Feminists, Cyborgs, and DNA Altering Toxins, Oh My!

The readings this week were chapters 13-24 from William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Donna Haraway’s classic feminist piece The Cyborg Manifesto. Let me start off by saying that what we have here, in my opinion, is a classic case of having a little of something good and lot of something not so good. I think we can all agree that Neuromancer is a great novel through and through, all references to the matrix aside. Then we come to Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto which is a tough read. This isn’t a reflection on Cyborg Manifesto in itself, but on manifestos everywhere because it is my experience that almost all manifestos are challenging to absorb.

Gibson lays out a very interesting future for the reader. Japan is an economic and technologic powerhouse, not unlike today. The future is subject to cowboys (hackers), drug addiction, the outlawing of paper currency and the development of a myriad of different and interesting technologies. Gibson deals with a lot of issues in this book including the presence of the Yakuza, black market medical operations, and, quite apropos I might add, the existence of cyborgs. The presence of humans that have machinery integrated into them is commonplace in Neuromancer. Body modification has been taken to a new extreme with the existence of people with razor blade implants in their fingers. DNA and nerve splicing have been invented and people can live indefinitely via yearly procedures which reset the DNA. I find this to be a very disturbing and, yet, fascinating future. One can draw many parallels between Gibson’s future and out present. There is mention of “coffin hotels”, pods big enough for only one person to sleep in, that are stacked on top of each other. Such hotels already exist today in Japan, ironically. Ratz, the bartender from the beginning, has a robotic prosthetic arm, technology which has already been invented. This is kind of scary in a way because it may suggest that we are closer to Gibson’s future than we may think.

The second reading, the Cyborg Manifesto, was Donna Haraway’s way of dealing with the idea of feminism and trying to break these preconceived notions. Haraway attempts to differentiate between cyborgs, half-animal and half-machine in her eyes, and humans. She also tries to differentiate between humans and animals, a distinction that I don’t believe many have tried to make in the past. According to Haraway, cyborgs are not bound to the same restrictions that humans are. Some examples include the existence of nuclear families, duality in relationships and gender, and communities. This is actually the second time I’ve read this manifesto this semester, the first being in my Basic Visual Literacy class a few weeks ago. Reading it a second time, and yes, I took it upon myself to read it again, I don’t think that I really got anything new out of it.

It is important to list the relationship between Gibson’s Neuromancer and Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto. Both readings deal with the idea of man ceasing its existence as just man and integrating itself with the machine world. I think, though, that this is where any similarity ceases. Manifesto speaks of a world in which human has become one with the machine and, as I said earlier, there is no need for families, gender and community. It can be easily seen, however, that such things do exist in Neuromancer in the same, if not a greater, capacity. Material needs, such drugs and weapons, still flourish and I think Gibson’s rendition of a cyborg future is a lot more feasible than Haraway’s. In conclusion, and I’ll be brief, Neuromancer was an awesome read and Cyborg Manifesto was challenging, but interesting.

Second Life: Part Deux

Once again, I found myself in the unforgiving wild of Second Life. Purchase Island had seen some improvements since my last visit, but I was exactly the same, save for a new shirt. We all gathered at the stage area to be given our assignments for the day and we were off to explore the far reaches of Second Life.

My group’s first destination was the Linux Open Source center. This, hands down, was the most informative field trip I have ever taken in Second Life. Thanks to the owner, screen name Michelle Pfeffer, we were able to learn practically everything we could ever want to know regarding open source software. She helped distinguish the differences between proprietary and open source software, something that is much more complicated then I had previously thought.

After a long conversation with the informative, but impatient Michelle Pfeffer, we moved on to our final destination, an island dedicated to classic Nintendo. I am not really sure how this island pertained to anything we were talking about that day, but it had a really cool building that looked exactly like a classic Nintendo. That was pretty much all there was to see. Without much to do in Nintendo Land, the group split up and I headed back to home sweet home, Purchase Island.