Got a new article up at h+. “N00bz & the Actor-Network: Transhumanist Traductions.”
Take a look, raise some Cain, whatever.
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/n00bz-actor-network-transhumanist-traductions
“Nothing surprises us; fat, wall-eyed robots clothing themselves in glandular carpets, wishy-washy sexualities, ears on mice… artificial life. We do now live in “the future”, no matter how much we winge about the fact that jetpacks weren’t waiting when we got here. So it behooves us, before we’re washed out to drift forever in cynicism and jadedness, to look at the foundations for some of this transhumanism business. Not the leeward and courseward zig-zag of discoveries and engineering so much, but the ideologies that allow for an understanding of what this stuff is all about.
As it turns out, transhumanism is an embodiment of a popular (or at least buzzy at the time) idea from the social sciences of the 1980s: Actor-Network Theory. Actor-Network Theory (ANT), suggesting that all nodes within a social network are social actors — whether human, animal, or machine — is a ready tool for finding peace with cyborgs and other less tidy things, and giving them room to grow in our 21st Century cultures.”
