Cyborgs, Transhumanism, and Utopia

As soon as I found out that we had to post an image of our utopic vision of gender and technology, I knew exactly where I was going to go. Dresdek Codak, a webcomic by Aaron Diaz, spends a lot of time exploring the melding of the human and the nonhuman. Transhumanism is a concept to which the comic returns many times–I could definitely make the argument that it is one of its main themes.

I can’t post this particular comic page to this site because it’s too big to upload to my image storage and hotlinking is bad. This page describes a future where the internet has expanded into a huge data structure (”the mother”) that eventually gains self-awareness. Human consciousness expands beyond the human. Humanity becomes a vestigial organ on/in this being/machine.

Here, I think that Diaz is depicting a Haraway cyborg. Hathaway writes “our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert,” and Diaz draws such a world. The humans have stagnated, the machine is vibrant. The Haraway quote isn’t as dichotomous as it sounds taken out of context. She, like Diaz, is interested in a world where the boundary between machine and human has fused, to the extent that humanity as we understand it today, with its categories of gender and such, is no longer relevant.

I want to acknowledge some shortcomings: Diaz’s future has fused most of the individual categorical consciousness, but he can’t quite let go of gender. His transcendent consciousness is female, albeit in a very non-gendered way. Also, the female figure in the last panel is pure fan-service, sexualized for the benefit of the (mostly male) webcomic audience.

(A final aside: I can see an ideological relationship between Transhumanism and Haraway’s cyborgs, but I can’t quite articulate what it is. I’m a slow thinker, and I think it’s the sort of thing that I’ll need to think about for several days before being able to clearly state anything.)

Related posts:

1. Technology as an Extension of Humanity. I’ve always thought about gender as being something fluid, as...
2. Notes Towards Day 3–”Cyborgs are Us” “Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.”...
3. cyborgs are everywhere In my quest to further explore (and hopefully understand!) Haraway’s...
4. Fusion of Gender and Technology in Fashion: My Utopia On Wednesday’s class we were supposed to bring in/blog about...
5. Utopia update and stuff…. another of my favorite comics ^_^ [edit: whoo... sorry...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.