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What would the implications be for our culture, Shaviro wonders, if prosthetic had been the dominant metaphor during the information revolution, rather than virtual?
30. Jim Rossignol, of Rock, Paper, Shotgun and author of This Gaming Life recasts videogames as cybernetic enhancements for the mind.
Posted on September 23, 2010 with 4 notes
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We routinely fetishize & sexualize cool, flashy tech. In doing so we impart emotional value to the soul-less tools of our construction.
29. Chris Arkenberg considers the ways we are becoming more like machines and how machines are becoming more like us.
Posted on September 23, 2010 with 3 notes
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Great day for an etymological celebration, I reckon.
28. Do you like science fiction mixed in with your tech history? Because if you do, Paul Graham Raven’s got you covered, in this piece leaked backwards 50 years, offered exclusively as part of our little project.
Who is Paul Graham Raven? I can offer no better bio than the one the man offers himself.
a fringe author from the second wave of text-based lifelogging in the Collapse Era
Posted on September 22, 2010
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27. Peggy Nelson, writing for HiLoBrow.
And yet, it concerns us to conceive mutations of our own design. It’s horrifying to regard even one small step, “an inverse fuel cell, capable of reducing CO2 to its components with removal of the carbon and recirculation of the oxygen, would eliminate the necessity for lung breathing”
Click through. There are pneumatic tubes.
Posted on September 22, 2010 with 9 notes
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The idea that an electronically augmented revelation could restore the experience of life to its original glory was hardly ordinary cultural currency in America in 1945
26. Steve Silberman looks at the life and fiction of Paul Linebarger, a man who wrote about cyborgs before we knew that’s what they were called.
Tripping Cyborgs and Organ Farms: The Fictions of Cordwainer Smith | NeuroTribes
Posted on September 21, 2010 with 2 notes
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25. BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh, isn’t really interested in cyborg architecture as a metaphor. Instead, he thinks about buildings wired straight into the nervous system.
BLDGBLOG: Of networked buildings and architectural neurology
Posted on September 21, 2010
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It is often said of actor Peter Sellers that he was so skilled at his craft because he had no identity of his own – only that of the characters he played. Peter Sellers would have loved the internet.
24. Navneet Alang considers the web as social prosthetic. A refuge for the shy, for shells seeking an outlet.
Posted on September 21, 2010 with 7 notes
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23. Far from the vast reaches of space, Nicola Twilley of Edible Geography considers a cyborgian solution to a different hostile environment — industry-designed foodscapes that short circuit our homeostatic mechanisms.
Posted on September 21, 2010 with 3 notes
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Pop culture influence aside, the cyborg has always represented the best and brightest of the military-industrial complex
22. Eleanor Saitta’s far-reaching essay considers the identity question from romantic self-sustaining hero to decision-outsourcing cloud network pseudo entity.
Posted on September 20, 2010 with 2 notes
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21. Weekend Reading: The Accidental Cyborg
Jamais Cascio is a futurist who found himself thrust into the role of cyborg as his hearing degraded to the point that he now relies on programmable audio-processors (hearing aids).
The demographics of the disabled are changing, as is the power of assistive technologies. And these changes have serious implications both for the role and visibility of the disabled in Western society and the ongoing debate between augmentation as “therapy” and augmentation as “enhancement.”
Later in the article, Cascio presents a perspective that adds a nice nuance to my idea that non-destructive enhancement (exoskeletons) will win out over more intrusive measures.
Herr claims he would not swap his prosthetic legs for natural legs, even if he could. “Would you buy a computer system if you were told you couldn’t upgrade it for 50 years?” he says.
Posted on September 19, 2010 with 14 notes
September 2010 was the 50th Anniversary of the coining of the term 'cyborg'. Over the course of the month, this site was updated 50 times with links to material — most of it new — celebrating 50 years of one of the 20th Century's more enduring concepts.
Now it's gone dark.
Curated by Tim Maly of Quiet Babylon
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