposed, not universal, relationship between the self and the other, or outside source, is threaded, as it can lead to alienation in their atmosphere. There is no breed of human organism in existence today that is autonomous, purely authentic, untainted by the materialization by other sources, be they people, communities, ideas, and in Haraway’s argument, technology. Donna Haraway’s essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” landscapes virtuous effects of technology’s grip over the social constructs regarding women when in the realm of a cyborg.

But looking at her essay deeper than her specific targeting on the effects of women, it is my belief that the rise of technology and media has come to a dehumanizing crux for all people. Media is used to fabricate a false sense of involvement, (in)security, in addition to the crippling phenomenon known as time theft, which is a debate in and of itself. Haraway’s theoretical push and proposal that cyborgs replace the role that traditional cultural standards concerning women, politics, and gender accusations/assumptions had, develops into the notion that “human” and “machine” are construed, due to technological advances and participation, to meld as one (or that is inevitably what results in the two meeting.) We are, in her musings, “creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously and naturally crafted,” and simply put, the individual has been programmed to be “organism and machine” as long as modern technology is an active partaker in our consciousness. Haraway is sequentially making the claim that the deviation from a cyborg is the retun to the soil and sowing idea of womanhood, an organic "Mother Earth" image rooted(no pun intended) in the revelations of Genesis.

Yet, a cyborg’s existence dehumanizes the individual in the same way that Haraway argues traditional values and developments have, as cyborgs condition people to be a rigid substitute for the ideas within the cyborg environment. And be that as it may, ideologies, computers, modified, wired and breathless machines have no souls, doubts, and emotions, no capacity for life and Woody Allen’s characters would have much to criticize and dispute within a cyborg.