Chris Hables Gray

Cyborg Citizen is a call to arms. Gray’s goal is to bring to our consciousness the range of political issues that cyborgization poses. He advocates a populist, activist movement to ensure the rights of cyborg citizens. Gray wants us to be concerned about issues like the medical establishment’s fascination with organ transplants, the military’s obsession with technological solutions, and the panoply of corporate interests whose profits depend on our continued embrace of technoscientific solutions. At times he sounds downright Luddite. Certainly he is right that we cannot rely on the goodwill of corporations or the government, both of whom have their own interests in accumulating wealth/power/information at the expense of individuals. Centralized political institutions and the invisible hand of the market do not deserve our easy trust or passive acquiescence.

One of Gray’s primary concerns is that the Net – one of the main vehicles for conscious self-cyborgization – not suffer the same fate as electricity, radio, film, and television and become a vehicle for shallow entertainment and corporate enrichment devoid of any real capacity for creating change. Some of Gray’s strongest criticism is reserved for libertarians who think the Net is a wild west frontier in which every person is out for themselves and free to do whatever they hell they want in pursuit of money, money, fame, and money. "Wired magazine is a good example. It has promoted the idea of the ‘netizen’ as a successor to the citizen. It is an incredibly empty concept, focusing more on the Net hookups and pagers of young entrepreneurs than anything else, and does much to confuse the real political issues" (48). This fetishizing of technology and the Net is unrealistic, narcissistic, at best plain silly and at worst damn dangerous.

My great regret is that the book doesn’t adequately address what maybe should be its central concern: how cyborgization is transforming political participation. Gray quite properly dismisses wide-eyed utopian proclamations about cyberdemocracy. Yet his insistent calls for each individual to be responsible and assertive of their rights takes place against the backdrop of an American political system massively transformed by machinic/organic systems. To mention the most obvious, the political ideologies we hold, information we have, and decisions we make are thoroughly mediated by a ‘borged media that extends from CNN to just about everywhere else.

This significant caveat aside, Cyborg Citizen is a barometer of where cyborgization is at technologically and socially. It gets you thinking. Cyborgization will proceed geometrically no matter what we do; the only question is whether we are aware, informed, and reflexive enough to ensure that the liberatory possibilities outweigh the totalitarian nightmares. Are you?

 

Previous Page

Illustration fromChris Hables Gray Website
Photomodified by Oates

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *