SIGNUM: Cyborg Citizen

Cyborg Citizen: Politics in the Posthuman Age
by Chris Hables Gray
(Routledge, 2001)

reviewed by Bill Cummings

Cyborgs – if you are one of the two people planetwide yet to hear the term – are organisms that combine natural and artificial elements. "If you have been technologically modified in any significant way, from an implanted pacemaker to a vaccination that reprogrammed your immune system, then you are definitely a cyborg," according to Chris Hables Gray in Cyborg Citizen. In fact, if you are reading this review you are a cyborg by virtue of being embedded in machinic/organic systems – in this case your computer, but encompassing everything that regulates our lives, from alarm clocks to cars to televisions.

Gray’s take on all this begins with a few basic premises.

• Technological advances allow us to shape the future course of human evolution: artificial or participation evolution is a reality (think prostheses, genetic engineering, etc.).

• Cyborgization is increasing exponentially: it too is a reality that cannot be wished away.

• Cyborgization has the potential to produce great domination or liberation. We should expect some of both, in fact, rather than one or the other: utopian and dystopian pronouncements are equally simplistic.

Against this backdrop, Gray addresses a wide range of concerns about technology’s increasing role in our lives. Cyborg Citizen traverses a huge number of topics, and includes all manner of fascinating anecdotes. My favorite: "In August of 1998 Texas A&M University announced that an anonymous couple had donated $2.3 million so that the university would clone their dog, Missy." Another anecdote centers on the case of John Moore. UCLA obtained a patent on genetic information in Moore’s spleen cells, and the California Supreme Court declared UCLA within its rights, ruling that Moore had no property rights to his body’s own tissues. Economic, moral, political, legal, and technological dilemmas are densely tangled in these nuggets, and Gray clearly enjoyed searching them out and bringing them together.