“Cyborg” is a child of the space age that almost immediately fled the nest. It found a home in the popular and critical imagination, where it’s flourished for the past 50 years. Hybrid creatures of technology, biology, and culture, cyborgs find purchase in our fantasies, our nightmares, and our purchase orders.

To those who have just discovered our project, greetings to you in the future! Poke through the archives, you’re in for a treat.

49. Alexis Madrigal, historian and lead tech writer for The Atlantic interviews the very man who coined ‘cyborg’, Manfred Clynes.

Threaded through his career, Clynes has wanted to allow humans to communicate without words. In art and in science, he sought ways to escape the messiness and ambiguity of language.

Don’t miss the part about feedback and the eye.

The Man Who First Said 'Cyborg,’ 50 Years Later - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

48. Quinn Norton, who once gave herself a sixth sense, offers a wide-gazing analysis of the place of cyborgs in a very, very weird half-century.

It seems like the discussion of cyborgs in the time since 1960, echoing the discussion of robotics, bounced between news of DARPA and DARPA-like Sci-fi projects none of us will ever really see and Critiques on how We’d All Been Cyborgs, Really, Since We First Picked Up Sticks. I want a middle ground. I want to say there are inflection points where the scale of things changes the nature of what they do.

50 years of cyborgs: I have not the words. | Quinn Said

(Source: quinnnorton.com)

47. Stephen Becker normally writes about architecture, but today he’s interested in cyborg fashion. If we’re all already cyborgs, why do some of us insist on dressing up like them?

fake cyborgs – mammoth // building nothing out of something

(Source: m.ammoth.us)

46. Rob Holmes and I worked together on this piece exploring the ethical implications of being able to adapt yourself to a changing environment rather than having to grapple with the changes themselves.

As we are learning to our growing horror, changing the environment is an activity that becomes extremely perilous at scale. In light of this, the cyborgian program of self-adaptation begins to look mighty virtuous.

Wearable Ethics | Quiet Babylon

45. Nicola Twilley examines an art installation that plays with the feedback mechanisms of our enteric system, the body’s “second brain”.

Gut Control | Edible Geography

(Source: ediblegeography.com)

44. This is the taxidermied body of Miss Able, one of the first two monkeys to successfully return to Earth after being launched into space. She died on June 1st 1959, four days after her trip.

The cause of death was a bad a reaction to anaesthetic, which she was under for surgery to remove an infected electrode. Like most of the monkeys that NASA launched into space, she had implants that allowed scientists on the ground to measure her vital signs.

While Kline and Clynes were envisioning technologically enhanced spacefaring humans, NASA was launching monkey cyborgs into space, to learn what would happen. 

It didn’t go well for the monkeys. Most subjects of the program died during or just after flight. Exceptionally, Miss Able’s co-passenger, Miss Baker, survived until 1984. 

Able (by Dan Coulter)

43. We’ve argued many times before in this series that the cyborg of Clynes and Kline was about much more than humans with robot bodyparts. Today, we offer a catalogue of the enhancements they envisioned.

The Clynes and Kline Enhancement Package | Quiet Babylon

(Source: quietbabylon.com)

42. Arikia Millikan, community manager of Haiti Rewired and research assistant to Nate Silver already spends most of her life online. She’s ready for the next step.

Hal: Now you Google things on your computer – of course. And you Google things on your phone. That’s the next stage. And I believe – people may laugh – but I think there will be an implant. So you’ll have it there, and I won’t say it’s necessarily Google, I’ll say the Web, it will access the Web of information.

Arikia: Sign me up when that happens.

Hal: You want your implant?

Arikia: I want it now

I Am Cyborg and I Want My Google Implant Already - Arikia Millikan - Technology - The Atlantic

41. Johnnie Wilcox considers the nature of cyborgs across a range of classic pieces of fiction.

mistersquid: a digital fiction: Notes About a Network

(Source: blog.mistersquid.com)