Literature and Media Series Entry #2


Fourteen years on from courageous neighbour-peeping we’re plunging into posthumanism with Phillip K. Dick’s book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? A cultural theory, philosophy and all-round reason-for-staying-bug-eyed-and-awake-at-night, posthumanism concerns what comes next – literally meaning “after” or “beyond” what is human. Although not mutually exclusive, it has become almost inextricable from anxieties surrounding the advancement of technology, whether that be through artificial intelligence, artificial body parts or simply total human dependence. Dick explores the political-sociological dilemmas surrounding what makes us human – or machines human – or us inhuman. A great defining emphasis is placed on empathy by him. Simply put: if a machine becomes capable of displaying (and practising) empathy more than some humans, and we already witness some humans behaving as if devoid of empathy, then the lines become blurred.

    Donna Haraway’s 1984 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, written just two years on from Electric Sheep’s film adaption Blade Runner, conceptualises a ‘cyborg’ as something that has broken the boundaries between humans, animals and machines as well as the physical and non-physical. It is that latter point which most interests me: the word ‘cyborg’ still conjures images of silvery effigies with glowing metal eyes (or, if they’re really cool, just one), and even the recently (and disastrously) released Cyberpunk 2077 seems to be primarily concerned with these superficial levels, being more interested in trendy neon sex-bombs with voluntary implants than what thoughts are actually their own. But though we are not all literally part-machine, the argument for computers and other technology becoming an essential part of us, as an organ or limb is, is strengthening – and neither Haraway nor Dick predicted our automated algorithms, influenced by automated tracking cookies, dictating our habits, and, through that, our beliefs.


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